Why invest in Sitecore Experience Commerce™ 9?A closer look at how commerce has evolved and how you will benefit from our latest release

White paper // Why invest in Sitecore Experience Commerce™ 9?

1

Published 01/18. © 2018 Sitecore Corporation A/S. All rights reserved. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S in the U.S. and other countries. All other brand and product names are the property of their respective owners. This document may not, in whole or in part, be photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable form without prior consent, in writing, from Sitecore. Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not represent a commitment on the part of Sitecore.

Contents

Introduction: Contextual commerce is a competitive advantage ................................................................................................................................................... 2

The virtuous circle of contextual commerce............................................................................................................................................................................................. 2

Why it pays to manage your own platform ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 3

Six key capabilities for a modern commerce platform ......................................................................................................................................................................... 4

What’s new in Sitecore Experience Commerce 9? ................................................................................................................................................................................. 4

Let’s talk ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... 6

About Sitecore ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ 6

White paper // Why invest in Sitecore Experience Commerce™ 9?

2

Introduction: Contextual commerce is a competitive advantageEighty-one percent of marketing and IT professionals predicted their online sales would increase in 2017.1 From the evidence we’re seeing, it looks like they were right.

According to eMarketer estimates, worldwide retail ecommerce sales will nearly double to $4.48 trillion by the end of 2021 from $2.29 trillion in 2017.2 The ecommerce landscape is more competitive than it’s ever been, and consumer expectations of a commerce experience are becoming more and more demanding.

All of this confirms it isn’t enough to simply feature your products online anymore. To compete, your channels need to be able to not just sell things, but to remember your customers, share relevant content, and continually increase your understanding of each customer’s preferences over time.

Don’t just take our word for it. A Vanson Bourne global study we commissioned this year showed that more customer respondents (56%) thought brands knew their purchase history than the percent of brands (47%) that said they were collecting such data.3

That same study also surfaced that 96% of customer respondents think there’s such a thing as “bad personalization,” even though 51% of brand respondents say personalization is a high priority, and 29% say it’s their number one priority.

That gap is a big opportunity. And if you’re looking for a competitive advantage, a contextual commerce experience is the right place to start.

In this paper, we’ll look at how Sitecore Experience Commerce™ 9 has been optimized to give you the tools you’ll need to thrive in this new environment.

The virtuous circle of contextual commerceBefore we get into the features in Sitecore Experience Commerce 9, it’s worth exploring why marketing in the context of customer interactions and commerce work so well together.

It wasn’t very long ago that the goal in commerce was to get customers to make a purchase: nothing more, nothing less.

Today, brands can—and need to—aim a great deal higher. Instead of just selling someone a product once, you will reap more benefit if you build a relationship that gets better and better over time.

Here’s what we mean:

Before the purchase

Your experience platform tracks your campaigns, your customers’ search habits, their shopping habits, and their profile histories, as well as their real-time interactions with your site. This data gives you an objective view of which campaigns, personalization rules, and pathways are successfully affecting buying behavior.

1. “Online commerce: Plotting a course to personalization,” http://www.sitecore.net/en/resources/index/white-papers/online-commerce-and-plotting-a-course-to-personalization

2. “A brief overview of the global ecommerce market,” eMarketer, July 2017, http://totalaccess.emarketer.com/article.aspx?r=1016182

3. “The challenge of gaining contextual insight,” Sitecore and Vanson Bourne, October 2017, https://www.sitecore.net/company/press-and-media/press-releases/2017/10/new-study-reveals-brands-fail-to-use-customer-data-to-deliver-personalized-digital-experiences

In this white paper, we’re going to show you what you’ll need from your platform to gain the competitive advantage of contextual commerce, what’s new in Sitecore Experience Commerce 9, and how to get started.

This white paper was originally published in February 2017 after the release of Sitecore® Commerce 8.2.1 and has been updated to reflect the features and benefits of Sitecore Experience Commerce™ 9, released in January 2018.

White paper // Why invest in Sitecore Experience Commerce™ 9?

3

At the point of purchase

You validate your customer experience rules with a clear view of actual monetary value—the products you sell. You’re able to see how changes to your marketing activity affect your sales, giving you a direct causal link between marketing and revenue.

More broadly, you can correlate all your customer interactions on your site with the products they eventually bought—crucial contextual insight into the buying habits of your customer segments.

After the purchase

This is where contextual commerce can really kick your customer experience up a gear, because your customer now owns your product, is using it, learning about it, and experiencing your brand first-hand.

Now’s the time to automatically build that relationship with your brand with personalized content—like manuals, guides, and videos for how to get the best out of the product.

In fact, because you know your customers in such depth, you will soon be able to recommend new products to them that are directly related to their past activity, including purchases and inferred preferences. Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 is far more than an engine that floods your customers with information they may not want. Instead, it shows customers you understand who they are and what they need.

By continuing the relationship in this way, your customers turn from anonymous visitors to members of a customer segment with clear interests and buying patterns—all of which you can track, analyze, and market against to continually improve their commerce experience in the future.

Why it pays to manage your own platformLet’s say you currently sell your products through the likes of Amazon and other distribution channels. The good news is that there’s no need to stop doing that when you run your own contextual commerce platform.

The positive brand experiences you nurture from your own channels will also drive traffic to your products on other commerce sites.

There are trade-offs, of course. The biggest is that your margins will be squeezed dramatically on other sites. And using any retailer or distributor means missing out on all the rich data you need to improve your marketing and customer experience.

A sale is just a box leaving a warehouse—nothing more. What do you know about the buyer? By taking control of your own commerce experience, you gain the ability to deliver relevant and tailored experiences on your own platform, and boost traffic to external platforms at the same time.

You’re competing on your own terms and creating relationships that are uniquely associated with your brand only. That’s big.

To do the job right, you’ll need the right capabilities. We view the six capabilities listed in the box on the next page as the backbone of a contextually intelligent commerce platform, and we’ve optimized them as the core features in Sitecore Experience Commerce 9. Without them, you’d find your ability to improve your customer experience severely limited.

Serving both B2B and B2C

The content-meets-commerce approach summarized here is just as powerful for the long purchase journeys typical of B2B as it is for the faster turn world of B2C.

Both benefit from contextual relevance and timely, personalized offers. And both show big uplift when you tailor interactions to the data you’ve gathered about your customers and where they are in their purchase journey.

White paper // Why invest in Sitecore Experience Commerce™ 9?

4

What’s new in Sitecore Experience Commerce 9?Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 is the only natively integrated commerce platform that helps brands to fully personalize the shopping experience before, during, and after the transaction. It blends content, commerce, and contextual intelligence in a modern, cloud-enabled commerce software system to improve the customer experience and lift sales.

In version 9, we have rearchitected the customer profile, catalog, and inventory tools. Three other tools—pricing, promotions, and orders—were rebuilt for our last version and are included in this release.

With its support of microservices architecture, Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 is entirely plug-in based, providing both flexibility and extensibility. This means you have greater control over your own platform. Right out of the box, Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 can be as heavy or as light as you need it to be. And if you ever need to add or edit new features, you can.

You can also host different plug-ins on different servers, depending on the power you need behind them. For example, if you’re using the inventory engine heavily, but use few other plug-ins, you don’t need to scale-up all the servers hosting your plug-ins—just the one hosting the inventory engine.

User-friendly business toolsThe previous version of our commerce platform included six key business tools: this version unifies them in a single icon from the Sitecore Launchpad. They are easily customizable to match your unique requirements, and you will notice a faster and simpler user experience as well. All our tools support role-based security, so a merchandiser, for example, would see only the tools they hold permission to use.

Previous versions of the inventory tool supported items from only one source. In this release, we’ve added features that allow you to manage multiple stores, warehouses, and inventories. Version 9 supports online to offline through allocations. It also supports multiple currencies, can track shipments, and provides alerts about dwindling or expired inventories. You can reserve inventory by bins and location as well. For example, you can allocate 100 units of merchandise for Store A and 40 for Store B.

Six key capabilities for a modern commerce platform

A commerce platform should not be a one-trick pony. If you’re going to transform your customers’ buying experiences, you’re going to need six key capabilities:

1. A pricing engine:

To price individual products and whole categories of products with ease.

2. A promotion engine:

To run offers on individual products and product categories.

3. Order management:

To capture, monitor, and edit customers’ purchases.

4. Catalog management:

To merchandise and manage your products.

5. Customer management:

To gather, track, and act on customers’ activities.

6. Inventory management:

To organize and manage your inventory.

White paper // Why invest in Sitecore Experience Commerce™ 9?

5

Sitecore® Experience Accelerator (SXA) StorefrontIn version 9, we added a fully supported SXA Storefront that allows you to develop and deploy storefronts either on Microsoft Azure Marketplace or on-premises. This means you can get your ecommerce presence up and running much faster.

SXA Storefront lets you simultaneously design the front-end website while you’re doing the back-end development work. This allows the content entry phase to begin much earlier in the project lifecycle, ultimately reducing the pressure on a task that typically occurs near the end of most projects.

Once it is set up, the SXA Storefront includes 40+ commerce-specific components that you can drag and drop onto a web page without the need for help from IT resources.

Sellable itemsWe’ve simplified the catalog management tool and added new features. We’ve introduced the notion of a “sellable item,” meaning any single item (physical products and entitlements) in a catalog, category, or inventory set. Sellable items may also include product variants that differ from one another in one or more properties. This allows different versions of the same item to be collected under one product ID in the global product list: as an example, a medium-size, green shirt could represent one variant of a product.

An entitlement is a type of sellable item that is not usually a physical product. Different types of entitlements include access to a digital product, such as a software download or a movie rental. They also include gift cards, warranties, installation services, virtual currency accounts, and promotion codes tied to particular products. Products and services can now be categorized as stand-alones or as part of a catalog.

No matter what you sell, most brands have a set of standard definitions—e.g., product name, SKU, list price—so we’ve simplified the default catalog schema to reflect this. This will save you time and effort when creating a product view from scratch. And business users can now see versioning and workflow in the catalog.

Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 also offers multi-currency support that separates the currencies from pricing and from price breaks based on quantity (tiered pricing).

What’s new at a glance

Click below to learn more about some key features of Sitecore Experience Commerce 9:

■ Microservices architecture support for catalog, customer profile, and inventory

■ Fully supported SXA Storefront

■ Unified, faster, extensible business tools

■ New and improved inventory features

■ Additional support for multiple currencies, warehouses, inventories, and stores

■ Simplified catalog manager

■ New migration tools for catalogs and profiles

■ PaaS support

The new SXA Storefront features drag-and-drop capabilities for 40+ components, making it easy to change prices, products, and promotions without help from IT developers.

White paper // Why invest in Sitecore Experience Commerce™ 9?

6

New migration toolsSitecore Experience Commerce 9 also includes a new catalog import tool that lets you import catalogs and customer profiles from legacy Commerce Server versions—or any other source—and automatically converts them to the format that our migration tool uses. You can also save your data mapping for later use or revision, which can save you time when migrating multiple catalogs. Note that our migration tool does not migrate payment instruments or passwords.

Because our commerce platform is natively integrated with the Sitecore® Experience Platform™ (XP), it benefits from improvements made to Sitecore XP. For instance, Sitecore XP 9—which we released in October 2017—features Sitecore xConnect™, a set of APIs that support vastly improved integration capabilities, including pre-built connectors for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRM. Our new Sitecore Forms module lets content editors create dynamic multi-step forms within our easy-to-use business tools. And updated marketing automation means that when you combine Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 with Sitecore® Email Experience Manager, you get omnichannel marketing automation with scalable email.

Built on modern architectureTo ensure speedy deployment of Sitecore Experience Commerce 9, we’ve partnered with Microsoft to provide a simple wizard-like experience in the Azure Marketplace. As a result, you can deploy Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 on your own Microsoft Azure account with just a few clicks. Azure brings new PaaS capabilities like security, scaling, advanced monitoring, and geo-replication.

Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 is built on ASP.NET Core—the very latest Microsoft framework. That means it provides a lean framework for building web and cloud applications that are fully open-source and available on GitHub. It can now be hosted as IaaS, PaaS, or on-premises.

Thanks to semantic versioning and public NuGet feeds, the new platform lets you make fixes and add functionality very quickly, without the fear of API-breaking changes.

Let’s talkWe’ve built Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 to help you gain a competitive advantage by unleashing your own contextual commerce experience from a single Sitecore platform. This entails using data to ensure your customers have better relationships with your brand than they do with your competitors.

You now have a big opportunity. Today, just one in five brands has the technology to collect customer data online, and 42% can’t integrate customer data from different systems, according to the study by Sitecore and Vanson Bourne we cited earlier.4 By acting now, you can make a strategic leap forward by implementing a contextual commerce strategy that puts you among commerce leaders.

To find out more about contextual commerce and Sitecore Experience Commerce 9, reach out to us via:

Email: sitecore.com/contact-us Phone: sitecore.com/phone Chat: sitecore.com/chat

Or request a demo here.

Once you’re set up, get trained

If you’d like to get your team feeling confident using the new platform, visit Sitecore Documentation, give your account manager a call, or check out Sitecore training to book an online or in-person training session. One of our experts can tailor a course to the plug-ins you’re using and make sure your team is comfortable with the new system before you go live.

About SitecoreSitecore is the global leader in experience management software that combines content management, commerce, and customer insights. The Sitecore Experience Cloud™ empowers marketers to deliver personalized content in real time and at scale across every channel—before, during, and after a sale. More than 5,200 brands—including American Express, Carnival Cruise Lines, Dow Chemical, and L’Oréal—have trusted Sitecore to deliver the personalized interactions that delight audiences, build loyalty, and drive revenue.

4. “The challenge of gaining contextual insight,” Sitecore and Vanson Bourne, October 2017, https://www.sitecore.net/company/press-and-media/press-releases/2017/10/new-study-reveals-brands-fail-to-use-customer-data-to-deliver-personalized-digital-experiences