As consumers enjoy more shopping choices than ever before, modern commerce is becoming increasingly experience-driven and customer centric. Since more than 30% of shoppers are shopping online at least once a week¹, savvy retailers realize how imperative it is to cut through the noise and exceed their customers’ digital expectations. With the release of Sitecore Commerce 9, retailers now have a modern and fully-integrated commerce experience management within the same familiar Sitecore interface to deliver compelling customer experiences. These experiences must be seamless with handoffs across every channel from marketing, to in-store experience, and digital commerce. As shoppers move through the conversion funnel from acquisition and engagement to purchase and leading into advocacy, having a single platform to unify the entire shopping experience is necessary for retailers to effectively deliver a seamless customer journey.

Sitecore Commerce 9 is service-driven and utilizes the latest .NET Core architecture to support omnichannel and headless experiences. This simplifies and accelerates digital marketing by enabling contextual selling through the use of both xConnect and Cortex. When retailers are ready to execute personalization, the Rules Engine is armed with new commerce-focused rules such as personalizing based on cart value, product views, and more. As a cloud-ready platform, Sitecore Commerce 9 is built for extreme scalability thus reducing risk and enabling lower total cost of ownership.

So what does this mean if you’re a retailer? Having a unified platform for both commerce and web content management provides seamless content targeting, recommendations, and search personalization all while being integrated with rich media management, inventory, pricing, and checkout. Even non-traditional commerce use cases such as catalog-only non-transactional commerce, catalog, and inventory experiences can start with Sitecore Commerce 9 as a foundation with the simple enablement of transactional features at a later date.

Recent Avanade research indicates that 96% of organizations have a customer experience strategy, but only 14% are ahead of their customers’ expectations². The need for flexible modern commerce systems is a requirement for ever-changing business demands. As digital consumer behavior sees some shifts to subscription-based consumption models where retailers promote and ship customers products such as wine, toothbrushes, and razors on a reoccurring basis, flexibility within the context of a commerce platform is key to a successful retail experience. Through its modern architecture and flexibility, the Sitecore platform not only enables retailers to create these experiences but also easily visualize the full user flow and analytics to test and optimize experiences. When our clients leverage these insights to offer their customers more tailored iterations, they often see rapid increases in customer loyalty and conversion rates.

Sitecore 9 is at the forefront of unified modern commerce platforms; brands leverage it to generate a seamless experience while simultaneously benefitting from cloud scale. It gives them a single view of the customer, enabling the delivery of curated experiences on every channel. And when Sitecore Commerce 9 is coupled with Sitecore features such as Email Experience Manager, Federated Experience Manager, and Forms, marketers have a fully integrated suite to effortlessly execute even the most complicated commerce campaigns.

Ready to reap the rewards of a powerful digital retail experience? Connect with the Avanade team for strategic insights and technical expertise to help you leverage Sitecore Commerce 9 and more.

Read Ben’s related commerce post on Sitecore’s blog.

¹ https://www.avanade.com/~/media/asset/point-of-view/avanade-apparel-retail-ebook.pdf

² https://www.avanade.com/cxresults