Adobe Magento will remain a worldwide leading e-commerce platform in 2021 but as its ownership by Adobe deepens so will the integrations with other aspects of the Adobe experience cloud platform. There is no question that for larger enterprises ($1b revenue and higher), the Adobe experience suite provides a powerful platform for managing customer experience and growth. The challenge for Adobe will be whether it can bring mid-market companies into the Adobe suite by way of Magento, and will the mid-market willingly and confidently move away from other platforms to immerse themselves in the Adobe way.
The value proposition that Adobe brings in 2021 is clear and rational, especially for omni-channel enterprises with in-person, retail, and e-commerce stores in a number of different countries. But even for mid-market firms – both B2C and B2B – that are looking to focus more on their e-commerce growth in 2021 (perhaps at the slight sacrifice of their other channels), Magento is going to provide a growth platform with features that allow merchants to get some of the benefits and features of the larger Adobe suite. Some of these features may come at added cost, but they will give many merchants in competitive industries the tools to grow and beat their competition this year.
Here are 3 Magento e-commerce features that will allow mid-market merchants to stand out this year. While these have been available since Q3 2020, 2021 is the year we see merchants picking Magento for these three feature-specific reasons. These are not available in the free Community Edition of Magento.
1. B2B Selling Features and Self-Service E-Commerce
Magento Commerce 2.4 (both on prem and Cloud). Magento allows B2B merchants to set up what essentially amounts to a self-service procurement system where a merchant can automate purchasing activity for company customers; no matter how many users purchase from that organization. Magento provides unlimited price and customer group rules, and provides merchants with the ability to set up hierarchies of users with permissions that match the contracts that they have with their customers – including purchase order approvals, custom address books and much more. We call this framework B2B Self-Service E-Commerce, and it’s perfect for a merchant that sells products to retail chains, buyers with complex organizations, global offices and many different roles and people that need access to purchasing. Being able to handle these levels of complexity not only automates processes that used to be manual and time-intensive, it also removes barriers to purchasing that will inevitably increase revenue
2. Data-Driven and AI-Powered Personalization
Magento and Adobe Sensei. No more guessing and product upsells, cross-sells and recommendations. Data can drive those decisions and presentations with the Product recommendation module and Adobe Sensei. Adobe Sensei computes product affinities based on production shopper behavior like product views, products added to a cart, and checkouts. This means that with the new Magento product recommendations engine AND Adobe Sensei, catalog data will learn and evolve continuously. Recommendations and product presentations will therefore be much more personalized and accurate. The ramifications for faster growth are dramatic and in 2021. We believe many Magento (Commerce and Cloud) customers will adopt and deploy them.
3. Great Mobile Experiences and the PWA Studio
This is the year B2B merchants will widely adopt a Mobile or PWA-centric approach to revitalizing their e-commerce. B2B e-commerce is already competitive – even within Amazon – so convenience, speed, and accessibility will be key drivers in determining the volume of business customer usage. This is the year that B2B e-commerce merchants will see mobile transaction rates top 50%. People will be traveling, in the field, and ordering from outside their office again…at a really rapid rate. Smart B2B merchants will revitalize their sites to be “mobile first” or supplement their sites with a PWA that works fast and is easy to use. Magento’s PWA studio allows merchants to make this transformation with relative ease, running on a sophisticated platform that handles all the complex integrations that B2B merchants need.
The Bottom Line
While Adobe has an aggressive roadmap for releases of Magento in 2021, we believe these features / feature areas released in 2020 are important for B2B merchants to adopt in order to compete with, surpass, and stay ahead of their competition. We also think they will be the 3 key aspects of Magento that will drive success for mid market B2B merchants in 2021.
