Recently we’ve been considering the key value propositions of the Adobe Commerce platform in market this year – especially in comparison to its largest competitors. This is an SI’s perspective on matching the value of Adobe Commerce with the needs of e-commerce merchants.
Thousands of customers use Adobe Commerce Community-supported edition ($0.00 licensing cost) – as many readers know, Adobe Commerce Cloud (formerly known as Magento Enterprise) is a very important and key part of the Adobe Experience Cloud customer experience (CX) stack. The value proposition of the stack to the largest consumer brands, e-commerce merchants, and enterprises is incredibly strong. Here are the fundamental value proposition points for e-commerce merchants considering a move to Adobe Commerce this year.
Adobe Stack Integration – Experience Cloud
Native integrations with Adobe products like Analytics, Target, Experience Manager, and Creative Cloud help take personalization to the next level. The entire stack is impressive in its seamless ability to integrate customer data into all aspects of the customer experience, from first touch through ongoing customer support messaging. Given the capabilities of the experience cloud, which they categorize into 10 key modules on their website, committing to complete integration of the stack is best suited for those enterprises that are already committed to key parts of it such as their CMS (Experience Manager), their ESP and digital marketing engine (Marketo), or their “customer experience” Analytics package (formerly Omniture).
Feature-Rich Magento-Based E-Commerce
The largest SaaS platforms provide a lot of value for the money and for many e-commerce merchants that will suffice but Adobe Commerce is now an enterprise-class e-commerce platform that provides all features and functionality that the modern B2C or B2B enterprise needs native to its core. Adobe Commerce was born from Magento and it is completely customizable so there is no need to compromise on what a merchant wants or needs. Multichannel / unified commerce – creating very rich B2B and B2C experiences with multiple storefronts serving multiple countries is a reality.
The larger SaaS e-commerce providers are testing their B2B offerings and multi store offerings as well, however the most dynamic organizations looking to build very progressive e-commerce stores that can support unified commerce and global expansion are leaning on Adobe Commerce.
Adobe Sensei: AI-Powered Personalization
Personalization is not as easy as it sounds but it pays dividends quickly. Merchants can quickly increase average order value (AOV), lift lifetime value (LTV), and reduce all the negative metrics with a more personalized shopping experience. Consumers and B2B buyers want it. Adobe Sensei is the AI engine that powers the personalization inside Adobe Commerce and it does so without heavy code lifting or complex configurations.
To quote Adobe:
“Adobe Sensei AI, provides actionable data analysis and automates back-end workflows on everything from catalog updates, site content creation, product recommendations, fulfillment, and customer targeting and personalization.”
Sensei is already a part of Adobe Commerce Product Recommendations. At this point, the merchant can create, manage, and deploy product recommendation units to their storefront directly from the Admin UI. E-commerce merchants with large catalogs and orders with a lot of line items will immediately benefit by simplifying the user experience – especially when it is integrated with site search. This will be a nice convenience factor for B2C merchants but B2B merchants who adopt even the most simple aspects of the technology are likely to see conversion rates lift dramatically.
Adobe Commerce: Powerful Headless & Extensible E-Commerce
Adobe Commerce (Magento) has already provided the e-commerce world with many examples of great front-end merchandising experiences powered by the Adobe Commerce transaction engine (Magento). Sometimes because Magento is a part of Adobe it gets a bad rap for being “monolithic” and therefore not “headless friendly.” This simply isn’t true.There are many awesome examples of headless architectures running Magento Open Source and Adobe Commerce Cloud and given the power of the core features and services it can provide a lot more flexibility than a headless architecture running on top of SaaS.
The Bottom Line
There are a myriad of other reasons you might end up moving to Adobe Commerce but these are the core parts of the value proposition that we see most relevant right now in 2022. As always the Accorin team believes it is critical to move through a requirements gathering process before selecting a platform – especially now with so many choices and solution architectures that are at our disposal.
We highly recommend signing up for and watching the Adobe Commerce programs that will be a part of (hopefully the final virtual) Adobe Summit coming in a little over a month.
