As e-commerce, or now known as commerce, continues to go from strength to strength, technological advancements have completely transformed the landscape, revolutionizing the way consumers connect with brands, and are becoming an integral part of everyday life. 

Brands have to stay abreast of the latest technologies to meet ever-heightening customer expectations and to stand out from an overcrowded market. 

To run a successful online store and deliver the kind of shopping experience your customers want, you need a set of fully integrated superior technologies manageable via one hub that together enable ultimate customer journey optimization: you need a digital experience platform (DXP).

Let’s look at some specific reasons a DXP is the answer to your commerce dreams.

1. Manage all kinds of products and pages with ease

You cannot expect your marketing or commerce teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences, if theirs is anything but.

Your content should be easy to navigate and your portfolio easy to sift through, using multiple category, attribute, and availability filters, as well as full-text search. Your team will need to be able to create navigation catered to your needs and build product catalogues with a fully flexible design.

Sophisticated product information management should give you full control over your offering (based on SKUs, prices, and stock records for each product and variation) and should enable you to offer any kind of product (goods, e-goods, services, memberships, bundles) as well as product options, or compound variants.

Your marketing team should find it simple to autonomously create beautiful product pages containing rich interactions, imagery, videos, and specifications (brands, manufacturers, suppliers, and collections).

And this should all be possible from one place. With a DXP, it is.

2. Tailor and fine-tune the shopping experience

69% of shopping carts are abandoned and one of the main reasons is the checkout procedure itself.

It goes without saying, therefore, that you need to optimize the entire buying experience from choosing a product to paying for it.

Your online store should automatically guide customers along their journey, providing up-to-date stock availability and delivery information and offer applicable discounts and special offers.

You not only need to provide a fast and secure checkout experience that works for your business, but one that is fully customized to your customer’s needs and your scenario-specific circumstances. You should be able to take orders from customers whether they are registered or not, and they should be able to add, update, or remove products from their cart with ease.

Put your customers in charge of their payment and delivery experience. Enable them to pay in their local currency by defining real-time exchange rates and converting prices and costs automatically. Invite them to pay you directly, via a third-party checkout like PayPal, or cash on delivery. Offer to keep card details securely for their next visit.

Provide a range of shipping options and automatically calculate real-time costs (based on weight, country, date of delivery, driver availability, etc.) by integrating with shipping companies.

A good DXP should even enable you to calculate the price of your products before and after tax, localize taxes based on shipping and billing addresses, and use product categorization to assign tax classes automatically.

Get your commerce solution to do all that.

3. Nurture leads with marketing and commerce automation

A huge advantage of a DXP over other commerce solutions is the integrated marketing tools and commerce automation capabilities it enables.

Not only can you leverage A/B testing and sophisticated personalization capabilities, but you can set points along the customer journey (subscribing, sharing, installing, downloading) to trigger an automated and personalized nurturing campaign. Abandoned cart follow-up emails, for example, have an average open rate of 45%.

With automated personalized up-selling, cross-selling, and reorder opportunities, you can increase productivity, retention rates, repeat custom, and revenue.

4. Efficiently manage multiple stores from one place

With a DXP, you can manage multiple websites from a single platform and share content, data, code, order statuses, invoices, payment methods, and credentials between them, enabling consistent digital experiences across all your website properties (corporate website, microsites, online store, community site, or blog).

Microsites can be deployed in minutes using your own website templates based on existing website structures, designs, predefined content, and more. Assigned dedicated users can then easily switch between them using a single set of credentials. 

5. Personalize and optimize the omnichannel experience

A typical customer journey takes in at least four touchpoints. Indeed, 90% of customers expect smooth and seamless brand experiences across multiple channels and devices, 80 percent of them ceasing doing business with a company that fails at this.

And it’s important not to underestimate the importance of the mobile experience. 50% of all online transactions happen on a mobile device and 65% of shoppers price compare on their mobile while in a physical store.

Brands simply can’t afford not to have a consistent omnichannel presence that delivers a personalized experience. And there is no platform that will set you up better for experience excellence than a DXP.

Content creators can push the same content to all channels from one place (saving lots of marketing and IT time), and as data from all devices and channels is stored in one place, you get an omnichannel view of the customer with which you can execute deeply personalized, location-specific, and timely digital marketing campaigns across all of them.

You can create touchpoints that offer unique content to different types of visitors or content that changes dynamically according to actions performed. Content can be personalized based on location, browser, device, clicks, demographics, behaviors, age, job title, pages visited, downloaded content, buying stage, purchase history, and more. What’s more, you can create segmentation rules for a variety of real-life scenarios for use across all your properties, campaigns, and automated workflows. 

6. The API architecture protects your future

With a digital experience platform that has an API at its core, you can easily import data from external sources, like SQL databases, XML, or XLS files, or import products in any format and modify the importing process according to your needs. And you can integrate content, contacts, orders, and other data with your existing technology stack.

That’s the beauty of APIs: you can integrate them easily with any system. The modular approach of a DXP means you can extend your commerce functionality according to your precise needs, rules, and tools, and can grow your business with all your favorite systems working seamlessly together.

And you’ll always be ready for the next big thing.

To be ready for anything, you need your technology to be future proof, which means having APIs at its core. 

To recap

So, why do you need a digital experience platform to successfully sell online?

Because you need the flexible sophistication of a modular system built for the high demands of today and ready for anything the future throws your way. You need complete control over your products and pages, to be able to nurture leads with marketing and commerce automation, to efficiently manage multiple stores and consistency across all devices, and to deliver personalized content to each customer and optimize their omnichannel experience.

Oh, and you want to be able to do it all from one place.

To learn more about digital experience platforms, schedule a 1-on-1 demo with one of our experts at a time that suits you.

Yvette Hastings