SftB#3 Recap: The Importance of Content in eCommerce

Jonathan Selander is the CTO and co-founder at Made People, a Swedish eCommerce agency and Storyblok partner. As part of our live event Stories from the Blok, he calls on his 15 years of experience in eCommerce development, building custom CMS solutions, and eCommerce platforms. He provides some details about how content management in the context of eCommerce has changed over the years. He also explains how Storyblok helps him solve some of the many challenges that were once very difficult to overcome in the eCommerce space.

Content management historically

When working with monolithic systems, re-using content when expanding to new markets is difficult due to the silos created and the number of people involved in the process.

Cross-channel content publishing requires multiple implementations. It can be difficult to maintain a unified customer experience since people who should be working together and collaborating are separated.

These silos also make adapting to emerging trends such as AI/ML and customer loyalty a challenge due to siloed data. Most of your time gets spent on content/eCommerce platform development and not executing an eCommerce plan, and improving the experience for the customers.

Content management today

Jonathan illustrated how content management historically occurred with a triangle diagram. For content management today, that triangle becomes inverted with less time spent on development and more time spent on customers.

Monolithic platforms forced content and commerce into a suite approach, but now organizations can develop a business-tailored stack instead. Content management becomes a unifying concept, connecting more than just writing but other channels as well, with more human resources being spent on the customer experience. This leads to an increase in business value and more functionality gained from other services in the tech stack, such as PIM and CRM.

Content becomes an experience

As content becomes an experience, Jonathan shares some examples of what he was able to achieve with Storyblok, including making a promotional page for women who are silver tier members and measures its effect, catering to the fact that your Reviews service cannot know which language a visitor speaks and having the ability to A/B test each scenario.

What happens next?

Choosing a flexible platform and stack today is vital for tomorrow and content management needs to be kept focused around the business and not around the specific platform. New concepts such as AI/ML and XR are emerging rapidly. The future happens whether we want it to or not and the faster you embrace it, the faster you profit from it.