Ready to face the new demands of eCommerce brands?

eCommerce beyond transactions

Your eCommerce clients work in an ever-evolving industry with ever-changing needs. As the technological landscape evolves, your clients become more demanding and for good reason. In order to stay successful, they have to do everything in their power to close the digital gap - what experience they can offer versus what their users need and want.

Business owners and day-to-day users are aware that it’s no longer enough to build or have access to a traditional website with a product catalog and a shopping cart. Users want personalised, on-brand journeys and to have those journeys on any platform or channel.

The question is: how do you empower your clients to offer these experiences to their users? The answer is the headless CMS, but let’s break it down and see how you get there.

Once upon a time

The first instance of an online transaction was in 1994. We’ve come a long way since then, in fact such a long way that we believe eCommerce can’t be defined as just online transactions anymore. From a user point of view it’s an experience and businesses looking to keep their competitive edge need to offer their clients the best experience they can.

A commissioned report conducted by Forrester Consulting found that 40% of consumers and 56% of B2B customers would pay more for a better experience. Furthermore, they said that they wouldn’t buy from the same business again if said experience was poor.

It is clear that there are considerable changes in customer behaviours and expectations, starting from the way they research a product or a service, the way they consider and complete a purchase, ending with how they prove brand loyalty.

What do users want?

In order to pinpoint how you can deliver for your clients, let’s look at what their users want. Specifically, let’s list the most common reasons why businesses don’t reach the point of conversion, the reasons for cart abandonment in the US.

For obvious reasons, you as an agency can’t influence all the factors that come into play. Still there are important pieces of information we can deduct from these numbers, when it comes to users’ needs. It’s abundantly clear that the most important factors are user experience (performance, checkout process, gain trust, no errors etc.) and omnichannel personalized user journeys.

When it comes to user experience, performance has a crucial role to play. For starters, it is a Google ranking signal for desktop and mobile searches. It is also a fair bet to say that there is an obvious correlation between page speed and revenue, bounce rate and session duration. A study done by Google in 2016 states that 53% of visitors leave a mobile site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, and according to a newer study a one-second delay in mobile load times can impact conversion rates by up to 20%.

Moving on to user journeys, users want the possibility to start their journey on one device or channel and continue it on a different one. Consumers have embraced the Internet of Things (IoT) era, and retailers need to keep up. A good example of this trend is the rise of voice commerce, which is estimated to reach $40 Billion in the U.S. by 2022.

In addition to omnichannel journeys, users are looking for personalized experience, they want a brand to remember who they are and have a history of their previous interactions, in fact 79% of clients value personalized marketing.

How do you empower your clients?

As mentioned in the introduction, we believe that the answer is the headless CMS, specifically Storyblok. By helping your clients adopt a headless technology, you empower them to build an ambidextrous strategy, selling on traditional channels and adopting emerging technologies like voice assistants, wearables and smart devices.

More to the point, here is how you can help them achieve the winning trifecta of user experience: Performance, Personalization and Omnipresence (omnichannel capabilities)

Performance

Headless CMS use a JAMstack architecture. The headless CMS in itself won’t make the sites automatically faster, but you can considerably improve performance by using the features of JAMstack. The reason behind it is that JAMstack doesn’t rely on a server, is prebuilt and server-like functionalities are handled by third-party services and connected via APIs.

One of the most important things to consider is how you approach asset optimisation. As you know, they have a serious impact on loading times. One way to approach the compression and optimisation of images is to make use of the CDN service provided by Storyblok.

Another way to improve the loading speed of a page is to preload key requests, to prioritize the preloading of critical assets.

Personalization

The issue of personalization and customisation of customer experiences is a central aspect in building a successful eCommerce platform. It comes as no surprise, since 91% of users state that they are more likely to buy from brands that offer them personal recommendations based on their browsing behaviour or past purchases. They are ready to share their data with brands for this purpose, as long as there is a legal promise that this data won’t be shared with third parties.

Having this permission and by using a headless CMS, personal data can be made available through the use of APIs, third-party web service, and open data.

Storyblok’s personalization engine provides recommendations based on individual behaviour.

More than that, compared to a traditional CMS which comes with predefined templates, with Storyblok you can create a unique front-end for a specific brand experience.

Omnichannel

There is a reason why the headless CMS is defined as being the future. The headless architecture was built for the IoT age.

Multichannel and omnichannel marketing are often confused and even used interchangeably.

An omnichannel experience is one that spans over multiple channels, while being seamlessly connected. It delivers a consistent, personalized experience for shoppers across channels and devices. By using APIs, retailers have the possibility to expand their digital strategies beyond the web and to deliver rich narratives, a seamless combination of content and commerce.

Through it’s decoupled nature, Storyblok acts as a content repository that can feed the content, via APIs, to any channel and platform. The commerce functionality becomes a service which can be integrated anywhere in the user journey.

If we go back on the voice shopping example, with Storyblok you can easily create Alexa Skills, using Storyblok as a source of content, content that is shared both by the virtual assistant and the website

Key takeaways

The highly competitive nature of eCommerce forces business owners to rethink their approach. They need to take the time to personalise user journeys and to meet their customers on all platforms and channels. For this, they will come to you and you will be ready because you have the answer: the headless CMS. A future-proof answer to the demands of the modern market and its users.