Empowering Marketers to Create Personalized Commerce Experiences At Scale

Sitecore Commerce 9 Delivers Numerous Enhancements for Marketers

Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 (XC9) has its focus on improving marketing capabilities on a bunch of different levels. A lot of research went into the exact needs of business users that allowed Sitecore to build a user-centric and intuitive process for the marketers to optimize their sales funnel. There are several things that were introduced, all targeted at making life easier for marketers, improving personalization and providing a much closer, holistic and real-time view of the customer:

• A new tool with a drag and drop interface is here to replace Engagement Automation plans and will allow to create and automate complex marketing campaigns, with the goal of creating a more personalized experience.
• Empowering marketers with even more customer information with the help of multiple data channels flowing into xDB with xConnect and Sitecore Cortex. Sitecore Cortex introduced with Sitecore 9 allows for machine learning to offer real-time insights into customer behavior, decisions and outcomes to drive better marketing decisions.
• Bidirectional CRM (such as Salesforce) connectivity to allow data to flow from Sitecore and into CRM and vice versa.
• Significant improvement to FORMS UX with ability to have multiple pages and drag and drop functionality.

All of these features offer a ton of business value when it comes to creating more targeted and personalized marketing, with less effort from the marketing department. Sitecore put a lot of effort into making sure the UI of these solutions is slick and easy to use, which will definitely be a huge improvement. In addition, Sitecore has also done a lot of work to their authentication and will now offer SSO for Sitecore users (again making things a bit easier and more streamlined) and social network log in for customers, which goes back to offering better marketing with the addition of social data metrics. Sitecore now also offers integration with social media aggregates like Slackla to enable even deeper personalization.

Commerce Customers will definitely appreciate the fact that Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 will now come fully integrated. In previous versions, numerous additional apps were required to make things work for business users. With XC9, the need for the additional apps will no longer be there as the solution will have commerce fully integrated, including product and catalog management. With the new XC9, businesses will be able to provide a seamless and personalized end to end shopping experience, capable of providing analytics before, during, and after the transaction.

Sitecore also promises significantly better documentation between releases, which may seem trivial, but is frequently brought up by our customers. This will hopefully decrease the time spent on live training sessions and provide the necessary guidance to the business users going into the maintenance phase.

Finally, upgrading to Sitecore Commerce 9 should be a simpler task with a streamlined and simpler migration process. Although mostly viewed as an IT task, this has definite benefits to the business user as it will help them get to market faster, and bring desired features to the business users a lot more quickly.

XCentium is a leading Sitecore Platinum Partner and one of few in North America with expertise in implementing the entire Sitecore Experience Platform, allowing you to have one software platform and one partner for all your CMS, Commerce and Cloud initiatives.

For more information on our Sitecore Commerce services, please click here