Although the traditional model has served us well, customers now have exceptionally high expectations for service in an eCommerce experience. Despite the complexity of building product catalogs, developing a headless frontend with top-tier UX, promotion engines, and segment-based personalization, customers still expect high-quality information delivered instantly, in a way that minimizes the time required to make a purchase.

Conversational Commerce is a revolutionary solution that combines artificial intelligence with natural language processing to guide users to the products they seek as efficiently as possible.

The Problem and the Opportunity

Traditional online shopping often feels like navigating a maze blindfolded. Customers face overwhelming product catalogs, complex filtering systems, and frustrating searches for exactly what they need. Meanwhile, businesses struggle with high cart abandonment rates (averaging 70% across industries), low conversion rates, and an inability to capture valuable customer insights during the shopping journey.

The opportunity is significant: Conversational Commerce bridges the gap between digital convenience and human-like assistance, creating a shopping experience that is both scalable and deeply personal. Companies implementing conversational commerce solutions report up to a 35% increase in conversion rates and a 25% improvement in customer satisfaction scores.

Context

Traditional B2C eCommerce follows a standard customer journey: Home Page → PLP (Product Listing Page) → PDP (Product Detail Page) → Shopping Cart → Checkout → Order Confirmation. The challenge has always been designing the best experience for each stage. This requires properly defining the product catalog and identifying all relevant attributes for the PDP, including technical specifications, tags, and labels (e.g., sport, family-friendly, business-casual). Customers should be able to find all necessary product details on a single page rather than searching elsewhere.

Additionally, defining the product hierarchy is crucial. A configurable product (as known in Adobe Commerce) must be associated with simple products for color and size. This allows customers to filter products on the PLP using these attributes (referred to as variants in SAP Commerce Cloud). Even after structuring the catalog correctly, the challenge remains: exposing this information effectively to a headless frontend for an intuitive product discovery experience.

The Problem

Even when all relevant product information is available, customers often have unresolved questions, such as:

• “Is this cotton clothing comfortable for someone who sweats a lot?”
• “Does it fade?”
• “I live in a cold area but want to use it for running—will it work?”

A salesperson in a physical store could easily address these concerns, but digital channels often fail to provide similar guidance. In-store experiences are also limited by staff capacity.

Other Use Case: Simplifying Product Searches

Filtering product attributes no longer needs to be complicated. Previously, customers navigated endless menus—“Category > Subcategory > Color > Size > Price.” Now, they can simply describe what they’re looking for: “I need a good laptop for video editing, with a great graphics card, under $2,000.”

Another Use Case: Streamlining B2B Purchases

Business transactions often involve complex CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) products with numerous options. Traditional configurators, filled with technical details, can be overwhelming. Instead, users should be able to describe their needs without having to be experts in the field.

Solution

The goal is NOT to replace human interaction with chatbots, but to empower chatbots to scale advisory capabilities, supporting multiple customers simultaneously. These chatbots are deeply knowledgeable about the product catalog and can also assist in-store staff by generating better questions for clients, monitoring system responses, and continuously improving chatbot learning. Additionally, chatbots serve as a valuable staff training tool—a topic for another discussion.

Moreover, AI assistants seamlessly integrate with marketing automation workflows, enabling real-time personalization. This article will explain how we implement Conversational Commerce at Perficient and share best practices for your adoption.

Technology Foundation: Conversational Commerce OpenAI Assistants

OpenAI’s Assistant API (beta) provides a powerful framework for sophisticated conversational commerce integrations. With this tool, businesses can:

1. Configure the assistant with a single purpose.
2. Connect the assistant with their commerce backend using functions.
3. Enhance the assistant’s knowledge of commerce specifics using vector files.
4. Maintain isolated context for each customer through separate conversation threads.
5. Preserve context throughout long interactions.
6. Handle complex queries requiring multi-step reasoning.
7. Ensure a consistent brand voice in all interactions.

Function Calling: Integrating Conversations with Commerce Data

The function-calling feature allows assistants to retrieve relevant information from existing commerce infrastructures when necessary.

First, it is critical to categorize products correctly and apply appropriate tagging (e.g., family-friendly, portable, cost-effective). Without proper tagging, customers may experience confusion or frustration when interacting with the chatbot. A poorly tagged catalog is like chatting with ChatGPT in a generic way—it lacks precision.

Common Functions Used:

• Product search and filtering based on natural language queries.
• Inventory checking and availability confirmation.
• Price calculations, including discounts and promotions.
• Product recommendations based on tagging.

Businesses don’t need to expose real inventory numbers but can simply provide availability flags based on customer location and promotional strategy.

Vector Files

Not all commerce data needs to be retrieved via functions. While function calls can provide specific customer-requested information, they can sometimes slow response times due to execution delays.

For static commerce-related details—such as return policies, delivery times, warranties, brand preferences, and category systems—vectorized files offer a more efficient approach. These files become part of the assistant’s context, eliminating the need to provide such information within each conversation thread.

MACH Architecture Integration

Modern commerce implementations following MACH principles (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) are naturally suited for conversational commerce integrations. Even legacy platforms like SAP Commerce, Adobe Commerce, and HCL can leverage this feature, as all modern platforms expose APIs.

Adopting a MACH approach significantly simplifies ecosystem development, performance monitoring, multi-channel integrations, and global scalability.

Conversation Development Challenges

Implementing conversational experiences involves several challenges:

1. Concurrency: Scaling workers up or down efficiently to handle thousands of conversations.
2. Thread Lock: Ensuring only one worker manages a conversation at a time to avoid flooding customers with overlapping messages.
3. Conversation Pace: Supporting fast-typing users without missing incoming messages during the assistant’s response time.

Cost Optimization

Conversational Commerce involves several cost factors, including OpenAI’s Assistant usage, which is billed per token processed. Conversations typically cost between $0.05 and $0.10, depending on complexity and length.

To reduce costs, businesses can:

• Optimize their assistant strategy with prompt engineering.
• Minimize function call payloads.
• Provide essential information through vectorized files instead of frequent function calls.

While OpenAI’s Assistant offers one of the best user experiences, alternatives include ElevenLabs AI Voice Tools, Azure OpenAI, AWS Bedrock, and Google Vertex AI. Pricing varies slightly across providers.

Once businesses validate the improved user experience, they can explore training custom models and hosting AI solutions in the cloud for better control and cost efficiency. Models like Mistral or LLaMA can be set up using Ollama for further optimization.

Return on Investment

Beyond enhancing customer experience, businesses can train AI models to capture customer emails and integrate them into automated marketing campaigns.

Monitoring Best Practices

Performance Metrics:

• Conversation completion rates
• Time to resolution
• Customer satisfaction scores
• Conversion rate (email collection)
• Cost per successful interaction

The Future of Commerce Is Conversational

Just a few years ago, this concept was merely a dream—something out of a futuristic car commercial. Today, the technology is here, and customers expect clear, educational answers about how to use a product and which option best suits their specific needs.

Personalization is no longer just a nice-to-have enhancement—it’s a mandatory feature, just like the “Add to Cart” button.

At Perficient, we believe that how we connect with our customers, how we learn about their needs, and how we solve their problems form the foundation of any successful commerce channel.

Are you looking to start, grow, manage, or scale your business? Look no further than Perficient for leveraging Shopify’s robust e-commerce platform to help achieve your goals.

Welcome to the digital era of commerce, where businesses grow online, and seamless checkouts are the norm. At Perficient, we understand the evolving landscape of commerce, and we’re here to elevate your online presence through the power of Shopify platform.

From Headless storefronts to composable tech stacks, we continue to evolve, setting new standards of excellence in the ever-evolving landscape of commerce.

How Does Shopify Work?

Shopify aggregates commerce activities under a single platform. Business owners can create and personalize an online store across channels such as online web and mobile devices, and in person through physical store locations. Orders and customer information can be synced across multiple channels, through powerful integrations—and managed all in one place.

Shopify plans range from the Starter plan, perfect for creators selling on social media channels, to Shopify Advanced plans for brick-and-mortar to Shopify Plus for high-volume global brands and Shopify Enterprise for enterprise retailers.

Why Shopify Commerce?

1. Time to Market: Shopify is one of the few commerce platforms that can assist in launching your webstore in a few weeks’ time. Unlike other commerce platforms, you don’t need to wait for months before you can launch an online store. Shopify has in-built features that can be easily plugged into the webstore that enables you to launch the online store in a matter of few weeks.
2. Shopify Supports End to End Commerce Ecosystem: Shopify is a buildable product that includes a core offering across several plans. Upon that base setup, store owners can integrate additional products, customize certain components, and add app integrations to create a unique experience that meets each business’s needs.
3. Go Global: Shopify enables businesses to sell to customers around the world, supporting multiple currencies and languages, as well as providing international shipping and tax calculation capabilities.
4. Comprehensive Features: Shopify offers a wide range of features essential for running an e-commerce business, including website customization, one step checkout, product management, secure payment processing, shipping and fulfillment, marketing tools, analytics, and more.
5. Competitive Cost: Shopify’s costing is very competitive and affordable for any type of business. They offer different plans that are suitable for small, medium, and fairly large enterprise businesses. Apart from the licensing cost, their apps are also cost effective to be utilized in online stores.
6. App Ecosystem: The Shopify App Store hosts thousands of third-party apps and integrations that extend the platform’s capabilities, allowing business owners to customize and power their stores with additional features suited for their needs.
7. Cloud Based and Secure: Shopify is completely secure, and cloud-based and -hosted, which means you can safely access it from any compatible device with an internet connection. This gives you the flexibility to run your business from anywhere. Has its own dedicated team to monitor the traffic and upsize as needed.
8. Payment Solutions: Shopify Payments simplifies the payment process for merchants by providing integrated payment processing solutions, reducing friction for customers and streamlining the checkout experience. It eliminates the hassle of setting up a third-party payment provider or merchant account and having to enter the credentials into Shopify.
9. Sell Anywhere: Sell to customers browsing on desktop or mobile through a dedicated online store. Grow your audience across social media and popular marketplaces including Facebook, Instagram etc. Sell in person with Shopify’s all-in-one POS system.

Why Choose Perficient?

Our team of top-tier Shopify commerce professionals specialize in tailoring solutions to meet your unique objectives, whether you operate in the B2B, B2C, or enterprise space. With our expertise, you can leverage cutting-edge architectures such as Headless, Composable, or Microservices to build robust platforms that meet the demands of today’s digital landscape. From initial consultation to post-launch support, our experts are committed to ensuring smooth and successful implementation every step of the way.

Meet an Expert

Justin Racine is Principal, Unified Commerce Strategy at Perficient, a global digital consulting firm serving enterprise clients throughout North America and the world. At Perficient, Justin drives digital commerce strategies that assist Fortune 500 brands to achieve and exceed business goals through commerce-enabled technologies. Justin has more than 14 years of experience in ecommerce, customer-focused experiences and branding strategy. In addition, Justin has been published in Forbes, Digital Commerce360 and Henry Stewart’s Journal of Brand Strategy.

Mouli Ganapathy is a Director in Commerce and AI practice at Perficient. With over 14 years of experience in Commerce platforms, Digital Experience Platforms, ML/AI-based Personalization, and Content Management Systems, Mouli is a dedicated leader committed to helping enterprise brands achieve enhanced engagement, increase online sales conversions and improve loyalty.

Ready to Transform Your Commerce Experience?

Ready to revolutionize your commerce strategy? Partner with Perficient and leverage the full potential of Shopify Commerce. Contact us today for a personalized consultation and take the first step towards transforming your digital commerce experience. Don’t let outdated commerce solutions hold your business back. Partner with Perficient today and unlock the full potential of Shopify for your online sales channels. Contact us now to schedule a consultation and take the first step towards commerce excellence. Let’s turn your vision into reality together.

Explore our commerce expertise.

This holiday season, what difference will 3.6 seconds make? For your e-commerce site’s load time, it will mean a significant difference in revenue.

Slow page load times directly correlate to decreased profitability and conversions. For example, a page loading in 2.4 seconds converts at 2%, while a page taking 6 seconds to load will only convert at 0.6%. The increase in traffic during holidays causes many ecommerce sites to struggle, leading customers to shop elsewhere.

To address this issue, Perficient offers a tactical Peak Holiday Readiness assessment that analyzes website code, integrations, and provides recommendations for improvement. The assessment, conducted by a dedicated team of experts, offers insights into solution architecture and provides actionable recommendations for performance enhancement beyond the holiday season.

Tap into Perficient’s team of commerce experts to take advantage of the Peak Holiday Readiness Offer before the shopping rush begins.

Over the last year or so, I’ve explored this idea of anthropomorphism in branding on a few different occasions via some article in CMSWire (Apple Vision Pro and The Adobe Summit Recap). If you’re not familiar with this idea, let me break it down for you.

Anthropomorphism is the idea of assigning human-like characteristics to non-human things. For example, our pets. We talk to them, feel emotions with them, etc., but at the end of the day, they aren’t human. Another example of this can be seen is Disney portrayal of characters like Mickey Mouse, or the Beast.

So, you may be asking yourself, “How can this relate to branding and digital commerce?”

Over the last 20 years, consumers have shifted their perception and motivations around purchasing choices and patterns. In today’s world, consumers aren’t looking to make a purchase, they’re looking to make a connection. They aren’t looking to have a one-way monologue; they are looking to have a two way dialog. Consumers have adopted a much more conscious mindset when purchasing than previous years.

Why?

Simple, it’s the access to information and the ability of choice. Consumers have more choices than ever before, and are more informed on social, economic, and environmental topics that are persuading their purchase behavior. They are seeing a friend’s story on Instagram or TikTok and being inspired to make a purchase or to adopt a style or new trend.

So, what does this mean for brands?

Customers desire the ability to see your brand as not just somewhere they buy something from, but to see your brand as they see their friends, loved ones and other important people in their life that they connect with. If done correctly, a brand that effectively taps into the anthropomorphism mindset will yield enhanced customer lifetime value, brand awareness and of course, increased revenues

Here are three ways to adopt anthropomorphism in your brand for 2024:

Seek to Understand

Before you can relate on a deeper level with your customer segments, you first must seek to understand who they are. What do they care about? What are they interested in? What are they posting on social media? By digging in deep on what motivates and drives your customers in their own personal life – you’ll be able to move into the next phase of connection which is becoming relatable.

Seek to Communicate

After having a full understanding of your customer, your next goal should be to build out marketing, branding, and experience-driven campaigns that communicate how your brand thinks like the customer does. Communication of the brand’s message is essential for customers to understand and see that you’re more than a business that sells a product or a service, but that you’re an entity that “gets them.” A good example of this is to build digital shopping experiences that are driven by content that supports the mindset of your customers.

Take the Harley Davidson brand. On the surface, they make and sell motorcycles. However, the persona of the brand runs deep in the blood of the customers who purchase them. Harley Davidson isn’t a means of transportation, it’s a way of life. For their customers, it’s how memories are made and how they connect with other likeminded individuals. Harley Davidson does a fantastic job of inspiring and encouraging customers to be who they truly are; and this can be seen through their social channels as well as their digital commerce experience where customers can build their dream bikes.

Seek to Relate

Once a brand can understand and communicate to their customers, the final phase in this journey to anthropomorphism excellence is seeking to relate. Just like with Harley Davidson, brands need to inject content and experiences that relate to the mindset of their customers. Harley Davidson’s experience HD section of their website is the perfect example of this. Once you navigate to this area, anything, and everything you would ever want to know about the Harley Davidson lifestyle is here. From cruises and meetups to learning to ride, Harley covers all their bases. By relating to customers and their desires, Harley Davidson becomes more than just a motorcycle manufacturer; they transcend into the consciousness of consumers in a way that keeps them coming back from life.

As I’m sure you know, there’s never been more choices and competition in this day and age. From Amazon to Alibaba, consumers are constantly flooded with choice as brands fight for their attention span. With all of that being said, taking the path of anthropomorphism to curate experiences that drive customer retention is easier said than done – but if done correctly, your brand will generate the sticky customers you desire to keep revenues strong – but more than that, connect with customers on the deeper level they desire. This is what creates customers for life; this is what creates revenues that last.

I tend to lean towards all the above as being the catalyst for why we find them so engaging. Ironically, this also can apply to the world of Commerce.

Over the last few years, there’s been more than just a few discussions on what commerce technology approach is best. There’s been a progression from the traditional monolith to headless and now into composability. But what makes the most sense? Where should you start? How would you even know what path is right?

Let’s talk about all of that – but first, let’s start with some of the basics and define the three flavors or commerce.

Monolith

The monolithic approach is the traditional implementation of a platform – essentially a suite of features and capabilities all wrapped up into one big solution. Sometimes called the ‘platform’ approach, the monolith typically comes with a front end (CMS) and back end (Commerce engine) all woven into one big solution that a brand can leverage.

Pros: Speed to market with many native traditional commerce features.
Cons: Extendibility and flexibility.

Headless

Headless commerce is the de-coupling of the front and back-end systems. Through a headless approach, brands typically select a front end CMS that appeals to the unique content and personalization capabilities they desire to exceed customer expectations around buying experiences. In this headless approach, the front end or back end can be interchanged at any time.

Pros: Enhanced personalization and curated content.
Cons: Longer speed to market with two systems to manage / maintain.

Composable

Composable commerce takes the foundations and ideas from headless to another level. Within a composable framework, a best of breed with everything approach is taken. Essentially, you’re building your ideal experience from the ground up. Best in class commerce engine, CMS, onsite search, personalization engine, etc. This approach allows the brand to build their own customer digital commerce experience by picking and choosing various technology partners to ‘fill in the gaps’ if you will.

Pros: Extremely curated and personalized experience.
Cons: Cost, time to market, and maintainability.

So, now that we have defined each of these – I can already guess your next question, what approach makes the most sense?

Well, my typical response to this question is – it depends.

One of the most important factors surrounds what the business challenge is that your brand is trying to solve for. With all of the buzz out there around composable commerce, it could be easy to select this as your path. However, if you don’t have a mature IT organization with a business that understands the time to market and the complexities that come with this approach, it likely isn’t the right time for composable.

At the end of the day the reason any organization moves from the monolithic approach to headless is because they want enhanced flexibility and agility. The reason a brand pivots off of headless to composable is because they typically are still limited with the amount of customizations that can be done on the front and back end of the tech stack.

Knowing when to, how to, and if you should pick a path can be challenging, and outside of a asking one of our experts to help you decide which path is correct, the best way to determine what you should do is to first understand the desires, channels, and buying patterns of your customers. Your customers hold the answer to which technology approach you should take.

Ask yourself these questions, “What do my customers want? What is our business trying to do? Where are we hitting roadblocks? Where do we want to be three years from now?”

The answers will help you decide your journey – the higher the complexity, the higher the likelihood that you’ll need to consider the composable path.

But remember, while composable can be scary, and does take longer to implement. There are massive benefits from choosing this journey and ways to baby step into this new frontier of commerce connectiveness.

Remember, if it’s right for the customer, it’s likely right for the business.

Is there anything worse than going to a pharmacy to pick up your prescriptions? Okay, I’m sure there are a few things but it’s still inconvenient, right?

Thankfully, many pharmacies have adopted home delivery services. Patients can request delivery of their medication come right to their doorstep. However, this presents some challenges. What if a patient wants to re-order medication online vs. other channels? How do they know their information is protected?

Well, that’s a great question. And now there’s an answer.

Adobe Commerce Protection & Cross-Sell Opportunities

Adobe offers a PHI and HIPAA-ready solution with its latest release of Healthcare Add-on for Adobe Commerce.

This past year, Perficient’s commerce and healthcare teams collaborated with Adobe to build this new solution specifically for use cases like this. Now more than ever, consumers are concerned about safeguarding their personal health information. A solution that can provide baseline HIPAA and PHI-ready features is essential in delivering this promise to patients and their loved ones, specifically when it comes to ordering and reordering medication.

Here are three ways pharmacies can adopt this Adobe Commerce solution to extend and secure trust with their patients.

Home Delivery Patient Ordering

This is probably the most obvious use case. It’s the ability for patients to order their medication from the comfort of their home, have it delivered to their door, and not have to worry about who is accessing their personal information. Adobe Commerce provides baseline HIPAA and PHI-ready features that can extend to help protect a patient’s personal information for any order placed. This also presents an opportunity for the next use case below.

Health and Wellness Products Cross-Sell

While pharmacies have patients in a shopping cart, why not suggest and recommend other products that are specific to their condition? We all have been in pharmacies and know they stock various health and wellness products that most of us purchase anyway. If medication is going to be delivered to the home, pharmacies should leverage dynamic cross-sell, condition-specific opportunities to recommend other items that may help manage their condition.

Dynamic Health Integrations

Finally, there could be an interesting integration between health providers and pharmacies. I spoke about this in another article, but providers being able to link and connect directly to pharmacies isn’t new. When you visit a doctor and need medication, the doctor will write a script and send it to a local pharmacy to be filled. But what if that doctor was also integrated to recommend other products and items that will help that patient manage their condition? This could be done through Adobe Commerce and could provide a new, intuitive way for consumers to access vital health and wellness products.

A Commerce Solution for Pharmacies

The three use cases outlined in this blog are just the tip of the iceberg on where and how Adobe Commerce can integrate into pharmacies. As you plan for the future, it’s important to look at a solution that will allow your pharmacy to do what it does best: service the health and wellness of your patients. HIPPA and PHI-ready Adobe Commerce solution does just that and is worth considering.

Adobe Commerce: Leading the Way in Proactive Healthcare Experiences

Learn More About HIPAA-Ready Adobe Commerce

This blog is part of a four-part series discussing commerce, protected healthcare experiences, use cases, and Adobe’s HIPAA-ready commerce platform.

Check out parts one, two, and three:

1. 3 Ways Adobe Commerce Enhances Patient-Provider Relationships
2. How Adobe Commerce Can Impact Payor Strategies
3. Adobe Commerce, Medical Device & Life Sciences, and … Golf?

My journey from golf course employee to building HIPAA-ready commerce solutions.

I’ve spent essentially my entire career in the medical device and life science space, and it didn’t start the way you would think.

In college, I worked at a golf course as the guy who drove that funny tin can of a golf cart around. Golfers would hit balls (and occasionally me…on purpose) at the driving range and I would collect them. Unfortunately, my college degree required an internship, and working at a golf course didn’t really count. When I told the owner of the course my situation, and that I couldn’t work for him that summer, he said, “Why don’t you come work for the medical supply company I also run?”

Huh? He runs a golf course and a medical supply company. Who is this guy?!

Anyway, I accepted and started my journey down the path of medical supply distribution and the rest is, as they say, history.

So, What Does This Have to Do with Adobe Commerce?

There’s a reason this story is important and why I tell it. I worked in marketing and eCommerce when I interned at this medical supply company. After graduation, I was offered a full-time role where I helped our customers build and launch Magento 1.0 sites that leveraged our distribution network to fulfill orders. So, a local durable medical equipment provider essentially could ship anywhere in the country.

During that time, we had to make sure that the Magento platform was secure and HIPAA / PHI compliant for our customers’ customers.

Fast forward 14 years and I find myself in a full-circle situation with Adobe Commerce. This past year, Perficient’s commerce and healthcare teams collaborated with Adobe’s commerce and healthcare teams to build a HIPAA and PHI-ready solution. In theory, the foundational work we did 14 years ago has become part of the actual Adobe Commerce product – talk about a cool story!

With all this in mind, here are three ways medical device and life science companies can leverage Adobe Commerce to build solutions that help everyone within the healthcare lifecycle.

3 Adobe Commerce Use Cases for Med Device & Life Science

Secure B2B Ordering

Just because an organization operates within the B2B vertical doesn’t mean they don’t or shouldn’t leverage HIPAA / PHI-ready platforms. For example, a nursing home will order from a medical supply distributor and need to order patient-specific products that need to go to a specific patient room upon delivery. Many times, these facilities want to place patient notes within the cart to notify the receiving department where the products need to go when they arrive. This is a perfect opportunity to leverage Adobe Commerce and to extend HIPAA and PHI-ready solutions through the ordering chain.

Order On Behalf of Ordering

Secondly, the secure B2B ordering feeds into an “order on behalf of” capability. Many durable medical equipment providers and pharmacies will leverage their distributor portal to order products on behalf of a customer. Then the products ship directly to the customer’s home. When doing this, the customer’s products and condition-specific information need to be protected. Utilizing Adobe Commerce in a scenario like this would enable medical device and life science organizations to broaden the level of protection and trust required. Plus, it would help the distribution company provide this ordering solution to its customers and create extensive customer lifetime value.

D2C Takes the Stage

Finally, having a foundation platform like Adobe Commerce in place allows medical device and life science companies the ability to enter new markets and channels like direct-to-consumer (or D2C). Now more than ever, consumers are demanding conversations and interactions with brands directly vs. through other channels. Adobe Commerce allows for this use case to become a reality by cloning off a new site instance that can be leveraged into this new channel with HIPPA and PHI-ready features, of course.

How Becton Dickinson Empowered Patient Independence With an Enhanced Commerce Experience | READ STORY

A Commerce Solution for the Healthcare Lifecycle

Vertically integrated solutions like this are a must-have for organizations that operate within the medical device and life science space. As you can probably tell, this is an industry that’s close to my heart and it’s really amazing to have a HIPAA-ready solution like what Adobe has created out in the space. I’m extremely excited to continue working with them, just like I did 14 years ago to help people have access to products and services that allow them to live the life they desire.

Learn More About HIPAA-Ready Adobe Commerce

This blog is part of a four-part series discussing commerce, protected healthcare experiences, use cases, and Adobe’s HIPAA-ready commerce platform.

Check out parts one and two and stay tuned for the final blog:

1. 3 Ways Adobe Commerce Enhances Patient-Provider Relationships
2. How Adobe Commerce Can Impact Payor Strategies

Health insurance is just one of those things we simply can’t live without. It’s a security blanket we all want to snuggle up to, but nobody likes to use it. Because if you’re using it, it likely means you’re sick or need care.

Can you guess who else doesn’t like it when you use your health insurance? The payor themselves. Why? Easy. When one of their members gets sick, they lose money.

Now, I’m not trying to sound harsh, but that is their business model. They are in the business of keeping you as healthy as possible. 365 days a year.

Luckily for these payors, there’s a new way for them to achieve this through technology enabled by Adobe’s HIPAA-ready Commerce.

This past year, Perficient’s commerce and healthcare teams collaborated with Adobe’s commerce and healthcare teams to build this new, HIPAA-ready solution specifically for use cases like this. Now, more than ever, consumers are concerned and worried about their personal health information. A solution that can provide baseline HIPAA and PHI-ready features is essential in delivering this promise to patients and their loved ones.

Keeping Members Healthy and Payors Happy With Adobe Commerce

Here are three use cases payors can leverage the Healthcare Add-on for Adobe Commerce to provide healthy solutions that keep you and me out of the hospital and healthy.

Education & Content Portal

Payors are invested in consumers’ health and wellness. So, they should also be invested in building education and content portals that offer condition-specific information, videos, diagrams, and other elements that can be personalized and recommended to their members based on previously diagnosed conditions.

FSA Health & Wellness Stores

This is one of my favorite use cases because it’s already happening in some applications. Many payors have FSAs (flexible spending accounts) that they offer. These pre-tax benefit accounts can be used to pay for eligible health and wellness products or expenses that are not covered by the member’s health care plan. Payors should own this entire cycle and build out digitally enabled commerce experiences where members can leverage their FSA funds and purchase products that keep them healthy and, of course, out of the hospital.

Proactive Wellness Recommendations

Leveraging the two previous examples, payors should also look to leverage their marketing tech stack to proactively recommend products, content, and activities that promote health and wellness to members. For example, there could be integrations to local gyms or exercise programs. All recommendations, whether they are products, content, or services, are personalized and tailored to individuals, adjusting according to their health status.

Adobe Commerce: Leading the Way in Proactive Healthcare Experiences

Using Adobe Commerce to Shape Proactive Health Solutions

As highlighted earlier in this blog, payors aren’t merely desiring the well-being of their members; it’s an imperative for them. Payors should explore the outlined use cases and seek opportunities to utilize Adobe Commerce for developing an innovative category of proactive health practices and products. This approach aims to ensure the collective safety and optimal living for society, all from the comfort of our homes, not the hospital.

Learn More About Adobe’s HIPAA-Ready Commerce Platform

This blog is part of a four-part series discussing commerce, protected healthcare experiences, use cases, and Adobe’s HIPAA-ready commerce platform.

Check out part one and part three of the series below:

• 3 Ways Adobe Commerce Enhances Patient-Provider Relationships
• Adobe Commerce, Medical Device & Life Sciences, and … Golf?

One of my favorite memories as a kid was going to the car dealership with my dad and watching him beat up (figuratively, of course) the sales associate who was trying to sell him a new truck. The sales associate wanted one price; my father wanted a very different price. Round and round they went, spending hours and oxygen as they both attempted to get to a place where they felt good about the deal.

After time, they didn’t, and my dad and I got up and left. A few days later, the sales associate called my father up and said he was able to get the price he wanted, so we drove back and purchased the truck.

So, what’s the overall lesson here? Well, there’s a few. First, if you’re an automotive sales associate and you see my father coming – run. Second, that entire shopping experience took a ton of time, stress, and work.

And that’s my exact point here. The automotive shopping experience needs to change. Consumers don’t really want to haggle on price, back and forth, all day. We’re all too busy for that. We don’t really want to block off an afternoon and test drive a car when there may be just as good options to see how the car drives from the comfort of our home.

The future of automotive shopping will and should be driven by immersive, unified shopping experiences that remove friction completely. In that frame, here are three ways I see the automotive shopping experience changing for the better.

Immersive Test Drives

Imagine a world where you can pop on your AR headset, hop into the seat of the car of your choice and dynamically experience what it’s like to drive it from the comfort of your couch. Sounds pretty cool right? This type of experience isn’t that far off, especially when you look at the ability to test drive the vehicle then customize the interior, exterior, leather choices, wheel choices, paint choices, etc. Automotive manufacturers who can embrace immersive experiences like this will begin to attract customers who are on the go and don’t have time to pop in and spend hours at the dealership. Additionally, immersive doesn’t just mean test drives. Immersive also applies to in-person events, experiences, and get togethers that evoke our senses in a way that curates customer lifetime value.

Digitally Enabled Sales

There is no reason that we should have to go into a dealership to purchase a vehicle. Most of the deal, paperwork, and logistics needed can be done virtually through technology. Imagine a world where there’s a digitally enabled commerce experience that both the buyer and the sales associate have access to. They can start to work on the car deal together, virtually. If the customer drops off for any reason, dynamic re-marketing campaigns through extensive marketing technology can nurture the customer back into the buying process allowing the sales associate to run many deals simultaneously. This not-so-distant future will soon become a reality, and in some cases – it already is.

Dynamic Upsells, Through Personal Connection

Unified commerce is the ability of an organization to truly put the customer at the center of everything. Through technology, the organization can curate content and experiences based upon the actual behavior of that customer. Here’s an example. Recently, you purchased a new car and so far, you’re loving it. After about a year, you realize that the car may not be for you. However, you’re still a big fan of the brand overall so you decide to head back to their website where you’ve previously created a profile. You login and start to browse. In a unified world, the sales associate you worked with previously is notified of this behavior and can start to curate content and vehicles for you to look at. This dynamic upsell opportunity is led by technology, but supported by a human, and the personal connection you may have made previously with that sales associate. The idea here is to always be paying attention to the signals and hints consumers are providing through their actions in a way that helps nurture their goals and desires.

If this all sounds like a lot, well it should – because it is. However, the good news is that if you’re operating in this space today – you’ve already made investments in technology that can start you on the path to unified experiences. What’s critical however is that you start with where your customers’ journey is today and see how it might change and pivot tomorrow to help determine what technology investments you may need to make.

Remember, your brand should always aspire to be in the channels your customers are most active in. Keep a close eye on how technology is evolving and find ways to leverage things like AR or collaborative ordering environments in some beta tests – collect the result data and make pivots to help curate the desirable experiences your customer demand.

I don’t think you’ll ever meet anyone who says they like to go to the hospital or to their doctor. Sure, it’s a necessary part of life and staying healthy. But sometimes unfortunate circumstances arise when we need urgent medical attention. As consumers, we’re inclined to minimize return visits to the doctor’s office whenever possible. Whether it’s managing bills through online portals or investing in medical products to ensure safety at home for us and our loved ones, a proactive approach is chosen to prevent setbacks. The goal is to navigate healthcare with foresight, utilizing technology and health products to safeguard well-being and reduce the need for frequent medical visits.

So, it’s critically important that healthcare providers offer more protected, trustworthy portals to support this journey. That’s where Adobe Commerce and its newly built HIPAA and PHI-ready solution come into play.

This past year, Perficient’s Commerce and Healthcare teams collaborated with Adobe’s Commerce and Healthcare teams to build this new solution specifically for use cases like this. Now more than ever, consumers are concerned and worried about their personal health information. A solution that can provide baseline HIPAA and PHI-ready features is essential in delivering this promise to patients and their loved ones.

Adobe Commerce: Leading the Way in Proactive Healthcare Experiences

How to Enhance Patient-Provider Relationships With Adobe Commerce

Here are three ways providers and health systems can leverage Adobe Commerce to extend and enhance their relationship with patients, and ultimately improve their health and wellness.

Digitally Enabled Bill Pay

Paying your medical bill post-visit can be a hassle. Who wants to call in to provide credit card information over the phone? Not me. Most providers and health systems have online portals that are available for bill pay. Adobe Commerce and its Healthcare Add-on come into play to help protect these portals. Especially when it involves the access of condition-specific information by the patient or commerce interactions such as credit card transactions. The platform helps safeguard sensitive data and maintain the integrity of the portal.

Post-Discharge Wellness

Imagine you recently went to your doctor because you were feeling a little stressed related to life and work. In doing so, your doctor recommends some supplements for you to try before prescribing medication. What if your provider/doctor had a digitally enabled commerce instance where they could add supplements to a cart for you, and you could purchase them after you leave the appointment. Sounds great, right? Absolutely. What’s even better, is as your condition progresses your doctor can collaborate with you through this portal on other health and wellness products.

Proactive Education & Training

Finally, there’s no better way to stay healthy than to educate yourself about your or your loved one’s condition. Being able to log in to a portal that presents condition-specific information, books, and other items for purchase is a fantastic way for providers and health systems to continue building relationships with patients and their families and become trusted advisors.

Did you know that the Global Healthcare Ecommerce Market is projected to reach a value of $994.2 Billion by 2030¹?

Give Your Patients What They Want: Proactive Healthcare

No matter the use case, providers and health systems need to embrace the world of digitally enabled commerce. Consumers want to be proactive with their health and wellness. Why not give them what they want and build a portal that enables them to pay bills, buy health products, and consume content and education that will help them live the life they desire.

Learn More About HIPAA-Ready Adobe Commerce

Stay tuned! This blog is part of a four-part series discussing commerce, protected healthcare experiences, and Adobe’s HIPPA-ready commerce platform.

You can read the next installment here: How Adobe Commerce Can Impact Payor Strategies

Vantage Market Research¹

There’s been a massive change of tone in the healthcare space over the last few years. What is it you might ask? Well, simple. Proactive healthcare choice.

Let me explain.

Traditionally, healthcare was reactive – when something went wrong, we would go to the doctor or seek medical treatment. Today, however, the tables have turned – and healthcare has become proactive. Society has access to wearable technologies that track our sleep, heart rate, and other activities. We can seek therapy from the comfort of our couch with our devices and doctors can diagnose us remotely.

All this proactivity is a good thing. It’s allowing this market and category to grow exponentially. Still, it does bring up additional areas brands need to consider if they are or will consider building these healthcare experiences with consumers through digitally enabled websites.

What are these considerations? HIPAA and PHI compliance.

HIPAA Enabled Adobe Commerce

Adobe offers a HIPAA-ready solution with its latest release of Healthcare Add-on for Adobe Commerce that merchants can leverage. Adobe Commerce becomes the staple within the SaaS commerce space as a leader and clear choice when looking to not only have more secure healthcare experiences, but also to enhance personalized content, products, and services based on medical condition and treatment.

Perficient Earns Adobe Commerce Specialization

HIPAA-Ready and Personalized Healthcare Experiences

Here’s a hypothetical. Let’s say you’re a brand that sells vitamins online. Instead of offering various vitamin categories to customers, you build a guided selling experience that asks customers questions about their health, conditions, and daily activities. Based on these answers, the site curates vitamins that are likely a good fit for them.

Sounds great, right? Of course, it does.

But this only works if the experience itself is HIPAA-ready. Customers won’t feel comfortable giving you information if they feel it’s at risk of being stolen.

That’s where Adobe’s HIPPA-ready commerce platform comes into play. With Adobe’s Healthcare Add-on for Commerce, you can now leverage the power of Adobe Commerce to personalize this vitamin shopping experience, allowing your customers to know that their personal information is more protected by HIPAA-ready security controls and processes.

Reduced Risk and Improved Experiences

The HIPAA-Ready Healthcare Add-on for Adobe Commerce platform allows you to check all the boxes for both your brand and your customers. This foundational approach will help reduce your organization’s compliance risk by providing the features and tools you need to be HIPAA-ready.

Listen, being healthy is a choice. And so is deciding where and how you shop for the medical conditions that you or your loved one might be dealing with. Ultimately, both have the same goal – increased peace of mind. Wouldn’t you like to have peace of mind that your customers’ information is HIPAA-ready? If yes, then you know the clear choice within digital health and medical commerce – it’s Adobe.

Learn more about your Adobe Commerce and Healthcare Experts

I haven’t been able to sleep well as of late. Why? Because of the excitement around all the possibilities Unified Commerce offers brands, but more so the opportunity it provides you, me, and the consumers that experience what brands have to offer daily.

For context, Unified Commerce is the strategy, implementation, and actions that allow brands to have a dialogue with their customers, within the channel of preference. Unified Commerce takes omnichannel ideologies and supercharges them to where consumers are in the driver’s seat regarding what content, products, and experiences they want to have.

Simply put, Unified Commerce tracks all behaviors that customers have – from opening an email to buying a product at a retail store front to conversations they may have with store associates and sellers to make additional purchases through digital buying channels. All these behaviors are not purchases; they are interactions. They aren’t sales, they are connections.

Based upon these behaviors, future experiences are tailored to me, the consumer, and not anyone else. Sure, I may look like other customers, but a true unified commerce approach leverages technology to serve up personalized, curated experiences, content, and products that are likely to resonate with who I am.

So, with all that said – where should you start? What technology systems are needed for Unified Commerce? Well, I’m glad you asked.

Here are the four foundational technology categories that are needed to build the foundation for a unified commerce approach for your brand.

Commerce

The foundation of any digital or physical experience will always be the engine that drives transactions and orders. Think of digital commerce platforms as the hub of the wheel, where everything else helps to support the ultimate goal, transactions, and revenue. When looking to venture down the Unified path, it’s critical to make sure your current commerce platform can support a composable approach, leveraging APIs and other integration touchpoints to share customer information between the systems below.

CMS

Depending on your use case, it may be beneficial to leverage a Content Management System (CMS) as the front end of your digital commerce experience, or the glass if you will. This “traditional headless” approach will still leverage the commerce engine as the back-end motor to drive revenue, where the CMS is running the front-end experiences. With this approach, you can offer enhanced personalization to your customers based on their behaviors and preferences. But (and this is a big but) to do this effectively, you’ll need to leverage the next foundational element.

CRM / CDP

Flying a plane is only effective if you have the right data and inputs to set your heading and course. The same holds when trying to personalize customer experiences. Once you’ve built your Commerce and CMS connection, you need to give this experience the data needed to know what products, content, or elements to tee up for each unique customer that shops with you. That’s where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and a Customer Data Platform (CDP) come in. You’ve likely heard of CRMs – they’re quite popular with sales associates who are meeting with your customers. It allows the sales or customer service reps to enter key information about customer needs, wants, or interests. A CDP is focused on the aggregation of customer data from multiple channels and sources, which in turn can be leveraged to tee up personalized experiences. I’ve listed these two together because though they both are similar; they complete the circle of customer data. When integrated with a commerce and CMS experience, the personalized range of features that can be built is endless.

Email/SMS Marketing

Finally, to complete this unified approach, you must integrate your email and SMS systems to re-target customers based on the inputs they are providing your brand through the above-mentioned technologies. Email and SMS systems can be cued up with relevant content, products, and experiences that can be sent to your customers in the right channel, at the right time, and with the right message. If done correctly, these platforms help nurture customers through their buying cycles and will yield higher customer lifetime values and affinity.

Here’s the thing. On paper, Unified Commerce seems pretty straightforward, and to a degree, it is. However, getting these systems to synchronize and harmonize the buying experience for customers needs to be handled with a surgical-type focus.

It all should start with assessing your current state. What can be leveraged from a technological standpoint? Where might you need to invest to realize this unified approach? Once you have this technological inventory defined – you’ll be able to see the road you need to travel to reach the destination of unified commerce excellence.

As Confucius so elegantly put it, “Roads were made for journeys, not destinations.” – the road to unified commerce is and will always be a journey. It will never be complete, there is no destination. If you can embrace the idea that this journey will never be complete, then you have embraced the idea and mindset that evolution within commerce will always be – and your customers will not only thank you for that but continue to travel the road you’ve paved for them.

To see how unified commerce could benefit your business, reach out to a commerce team member!