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.

Revolutionizing B2C Commerce: The Impact of Generative AI

In the dynamic landscape of commerce and consumer-driven markets, Business-to-Consumer (B2C) organizations are increasingly turning to generative AI to revolutionize their operations and enhance customer experiences. Generative AI, a subset of artificial intelligence, empowers these organizations to create content, personalize interactions, and optimize various aspects of their business processes. By leveraging advanced algorithms and machine learning models, B2C companies can now tailor their offerings to individual preferences, predict consumer behavior, and streamline the overall customer journey.

This transformative technology not only enables unprecedented levels of personalization but also contributes to improved efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and competitiveness in an ever-evolving marketplace. In this era of digital innovation, the strategic integration of generative AI has emerged as a key driver for B2C organizations seeking to stay ahead of the curve and deliver unparalleled value to their customers.

In its recent report, How Generative AI Is Changing The Game In B2C Commerce Solutions, Forrester states, “To better understand genAI’s role in commerce tech solutions, we launched a research series where we ask leading vendors to outline how they’re bringing genAI into their products today.” Perficient’s Commerce and Generative AI experts were interviewed by Forrester to discuss our perspective of genAI in commerce solutions, and Perficient is listed as a company interviewed for this report.

Generative AI at Perficient

From chatbots to intelligent document automation, Perficient is helping organizations utilize AI and generative AI to streamline business processes and improve the customer experience. We have a Generative AI Innovation Group (IG) that is comprised of hundreds of Perficient strategists, designers, and developers from around the world with an interest and expertise in new technologies to discuss applications and opportunities for the market. This group drives innovation, connection, and community with Perficient’s clients, colleagues and partners, about the emergence of generative AI tools and capabilities, and the impact these technologies will have on businesses. The group also identifies and develops market offerings, internal use cases and applications, and routinely hosts events that educate, enable, and engage colleagues about the groundbreaking technology and its implications for transforming enterprise operations.

Generative AI is a rapidly evolving area of artificial intelligence that’s driving a new wave of digital transformation, and we’ve outlined below how Perficient is helping B2C organizations harness this power in a multitude of ways.  

How Generative AI Can Enhance Your Commerce Solutions

From image and video synthesis to natural language processing and beyond, generative AI solutions are becoming an essential part of business. At Perficient, we want to first explore the business challenges in order to validate potential outcomes and optimization solutions.

Unified commerce takes the customer experience a step further, and is essentially the ability to have an ongoing digital dialogue that curates enhanced customer lifetime value and brand affinity. By utilizing AI and Machine Learning (ML), organizations are able to better understand and communicate with their customers and offer them a more targeted and personalized experience. In the report, Forrester states, “Half of the vendor respondents noted that using genAI to deliver more effective promotions was on their radar. Specific use cases are autogenerated custom promotions across email, SMS, and messaging apps, as well as leveraging segmentation and analytics to deliver more personalized offers,” which we believe ties into unified commerce.

On top of personalizing experiences, AI can help generate marketing content (in multiple languages), provide appropriate tagging, aid in guided selling, and help even in the contact center space with chatbots.

From AI-generated content to guided selling and customer service, generative AI is an important technology for B2C commerce organizations to utilize.

Experts in Commerce and AI

Forrester interviewed leaders from Perficient’s Commerce and Artificial Intelligence Practices while conducting research for this report. Perficient is excited to continue sharing thought leadership and perspective on emerging trends in this space as we work toward our goals of helping our clients meet their customers and employees where they are in the B2C space. To learn more, download How Generative AI Is Changing The Game In B2C Commerce Solutions, available to purchase or to Forrester subscribers, today.

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.

Introduction:

B2C Commerce Template is a pre-built framework available in Experience Cloud that allows businesses to create and manage their online store for business-to-consumer (B2C) commerce. It provides a platform for building feature-rich, customizable, and mobile-responsive websites for selling products to consumers directly.

What is B2C Commerce?

B2C means business-to-consumer ecommerce, also known as retail ecommerce, is a business strategy that incorporates sales between online businesses and customers. It falls under the umbrella of Commerce Cloud Salesforce.

Salesforce B2C Commerce is extensively used by organizations of all sizes to increase online sales, engage customers, and provide excellent B2C commerce experiences. These experiences normally take place on the web or mobile devices. It offers a scalable and adaptable solution to the changing needs of organizations .

Key features and capabilities of B2C Commerce in Salesforce include: 

1. Personalized experiences: Assists businesses in providing personalized shopping experiences for clients based on their browsing and purchasing habits.
2. Marketing and promotions: Allows organizations to build and manage targeted marketing programs and promotions.
3. Omni-channel support: Allows for a unified shopping experience across numerous sales channels, including web, mobile, and in-store.
4. Payment and checkout: Supports many payment gateways and provides a configurable checkout procedure.
5. Integration with Salesforce: Integrates with other Salesforce products like Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud to offer an integrated overview of interactions of customers.

Also, Analytics and reporting, Order management, Storefront Creation and Customization are the key features of B2C Commerce.

B2C Commerce (LWR) template in Salesforce

• A new Salesforce B2C Commerce template is a template that you need to create, implement, and manage a responsive eCommerce store. It can handle real-time orders and order history as well as product catalogues, shipping, pricing, payments as well as taxes, all in one place.
• The template offers various out-of-the-box components, such as product listings, search functionality, customer reviews, and personalized recommendations, which can be easily customized to match a company’s branding and unique requirements.
• LWR is an abbreviation for Lightning Web Runtime, which is the underlying technology that powers the upcoming version of Experience Cloud sites. LWR sites are quicker and more developer-friendly than Aura sites since they emphazise on performance and customization.

How To Set Up Salesforce for B2C Commerce (LWR) Template on Lightning Experience?

1. Sign Up for Developer Edition

Go with this link=>  https://developer.salesforce.com/signup

2. Enable Commerce Feature in Org

a) Click on setup.
b) In the Quick Find Box, enter “Commerce”.
c)  It will be like, Feature Settings => Commerce => Settings. Click Settings.
d) Enable Commerce.

e)  Click Save.

• In a Salesforce org, enabling Commerce refers to the activation of Salesforce’s native e-commerce capabilities, specifically Salesforce B2B Commerce or Salesforce B2C Commerce (formerly known as Commerce Cloud).
• Enabling Commerce in a Salesforce org allows businesses to leverage the platform’s robust e-commerce functionalities to sell products and services online.

3. Enable Digital Experience

a) Go to the Setup.
b) In the Quick Find Box, enter Digital.
c) It will be like, Feature Settings => Digital Experiences => Settings. Click Settings.
d) Mark the “Enable Digital Experiences” box as check as shown below.

e) Inside Settings, Enable the box “Allow using standard external profiles for self-registration, user, creation and login “.

4. Choose an Experience Cloud Template

a) Inside the Digital Experience, Click All Sites.
b) Click New.
c) Select “B2C Commerce (LWR)” Template as shown in figure.

d) Click Get Started.
e) Enter the Name of your template/store you want to Add. URL is optional.

f) Click Create.
g) Hurray!! Your site (Store) has been created successfully. Now, click Experience Builder.

• This is the brand new B2C Commerce Experience Site you just created.

The template is designed to integrate with other Experience Cloud solutions, such as Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud, enabling businesses to deliver personalized marketing campaigns and provide exceptional customer service.

# Experience Pages:

In Experience Cloud at top left side, Salesforce provides ‘Experience Pages’. Experience Pages in Experience Cloud Salesforce are a fundamental component for building and delivering personalized (highly customizable), content-rich digital experiences to users. You can create Experience Pages from here as shown below.

Do as much as customizations in your store according to requirement. Enjoy your Experience Cloud Store.

Conclusion:

With B2C Commerce Template, businesses can create smooth and intuitive shopping experiences across multiple platforms, including desktop, mobile devices, and tablets. Overall, B2C Commerce Template in Experience Cloud simplifies the process of building and managing an online store, empowering businesses to deliver exceptional digital experiences and drive revenue growth in the B2C commerce space.

Happy Learning!!

Stay Tuned.

To meet customer demands, top brands must have a consumer-centric supply chain strategy in place. Having an effective supply chain is vital because consumers want their orders shipped as soon as possible at the cheapest cost. With the right technology and partner in place, establishing an effective supply chain is easy and will guarantee B2C success.

Get a fresh outlook on the retail supply chain during the Benefits of Automated and Integrated Supply Chain through Order Management in B2C webinar on October 21 at 12 PM ET. Sonoma Taylor, VP of Solution Delivery at Sally Beauty, and Steve Gatto, Director of Commerce Solutions at Perficient, will discuss how having a unified, automated, and integrated operation provides a pleasant customer experience throughout the buying journey.

Sally Beauty is Creating a Seamless Customer Experience

Top brands like Sally Beauty use innovative supply chain integration and automation strategies to meet growing consumer demands. This is in large part to their dedication to providing a seamless customer experience from order capture to post-purchase experience. Supply chain integration increases connectivity through the entire supply chain enabling brands to produce and deliver products at a much faster rate.

Supply chain automation eliminates manual tasks allowing brands to concentrate on new initiatives like BOPIS, BOSS, SFS, and more. Together, supply chain integration and automation enhance the user experience, increase consumer loyalty, and drive profit.

Key Takeaways

During this webinar, we will explore why supply chains are the most effective customer service tool and how creating a unified operation provides a pleasant customer experience.

Experts will discuss the following topics:

• A unified operating model to effectively manage B2C operations
• How to create a seamless customer post-purchase experience and improved self-service for business expansion and competitiveness
• What is needed to establish streamlined business processes that address increased supply chain complexity and data management
• Key features for an ecosystem that is capable of quick-to-market introduction for new initiatives like BOPIS, BOSS, SFS, and more

Register today and join the conversation about the Benefits of Automated and Integrated Supply Chain through Order Management in B2C

Perficient’s Order Management (OM) team helped Sally Beauty, a leading beauty supplier and retailer, accelerate its same-day delivery (SDD) to just three hours for all 1,990 stores across the United States. Our team of IBM Sterling Order Management experts helped create a solution that ties the communication points and functionality of the solution to work seamlessly in Sally Beauty’s current technology stack.

Why We Did it and How it Works

After seeing successful customer adoption with the rollout of this feature earlier this year for its B2B brand, Cosmo Prof, this recent addition came as a natural extension for its B2C brand, Sally Beauty. This feature provides convenience to Sally’s customers by increasing the speed of fulfillment to less than three hours for delivery without having to step out from their homes, especially if it’s for an occasion where the consumer needs the product immediately.

Faster SDD has become an important and popular feature for many retailers amidst the pandemic, which was also a strong driver for why Sally Beauty decided to implement and stay ahead of the competition. This three-hour delivery program ships merchandise directly from the physical store, improve speed-to-fulfillment for customer orders, and exceeds customer expectations by delivering products within little to no time. This feature finished rolling out to all stores in August 2021.

Other Benefits to the Feature

Additionally, on-demand carrier services such as Uber or Postmates delivers the product, allowing a retailer to use something readily available to them to avoid investing in and creating its own fleet of delivery services.

To learn more about our order management solutions for your business’ technology stack, contact our commerce experts today.

Adobe Summit 2021 is fast approaching and promises to offer numerous sessions on products across the Adobe Experience Cloud suite. Perficient is excited to present this year with MonkeySports on its Magento 1 (M1) to Magento 2 (M2) migration process during the session Upgrading to Higher eCommerce Sales and Efficiency.

Magento Commerce is a scalable platform built to deliver personalized commerce experiences across every channel, from content management to visual merchandising to cart and checkout navigation, and so much more. It allows you to create a unified B2C or B2B commerce experience with omnichannel management. At the same time, delivering complex Magento projects successfully requires the right experience and skillsets. That is where a digital consultancy comes into play.

Perficient has implemented award-winning Magento experiences for a variety of industries. We have recently helped a sporting goods retail company, MonkeySports, migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2 on both their Canada and U.S. sites. Our teams worked together diligently from day 1 to create a successful migration roadmap that could elevate customer experiences. Due to the extensive work upfront, once the sites launched on Magento 2, MonkeySports saw an immediate increase in revenue.

Our Magento practice director Kaushal Shah has teamed up with MonkeySports eCommerce Director Ki Song for an in-depth review of the Magento implementation. Shah and Song will be presenting at Adobe Summit 2021 on Upgrading to Higher eCommerce Sales and Efficiency on April 28 at 2 PM PST. Register for Adobe Summit and add their session to your agenda.

Partnering with a commerce solution provider that can transform B2B and B2C digital omnichannel experiences is paramount in today’s digital world. Businesses need a full suite of expertise and assets to compete and provide seamless commerce experiences that delight consumers. Forrester canvased 35 commerce service providers to help shape the shortlists of digital decision-makers and channel strategy professionals.

Forrester Now Tech: Commerce Services, Q4 2020 Report

Providing a quality commerce experience is table stakes in these unprecedented times, and brands across all industries are racing to sell through digital channels. However, every industry is unique and requires a variety of different services, technologies, and assets for successful omnichannel delivery.

To determine where capabilities lie, Forrester segmented solution providers based on commerce service revenue into three categories: large, midsize, and small. The research firm then asked each provider 15 detailed questions about their services, how they allocate staff, and their key stakeholders. Based on the responses, Forrester supplies information about providers that best serve your business’s needs and help determine if selecting a multi-provider option based on the complexity of the transformation is appropriate.

Perficient Excels as a Commerce Provider

Forrester listed Perficient as a provider with a focus on experience and operations, able to build commerce experiences for enterprises and provide services that help build out these experiences around order management, inventory management, and payment gateways. With our extensive commerce experience and expertise, we understand how to strategize and create an impactful commerce experience for both businesses and consumers.

Learn More About Perficient

The digital world is evolving every day, and you have an important choice to make when it comes to your commerce solutions provider. To find out more, download the Forrester Now Tech: Commerce Services, Q4 2020 report, and contact our commerce experts today.

It’s more important than ever for brands to invest in digital channels if they want to grow and expand at the speed of business. To successfully develop a commerce site that will drive traffic while increasing sales, you need the right team and the right commerce strategy and roadmap. Join Perficient and Benchmade, a forward-thinking knife manufacturer, on Wednesday, July 15 at 2 PM ET for our webinar, Cutting Customer Experience Barriers Across B2B and B2C Channels.

This webinar is part of our expanding initiative with Adobe: Women in Digital. What started as a small breakfast at Adobe Summit 2017, has now evolved to a broader focus on highlighting women in the digital sector that are doing extraordinary work. The first installment in this series was in April, The State of Digital Health in 2020: Payer and Provider Perspectives, where we talked with two female leaders from Blue Cross Blue Shield North Dakota and Cedars-Sinai.

In this webinar, we will discuss how our award-winning client, Benchmade, is transforming their customer’s experience. We will review how Magento Commerce can be leveraged to scale at the speed of business. Our team will review best practices for supporting your channel and how to drive conversions with personalization.

This Women in Digital commerce discussion will address how scaling your commerce platform to support your channels and drive conversions is a daunting and necessary step. Even though commerce is a large investment, the ROI is vital to your business’ success. Register for this webinar to see how you can utilize the right platform and partner to set your business up for success, now and in the future.

This three-part series focuses on what digital commerce teams can do to shore up operations and remain effective right now, over the next few months, and in the mid-term future. Obviously, times are tough and every organization has unique challenges, so not everything below might apply, but sometimes the most stressful situations result in the most effective innovations. As your customers have more time at home and online, digital is where they are.

Part 3 – What To Do for the FUTURE

It’s been a wild week, to say the least. Daily, sometimes hourly, changes continue to impact the way we do business, or in some cases, fight to keep the business we have. Hopefully the immediate actions you’ve taken in your commerce business have allowed you to leverage existing digital capabilities and augment emerging ones to keep things going. Your team has been sprinting, now it’s time to think about the marathon ahead.

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I discussed how digital commerce teams could mitigate the potential impacts to the business during this crisis. Now that you’ve determined your initial response approach, it’s time to think about the future. As I mentioned in my previous post, now is not the time to ‘wait and see.’ Strategy is more important than ever right now. In your commerce business, there is real opportunity to safeguard the future business as well as formulate new strategies to respond to emerging customer behaviors and expectations. Where to start?

Don’t Throw Out Your Current Roadmap

There might be temptation to take one look at your existing roadmap and blow it up. Don’t do that. Yet.

• Evaluate each initiative in the roadmap against what you know today. If they are still valid, obviously keep them – BUT think about budget earmarked. Is there potential for greater upside if you can invest more? For example, if you were planning on increasing endless aisle capabilities, is there potential to add features now?
• If it doesn’t exist already, create a swim lane dedicated to team enablement. This should cover all aspects of ‘people,’ ‘process,’ and ‘technology’ in service of your team being able to amp up their ability to deliver on customer experience post-crisis. This might include investment in better team workflow tools or refinement and expansion of DevOps. Use what you’ve learned in the recent scramble to help categorize and prioritize what team needs bubbled to the top.
• Take that list from your ‘Art of the Possible‘ and plot out how you can replace these new initiatives with items in your roadmap that just don’t make sense or matter any more, OR…
• Blow it up. It might be the case that in the last few weeks you’ve discovered opportunities for significant new business models which will require totally new operating models. Now is the time to embrace that change. Create a ‘shadow roadmap’ you can begin to socialize with your peers and your leadership that reflects this new way of thinking.

aaS is Real

Many commerce businesses have been hesitant to rock the internal boat by fully migrating their commerce infrastructure and operations to cloud solutions. Prioritize and lobby for a greater share of budget that WILL come to bite the bullet and migrate whatever you can to free up your team to focus on what really matters in this new world. This might mean some re-skilling and team composition shifts, but now is the time to set the business up for future success while taking some solid business continuity measures. Think about software, platforms, and infrastructure to identify where the greatest opportunities are for migrations and build these into your revised roadmap. Not sure where to start? Here’s a great primer. 

Don’t Forget About the Basics

What won’t change? You run a digital commerce business that depends on delivering superior customer experience from acquisition to advocacy. The principles you used last quarter will still hold true next quarter, regardless of changes in how you might be executing against them. Organizations that remained focused on providing good customer experience now will come out ahead when we emerge from this crisis. I truly believe an outcome of this crisis will be clarity in what your customers want and how to best deliver it to them. All else (growth, success, happiness) will follow.

Perficient is here to help. Reach out to us if you would like more information or guidance on reviewing your digital commerce strategies during this crisis. We’ve also created a collection of guiding content that businesses can refer to during this crisis.

This three-part series focuses on what digital commerce teams can do to shore up operations and remain effective right now, over the next few months, and in the mid-term future. Obviously, times are tough and every organization has unique challenges, so not everything below might apply, but sometimes the most stressful situations result in the most effective innovations. As your customers have more time at home and online, digital is where they are.

Part 2 – What To Do NEXT

There is no ‘normal’ right now. Things are still in flux. In Part 1 of this blog series, I talked about initial actions digital commerce teams should take to shore up operations. It’s not a bad idea to have daily grooming sessions on what you triaged to make sure priorities are clear each day as the situation changes. After that, the question to answer is, what’s next?

What you do next largely depends on the type of products and services you provide. If you sell what is deemed ‘essential’ products or services, you are likely understaffed and under-serving your customers relative to demand right now. If you are providing ‘non-essential’ goods and services, you may be in a situation where production and shipping is halted for the time-being. In either case, use the analysis initially performed to inform how to proceed over the next month or two, and as with any recommendations given right now, your mileage may vary.

That said, we are already seeing significant shifts in customer digital behavior due to the circumstances and, as a business, the next thing to do is start to try and understand these behaviors so you can start planning for the longer term. While these behaviors may be somewhat forced right now, as Clay Shirky discusses in his book Cognitive Surplus, new technology drives new behavior and we will emerge from this crisis with a new set of customer behaviors that will stick.

Talk with Your Customers

It’s always business-critical to get feedback from your customers, but it’s more critical now than it has ever been. A great example of this occurred last week as quarantined people started making cotton masks to donate to healthcare centers. As they were delivered and used, healthcare workers used social media and online communities to give ‘product’ feedback in real time and makers rapidly adjusted.

While you might not be able to respond immediately to your customers’ asks right now, input gathered can be leading indicators of behaviors that will stick post-crisis (and that time will come). In order to gather direct voice of the customer input right now, you should leverage tools and platforms you already have in place including:

• Social media – start a discussion with your customers on your social media platforms. With more time on their hands, your customers may be willing to have more in-depth conversations with you.
• Customer service and call centers – are you able redeploy your customer service teams, armed with scripts, to speak live with your customers?
• Surveys – customers with extra time may give more thoughtful feedback via surveys, whether delivered via email or offered via other digital properties. If you are a Survey Monkey customer, they’ve launched a series of tutorials and templates to help you get started.

Brainstorm What Could Be Possible

Get a video conference going with your team and start brainstorming which products and services could be delivered virtually right now and, with some support and investment, in the future. Build ‘what if’ scenarios and conduct some design-thinking based exercises to dig in. Depending on the industry, consider how to digitally enhance or virtually deliver:

• Sales consulting
• Garment styling or fitting sessions
• ‘Hands-on’ product customization or configuration
• Live product training and tutorials
• ‘Face-to-face’ product support
• Real-time product feedback
• ‘Shop Together’ features (has there finally come a time to make this a reality??)

Don’t Forget About Digital Marketing

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention digital marketing considerations right now.

• Paid – If you haven’t already, take a hard look at your ad spend right now and adjust according to the day. Forget about last year’s performance as a guide. Just look at the last few days and assume you will be adjusting budgets daily for the time being. Also, now might be the opportune time to shift your paid strategy to customer lifetime value (CLV or LTV) versus ROI.
• Organic – SEO and content marketing have always been powerful tools to drive traffic to your digital properties and now is no exception. Be sure to review your internal search and Google search trends to ensure you are taking into account what key words and phrases your customers are using right now. Google has a special data view focused exclusively on Coronavirus Covid-19 search trends.

Friday we’ll move on to Part 3 – What To Do for the FUTURE. In the meantime, Perficient is here to help. Reach out to us if you would like more information or guidance on reviewing your digital commerce strategies during this crisis. We’ve also created a collection of guiding content that businesses can refer to during this crisis.

Times are tough for a lot of retailers right now and we are all being forced, whether we like it or not, to live in the moment as the situation related to the coronavirus shifts hour by hour. Ideally, business strategies put in place are holding out even if details need to be adjusted day by day. However, if your retail business is already suffering and your digital commerce channel is being asked to pick up the slack, now is not the time to take a ‘wait and see’ approach. Now is the time to take a hard look at your digital commerce strategy for the next 18 to 24 months and be ruthless in revamping according to the current situation, leaving plenty of room for agility where there currently might not be.

This three-part series will focus on what digital commerce teams can do to shore up operations and remain effective right now, over the next few months, and in the mid-term future. Obviously, times are tough and every organization has unique challenges, so not everything below might apply, but sometimes the most stressful situations result in the most effective innovations. As your customers have more time at home and online, digital is where they are.

Part 1 – What To Do NOW

Redefine what really matters right now to your customers and to the business. And when I say “Now,” I mean over the next two weeks.

• Reprioritize any technical and experience debt to ensure customers are able to transact on your digital properties without hesitation or failure.
• While you’re at it, when is the last time you did a load test? While you might not be expecting a traffic or transaction spike right now, you don’t know what the future holds. Testing to ensure uptime across a variety of scenarios is prudent right now.
• Reprioritize new features and functions that focus on the basics – driving digital traffic and driving conversion.
• Look at this weekend’s digital traffic as leading indicators of consumer behavior that will help you prioritize the first two bullets.
• What products are your customers looking for? Can you merchandise them more effectively?
• What content are they reading? Can you re-use across communication channels like email and social media?
• What paths are they taking through your digital properties and where are they spending more time? Less time? Can you use this information to uncover opportunities for personalization?
• What can internal search trends tell you about what your customers are looking for, but perhaps not finding? This is good information for your product team.

If You Can Still Fulfill

Review your business processes and team structure. Are there new processes needed to fulfill more efficiently? Is there an opportunity to shift and re-skill team members to align with new priorities? Obviously, do team members have what they need to work remotely? (While your team might be digital, the rest of your company may not be. This has caught many retailers by surprise in the past few weeks.)

Have a look at another recent blog post from Perficient.

If You Cannot Currently Fulfill

Now is not the time to go dark on your customers, especially if they have orders pending. Create a task force focused on communicating with customers consistently across channels. Transparency is key here. While most customers will understand you are operating based on many unknowns, they still want to be known to you. Clear communication now will mean loyalty when you come back up.

Next

Wednesday we’ll move on to Part 2 – What To Do NEXT. In the meantime, Perficient is here to help. Reach out to us if you would like more information or guidance on reviewing your digital commerce strategies in the current environment.

Read Part 2 of the series now.