The growing popularity of eCommerce is not a new trend and the onset of the pandemic at the start of the new decade of 2020 has only hastened the transition to going online across the entire industry. Out of all the eCommerce applications that have enabled businesses to accelerate their shift to a fully enabled eCommerce business, Adobe Commerce has been one of the standout platforms. Adobe Commerce, formerly known as Magento, is an industry-leading eCommerce platform that offers enterprise-grade functionalities to companies for creating and managing a robust, feature-rich online store. While the common eCommerce features and functionalities of the platform are used ubiquitously by organizations to manage their operations, most overlook the finer benefits of Adobe Commerce. Tapping into these features offered by the platform can enable companies to leverage previously untapped opportunities and unlock new horizons of success!
Table of Contents
What is Adobe Commerce?
Formally known as Magento prior to its acquisition by Adobe in 2018, Adobe Commerce is now the premium eCommerce platform offered by Adobe for merchants and brands. Built upon the robust foundation of Magento, Adobe Commerce is one of the industry leaders in offering feature-rich omnichannel shopping experiences with unparalleled security, premium performance, and future-proof scalability.
The eCommerce platform offers expanded features for businesses to rapidly design their webstores through an intuitive drag-and-drop page builder, effortlessly manage stock levels, offer a unified shopping experience across multiple channels, and broaden their reach to new geographic regions. Adobe Commerce also offers the capability for businesses to seamlessly offer unparalleled B2B shopping experiences right out of the box. Furthermore, with Adobe being an industry leader in offering enterprise marketing suites Adobe Commerce comes backed with top-of-the-line analytics and marketing tools to deliver greater insights for data-driven decision-making and increased sales.
If you are using multiple applications across your business and want to seamlessly integrate them with your Adobe Commerce webstore, then connect them under a single intelligent BPA platform with APPSeCONNECT’s robust Adobe Commerce connectors. Get started with smarter automation and greater business efficiency with APPSeCONNECT today!
Distinguishing Benefits of Adobe Commerce Over Magento
With Adobe Commerce and Magento’s shared origin, both eCommerce platforms offer certain common features and benefits to their end users. Enterprises already running a successful business through Magento may also find transitioning to Adobe Commerce to be unnecessary. Moreover, Magento is a free application as compared to Adobe Commerce, which is a premium, paid platform. However, with a premium solution, users also get premium features and functionalities that can offer exceptional competitive advantages.
One of the most understated benefits of Adobe Commerce over Magento is its dedicated customer support. While Magento has one of the strongest communities in the industry, comprising of veteran developers and platform experts, inexperienced users may find it difficult to reach out to the right experts to troubleshoot their issues. On the other hand, with Adobe Commerce’s technical support through Customer Success Managers and Onboarding Support, users can easily get accustomed to the platform and receive the exact technical help they need.
Furthermore, Magento is more suited for smaller retailers that are just starting out and have limited resources. Medium to larger-scale enterprises processing significantly higher traffic and sales are best suited to use Adobe Commerce to manage their online sales. Adobe Commerce not only offers a vast library of advanced features like Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities through Adobe Sensei, advanced marketing functionalities, and customer loyalty tools but is also a ready-to-use B2B capable eCommerce platform. The growth of digital commerce is transforming B2B businesses and Adobe Commerce can effortlessly enable this transition for offline B2B companies to fully functional online businesses.
The in-depth capabilities of scalability, B2B functionalities, and robust security benefits of Adobe Commerce over Magento means enterprises get more flexibility to grow and improve their ability to deliver effective customer experiences. Businesses currently operating with Magento and finding it lacking to meet their needs may find Adobe Commerce as the ideal upgrade.
Top Exclusive Benefits of Adobe Commerce
Adobe Commerce has already seen widespread adoption across the industry. Brands using the platform are already profitably managing their eCommerce business and efficiently accelerating their growth. However, some enterprises may find themselves not fully leveraging the complete range of tools offered by the platform to achieve the true potential of their business. Some of the exclusive and lesser-used benefits of Adobe Commerce that come packed with the platform are:
Out-of-the-Box B2B Benefits of Adobe Commerce
With most of the B2B industry already going digital, the survivability of traditional offline B2B enterprises in the current fast-paced industry depends on the effective transition to online B2B commerce. Moreover, with the global B2B eCommerce industry already being valued at over USD 7,900 billion in 2022, B2C eCommerce companies should also consider expanding into the B2B industry to increase their revenues.
The integrated B2B functionalities of Adobe Commerce are designed to accommodate B2B customers with complex organizational structures and multiple users with distinct roles and various levels of purchasing permissions. The eCommerce solution allows organizations to create company accounts to collate multiple buyers from the same company under a single account for more efficient customer relationship management. Additionally, the benefits of Adobe Commerce for B2B workflows include the creation of shared catalogs for setting custom prices per product for different companies, quote negotiations functionalities for approved customers, automated purchase order approval for authorized companies, and many more.
Future-proof Scalable Growth
Every business aims to grow and increase its revenue. However, lack of scalability often becomes a shackle for companies to achieve this growth. For companies expecting rapid growth, Adobe Commerce offers the room for businesses to explore its wide range of features and customizations to scale to every required size of implementation.
For both B2B and B2C eCommerce scenarios, Adobe Commerce can scale up to provide a seamless experience across end consumers and enterprise business customers. The cloud infrastructure of the platform along with its modular core and headless commerce capabilities allows the platform to scale in parallel with the growth of the company. With the future-proof scalable benefits of Adobe Commerce, businesses can effortlessly scale to integrate new brands, deploy multi-regional stores, and deliver customized multichannel experiences for the global market.
In-depth Content Staging Capabilities
Content staging is a separate content environment within an application to allow users to create or modify webpages before publishing them to the live website. With eCommerce businesses primarily relying on their webstore experience to convert sales, it is of utmost importance to ensure that every aspect of the webstore functions and appears properly before being presented to the customer.
Adobe Commerce offers in-depth content staging capabilities to its users to effortlessly create, preview, optimize, and schedule a diverse range of content for the webstore. With the offered Staging Dashboard, users can view and manage scheduled changes across a timeline. The timeline can also be used to view previous versions of the content and draft it for future reuse. Multiple versions of the same baseline content can also be scheduled to bring in a fresh experience in a future update. Moreover, businesses can also run scheduled changes to content for a specific period that reverts to the previous version once the timer expires, which is especially useful when running sessional sales.
Robust Customer Management Functionalities
While implementing dedicated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications has become the norm across the industry, there are several customer management functionalities that Adobe Commerce comes pre-packaged with. For the case of B2B sales, it is essential to ensure that Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) have ready access to accurate information regarding accounts and a centralized source of order details for all sales and fulfillment channels.
The built-in benefits of Adobe Commerce for customer management offer customer-facing teams within an organization to get quick access to up-to-date inventory and order information along with powerful tools to provide an impactful customer experience. The customer account management tools provided by Adobe Commerce include tracking customers and visitors that are currently online, dynamically displaying content and promotions to specific customers, customer grouping for specific discounts, and much more. The centralized customer information management and range of tools by Adobe Commerce make customer interactions more efficient and effective. Additionally, with Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (Real-Time CDP) companies can collate known and anonymous customer data from multiple enterprise sources to create profiles that can be used to provide personalized customer experiences.
Full Spectrum Inventory Management
Proper inventory management plays a critical role in the success and growth of any business. For eCommerce businesses, it is equally critical if not more, that the inventory management process is efficient, cost-effective, and accurate. Having proper systems in place can also help with inventory forecasting and preparation for unexpected supply chain issues, such as delayed inventory from manufacturers or unexpected product sell out.
Merchants with a single store to multiple warehouses, stores, and more can utilize Adobe Commerce’s inventory management features to maintain quantities for sales and handle shipments to complete orders across multiple channels. The platform’s inventory management capabilities include real-time global inventory views, centralized order information, providing accurate stock-for-sale values to customers, and offering shipping recommendations according to distance or priority. The eCommerce platform also enables businesses to work with a single warehouse or complex shipping network for greater operation scalability.
Progressive Web Application (PWA) Enabled Mobile Commerce
The global mobile commerce market is estimated to reach over USD 620 billion by 2024. With that growing figure, prioritizing mobile centricity for eCommerce businesses has become more prudent than ever. Having an eCommerce platform that also delivers mobile commerce functionalities through Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) can enable businesses to tap into the growing mobile commerce market without having to expend additional resources for developing a dedicated mobile application.
Adobe Commerce comes packed with PWA components to offer seamless, app-like experiences, and smooth sales conversion across multiple devices. With the PWA-enabled mobile commerce tools, enterprises can also tap into delivering omnichannel experiences to their customers to further extend their reach and profitability.
Artificial Intelligence-Powered Shopping Experience
Artificial Intelligence or AI has become a major buzzword across every field and industry. Leveraging AI to further accelerate workflows or to utilize it to process vast volumes of analytics for targeting marketing is not a new concept. However, most eCommerce platforms do not offer AI-powered functionalities to their users for achieving business success.
The AI-driven benefits of Adobe Commerce offer intelligent and targeted product recommendations and live search results to help deliver relevant and personalized shopping experiences that improve conversion and open up the opportunity for cross-selling and up-selling. With AI-powered search features for intelligent product recommendations, Adobe Commerce tracks and analyses every customer interaction with the webstore and uses it to enable data-driven growth for the business and improved revenue generation.
Unlocking Greater Benefits of Adobe Commerce Through Automation
While Adobe Commerce as an enterprise-grade eCommerce platform provides a wide range of features to allow brands to build and manage an online store effectively, automation through integration remains a critical element to the success of the business. With modern businesses relying extensively on a suite of business applications to manage their distinct processes, integration of these applications with each other is necessary to remove data silos, reduce time to market and improve productivity.
Enabling automation through low-code Business Process Automation (BPA) platforms like APPSeCONNECT allows the execution of previously ineffective manual processes between two or applications automatically. Removing manual processing from bulk workflows not only increases its efficiency but also reduces the risk of errors and redundancies. For Adobe Commerce, implementing an end-to-end bidirectional integration with the software ecosystem of a business can streamline various eCommerce tasks, such as order processing, inventory management, and shipping. Integration with other best-of-breed business applications like Salesforce, SAP ERP applications, Zoho CRM, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 NAV can streamline and unify efforts across the organization. With increased efficiency and unified focus, enterprises can effectively allocate their resources to providing exceptional customer experiences and growing their online store.
Closing Note – Tapping into the Full Benefits of Adobe Commerce
Adobe Commerce without a doubt is one of the most powerful eCommerce platforms available in the current market. While most organizations are tapping into the more surface-level eCommerce functionalities of the platform, the lesser-known benefits of Adobe Commerce often get overlooked. The significant benefits of Adobe Commerce for out-of-the-box B2B functionalities, PWA-enabled mobile commerce capabilities, and AI tools, all offer numerous benefits to businesses that are looking to establish a strong online presence and grow their online store. By leveraging these tools and features of the platform enterprises can achieve their desired business goals and succeed in the competitive industry of eCommerce.
If you are using multiple applications across your business and want to seamlessly integrate them with your Adobe Commerce webstore, then connect them under a single intelligent BPA platform with APPSeCONNECT’s robust Adobe Commerce connectors. Get started with smarter automation and greater business efficiency with APPSeCONNECT today!
