Five things you can utilise in Adobe eCommerce
Adobe Commerce is an amazing platform for your eCommerce website. But there’s a whole lot of functionality to the platform that people often overlook. In this blog, Tom Jenkins, our Senior Solution Specialist, takes a deep dive into Adobe Commerce and looks at some of the features you should be taking more advantage of.
Content staging
As a marketer, your marketing activities are usually planned a few months in advance. Previously, this was difficult to organise in Magento – with very few areas of Magento having any form of scheduling functionality whatsoever.
This meant that, barring any promotions, other changes needed to be run ‘live’ at the time of the campaign. This sometimes meant that content managers/marketing managers were logging into Magento and making changes at unsocial hours.
Adobe Commerce comes with a feature called content staging.
Content staging allows for the following areas of Magento to be scheduled ahead of time.
- CMS pages
- Product pages
- Categories
- Cart price rules
- Catalogue price rules
Originally for cart and catalogue price rules, you only had the option to schedule on a ‘from’ and ‘to’ date, which ran from midnight to midnight. With content staging this can be set up to schedule any update to a specific day and time.
The main benefit of this is that you can group any changes into one update. So once a campaign has been created you can make sure they go live at the same time.
There are no restrictions on the number of changes you can make under one update, which is useful when you want to update the different areas of the site at the same time.
For the product page/category pages you can schedule updates such as:
- Enable/disable products
- Update attribute data such as descriptions
- Update and schedule price changes.
Another advantage of the content staging: you are able to see all the scheduled updates in one place either via a timeline, grid or list view.
Of course, with any of the scheduled marketing challenges, it is important that we can see that the scheduled changes are going to work correctly on the scheduled date.
With this in mind we can preview any of the marketing activities.
Content staging is a great tool to allow marketers to safely bundle changes to the website ahead of time for coordinated marketing activities.
Category restrictions
There is nothing better for a customer than feeling valued or like they’re getting something before anyone else.
This is exactly what category restrictions allow us to do. Once the functionality is enabled we can set individual permissions on a category.
On a per category level you can set the permissions to decide what customer groups can do the following:
- View a category
- View prices
- Add products to the cart
As you can see this provides the flexibility for marketers to create things like:
- Early sales
- Access to early launches
- Preview new product lines.
These are normal categories so they can be populated as standard with SEO data and products to serve the need.
These can be linked to your customer segments within your email service provider to send out emails with that exclusive link.
Adobe Business Intelligence
There are a number of reports available in Adobe Commerce by default, which allows for an admin user to get reports based on a wide variety of different areas:
- Search terms
- Products in carts
- Orders
- Coupons used
- Product views
Even though these reports can be exported they can’t be customised easily without custom development.
As part of an Adobe Commerce licence you gain access to Adobe Business Intelligence, which has a number of unique features, providing a more advanced experience for analytical teams.
These include the following:
- Over 100 reports available out of the box
- Can connect multiple data sources into one location
- Visual representation of data
- Export of data as required.
There is a heavy reliance on Google analytics for data driven decisions, however this should always be used alongside other data sources. Adobe Business Intelligence allows for data to be used in one location, so it provides the best ability to make data led decisions going forward.
Adobe Sensei
Adobe Sensei is an intelligence layer available to Adobe Commerce licence holders that can be used to power two core areas: search and recommendations.
Live Search
Adobe Live search is the first step in providing AI based search results on the website. Traditionally you had to rely on SOLR or MYSQL based search queries which usually meant that the search data was static to a customer.
Adobe Commerce Live Search changes that. By combining the AI and machine learning of Adobe Sensei with catalogue data, merchants can deliver lightning fast search results and personalised results on every shopper query.
Live search includes functionality that includes support for search as you type, giving results on each keystroke and filters directly within the search results drop-down to allow shoppers to narrow the search queries even further.
Product recomendations
Many customers are browsing the site and, even though they know they want something, they are not sure of what exactly. This is where product recommendations come in. Traditionally setting up product recommendations was a very manual process. Adobe Commerce comes with rule based logic to show recommendations based on certain conditions with logic such as showing other products from the same category. Even though this is better than the 1:1 relationship in Magento open source, it still takes a fair amount of time to cover all the different scenarios needed for product recommendations.
With Product Recommendations, AI automatically suggests relevant products based on your shopper’s behaviour as well as specific product features.
This greatly reduces the time to offer customers recommendations and the data changes based on user and sales data.
Automated rules on categories
Getting categories populated with products can be a real time sink. If you are launching a new category for halloween for example, or creating brand specific categories. Normally you have two choices for populating these categories. You either have to import via a CSV or manually assign products via the admin.
Both of these methods take time to run if you are launching new categories or re-organising existing categories.
What automated rules allows an admin user to do is to populate based on specific rules per categories.
You can add any attribute in Magento to be used as logic for the automated rules
Once this has been configured you can then select what rules to use for Adobe Commerce to auto populate the category
As you can see from the screenshot above you can use rule based logic. This allows for a combination of different conditions to be used to populate a category.
Some options could include:
- Brand and price under X price
- Special Price is over X
- Product type is X and only show configurable products
This functionality allows for an admin user to react to trends within their industry by spinning up new categories with full SEO controls and to populate categories quickly based on these rules.
These are just some of the features of Adobe Commerce that you might be missing. If you want to delve deeper into what Adobe Commerce can do for your eCommerce business, reach out to us today on thrive@wearejh.com