Over the last half decade, retail landscape is facing the perfect storm with declining sales growth due to fierce competition, pricing pressures from e-commerce giants such as Amazon, Alibaba, FlipKart and increasing negative consumer sentiments. Many of the retail stores are closing down or on the verge of closing down globally, as brands are unable to cope with the losses due to higher rental expenses and lower profit margins.

Digital disruption is inevitable and sooner the brands understand this, will make survival smoother. Digital transformation should be the top most priority and strategy to avoid crash landing.

Just having your web shop will not help, brands should have enough ammunition to understand their customer needs and tailor the commerce experience for each customer.

Commerce today isn’t about the cart. It’s about the customer!

Welcome to Sitecore Experience Commerce

Engagement is the key to conversion and customer retention, and relevance is the
key to engagement.
People engage with content that’s totally relevant to them at the exact point it’s
delivered. They don’t engage with content that appears random or disconnected from their current problems, desires, or readiness to buy.

This is why personalized experiences—combining content and context—are
so important. When prospects are engaged,they’ll convert into customers. And when
customers stay engaged (when they feel they’re “known” and treated as an individual,
with unique needs), they’ll bring far more lifetime value to your business, through
ongoing sales and brand advocacy.

With Sitecore Experience Commerce, you can use everything you know about your customers to deliver contextual shopping experiences that transform prospects into lifelong fans. Sitecore Experience Commerce maintains an upto-date profile and cross-channel history for each customer interacting with your brand. The resulting customer experience reflects interactions across every channel—online, mobile, stores, mail, kiosks,and more.

Sitecore Experience Commerce is a secure, enterprise-grade commerce solution that delivers a personalized experience throughout the customer life cycle.

Why you should consider Sitecore Experience Commerce

Sitecore Experience Commerce is a modern commerce platform and offers below key capabilities.

1. Shops
Create multiple online shopping experiences. Define Currencies, Payment Methods and Catalogs. Setup one or more web shops per environment.
2. Catalog Management
Store all saleable items and attributes in hierarchy.
Assign custom attributes
Integrate with other Catalog system and extend the catalog
3. Inventory Management
Store Product inventory information
Develop a plugin to integrate with other System
4. Shopping Cart
Add, remove or update products or services customer purchased form the shopping cart
5. Checkout
Capture the relevant information to complete the order
6. Payments
Allows custom or third party plugins to deliver the payment integration. SDK is provided to integrate third party payment gateway.
7. Fulfillment
Assist delivery of digital products or shipments of Physical products to customer address. Allow different delivery methods or addresses
8. Orders
Generates an order as a result of completed cart. Can Hold, cancel or update an order. Move orders through states using minions
9. Pricing
Enables flexible, extensible and dynamic pricing. Base pricing on dates or tiers.
10. Entitlements
Track digital product or service ownership or access. Implement software downloads, warranties or usage tracking
11. Promotions
Use scenarios to define, evaluate and apply promotions
Can create new qualification and benefits by creating new plugins

From Technical Perspective,

Sitecore Experience Commerce is the only natively integrated, cloud-enabled software platform built-on ASP.NET core—the very latest Microsoft framework.

With its support of microservices architecture, Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 is entirely plug-in based, providing both flexibility and extensibility. This means you have greater control over your own platform. Right out of the box, Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 can be as heavy or as light as you need it to be. And if you ever need to add or edit new features, you can.

You can also host different plug-ins on different servers, depending on the power you need behind them. For example, if you’re using the inventory engine heavily, but use few other plug-ins, you don’t need to scale-up all the servers hosting your plug-ins—just the one hosting the inventory engine.

Last but not the least,

Sitecore Experience Commerce is deeply integrated with enterprise grade Sitecore Experience platform. This combination

Enables brands to fully personalize the end-to-end shopping experience.

Blends content, commerce,and contextual intelligence in a modern commerce platform

In Summary,

Engage every customer before, during, and after the purchase—in real time, across every channel.

Before the Purchase

Your experience platform tracks your campaigns, your customers’ search habits, their shopping habits, and their profile histories, as well as their real-time interactions with your site. This data gives you an objective view of which campaigns, personalization rules, and pathways are successfully affecting buying behavior.

At the point of purchase

You validate your customer experience rules with a clear view of actual monetary value—the products you sell. You’re able to see how changes to your marketing activity affect your sales, giving you a direct causal link between marketing and revenue.
More broadly, you can correlate all your customer interactions on your site with the products they eventually bought crucial contextual insight into the buying habits of your customer segments.

After the purchase

This is where contextual commerce can really kick your customer experience up a gear, because your customer now owns your product, is using it, learning about it, and experiencing your brand first-hand. Now’s the time to automatically build that relationship with your brand with personalized content—like manuals, guides, and videos for how to get the best out of the product.
In fact, because you know your customers in such depth, you will soon be able to recommend new products to them that are directly related to their past activity, including purchases and inferred preferences. Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 is far more than an engine that floods your customers with information they may not want. Instead, it shows customers you understand who they are and what they need.