How to launch a modern commerce architecture without replatforming
Going headless with HCL Commerce
If you’re an IBM Websphere Commerce customer, HCL’s recent acquisition probably has you contemplating what this means for your long-term commerce strategy.
This change presents a big opportunity to launch a modern commerce architecture – a decoupled architecture in which the commerce and content systems are connected via APIs to a separate web storefront. This “headless commerce” approach gives you the freedom to innovate your customer experience quickly and frequently.
And the best part? HCL Commerce provides a rich set of storefront and admin APIs to call on all commerce functionality so you won’t have to make any changes to your commerce system.
What are the benefits of going headless?
Decoupling your web storefront will allow you to:
● Gain the agility to experiment often and deploy frequently
● Use the same commerce and content systems across all touchpoints – web, social, IoT, in-store, marketplace, etc.
● Quickly adopt emerging touchpoints
● Future-proof the front-end experience
● Use the latest advancements in cloud and DevOps practices to scale more efficiently and become a more agile digital organization
How does it work?
HCL Commerce provides a rich set of APIs to call on to perform commerce services, just as a headless CMS would provide APIs to call on content services. A decoupled web storefront like Mobify would layer on top and call on these APIs to render the front-end experience. Mobify would also host, scale, secure and monitor your website to mitigate operational risk of running and evolving a decoupled storefront.
Because it’s decoupled, you can do any future HCL Commerce upgrades without impacting the customer experience.
How will the customer experience differ?
● The new set up will enable the seamless integration of commerce and content functionality throughout the entire customer experience to empower your team to combine rich, immersive content for effective storytelling, and fast, optimized purchase flows for maximum conversions.
● Mobify’s web storefront leverages the latest modern web technology, Progressive Web Apps, to ensure the experience is fast and engaging.
● The decoupled nature provides the ability to frequently experiment and continuously improve the experience based on customer behavior/preferences.
With customer expectations at an all time high, now is the perfect time to transition to a modern commerce architecture. Download A Day in the Life with a Modern Commerce Architecture with HCL Commerce to get a breakdown of how this new approach would impact the day-to-day tasks and responsibilities of each end user on your team.
By Karly Cyr, Director of Marketing, Mobify
