eCommerce

The global eCommerce market reached a US $13 trillion value in 2021 and is forecasted to reach a whopping US $55.6 trillion by 2027.

With such growth of eCommerce year over year, it's essential for online retailers (and other businesses) to have the right technology to support their business and strategy. But with so many eCommerce platforms available, how can you tell which fits your business best?

How do you pick the one that suits your needs, keeps up with the development and market trends, and ensures your business's online success?

In part two of the five-part article series, we discuss choosing an eCommerce platform that's the right one for your use case.

Gartner magic quadrant view, business expectations, industry leaders' opinions, most popular solutions… best of articles come in all shapes and sizes. This one of ours about eCommerce platforms is a bit different… we hope.

Great product pages are vital to a successful online store, so how do you optimize your product pages for SEO and high conversions?

Driving customer acquisition, optimizing the eCommerce experience, fostering loyalty, and scaling operations are the reason why brands opt out for Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) approach in business and marketing. But is it for everyone, and how do you start with it?

60% of consumers say they will likely become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience with a retailer. (source link).

The value of getting personalization right or wrong is also rising. Right now, companies that get personalization right have the potential to generate 40% more revenue (source link).

There are a ton of stats like the two above, and they all suggest the same thing personalization matters! With the increasing competition, the sheer number of available shopping channels, and omnichannel buying experiences on the rise, online retailers and other eCommerce businesses need to differentiate themselves from their competitors to attract and retain customers.

Personalization shines here. It helps create a unique experience for each customer, leading to increased customer engagement and loyalty. It is one of the best-proven Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) tactics in 2023.

With that in mind, we wanted to put a couple of strategies and tools in your perspective that can substantially increase customer engagement and loyalty through personalization.

Google announced Universal Analytics (UA) would no longer process new data in standard properties beginning July 1, 2023, and that you should be moving to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). It’s not like the world is ending, right? But what does that mean for your business?

Are you struggling to convert your website traffic into paying customers? Are you tired of spending hours and resources on driving traffic to your site with little to no return on investment? Then it's time to focus on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

eCommerce is wildly different than it was ten years ago. With the rise of omnichannel and globalization, managing your store has become increasingly complex.

Not your average list but a comprehensive 19-point eCommerce SEO checklist with everything you need to know to optimize your store and successfully grow organic traffic and revenue.

When it comes to managing product information, two terms often used interchangeably are PIM and PCM. While they may sound similar, these two concepts are quite different and serve different purposes in the world of e-commerce and product management.

PIM is your centralized product information system from which the product data is distributed to all relevant stakeholders, teams, and sales channels.

A headless approach to PIM means having a service ready to manage product information in seconds. Product information and content are delivered via an API. No templates, no web pages, only structured content. Pure developer bliss.

Product Information Management (PIM) is the key to eCommerce success.

With digital asset management (DAM) platforms, you get the power to store, share and organize all digital assets from a single secure location.

ERP helps to manage core business processes (manufacturing, supply chain, services, procurement, finance, HR, etc.) in an integrated system efficiently.

Welcome to another battle of acronyms! Who will come out on top: PIM or PLM?! Spoiler alert, ideally, they’d work together.

Businesses and organizations that need to manage and organize massive amounts of product-related data effectively should use PDM.

With the number of available tech solutions, tools, architectures, and approaches to web development today, it is easy to get overwhelmed when choosing the one for your online store.

When it comes to managing digital content, there are two main types of systems that professional businesses use (oftentimes together): Product Information Management (PIM) systems and Content Management Systems (CMS).

We just scratched the surface by explaining product information management (PIM) and digital asset management (DAM). Time to compare these two concepts and systems and describe the business benefits of using them.

Personalized experiences increase the likelihood of purchase by 80% for consumers. And with that, experience management platforms (XM) entered the scene.

MDM manages all types of company data, including those managed in PIM, making PIM a subset of MDM. Wait, what?

The benefits and competitive advantages of headless commerce are many. When done right, of course. Let’s look at some of the primary advantages that a proper headless commerce buildout can provide.

The frontend frameworks ecosystem is booming so much that finding the right one for your online business/store has become challenging (at best). We’d love to help. This post is all about that.

Composable commerce refers to a new type of eCommerce architecture where you’re free to pick and choose each segment, allowing for better performance. And it makes sense, right?

Keeping that #1 place in search results is becoming more and more complicated, especially for online stores and eCommerce businesses. To help you stay on top of the best practices, we've made the most comprehensive guide to eCommerce SEO you'll find online.

Check out the top reasons your ecommerce platform needs to be blazing fast if the satisfied customer is not a good enough explanation.

Genuine internet craftsmanship is performed by experienced UX designers, front-end developers, and information architects. The combined focus on customer experience, frontend performance, and beautiful reusable information architecture is rocket fuel for SEO, conversion and click-through rates, and reusable content services.

The differentiation is in the execution—in the details.

Creating a seamless and engaging on-site customer experience is the ultimate goal for everyone running an online store. Besides your product/service, your store performance and product videos ensure you get the much-needed attention.

It makes no sense, but it is true. The reason for waiting in line is that many online stores are running on outdated technologies that simply do not scale, like Elkjøp in Norway or Jeffree Star.

How fast and well your website can handle serious amounts of simultaneous order placements can make or break businesses. It depends on your chosen ecommerce platform, of course. So we tested ours.

The ability to offer a personalized, localized experience to your customers fast is hugely important for today’s businesses. With that in mind, let’s talk about Jamstack, ecommerce, and multilingual setup.

The Jamstack strategy is gaining momentum these days, and rightfully so. Benefits such as better performance and easier scaling alongside better developer experience come to mind immediately. One of the main reasons we got into the business of reimagining ecommerce is giving devs the freedom to BYOF (bring your own front end). To tailor-make the front end and build a process for continuous deployment for fast iterations and deliver the best possible customer experience.

To make it even easier to start a Gatsby JS ecommerce project, we combined our Crystallize PIM with Gatsby, a modern React-based framework, to build out a super scalable Jamstack headless commerce solution. The results are staggering. Pagespeed score of 100 and a 3ms average response time when scaling out with 500 concurrent users on Vercel. Fast.

With the rapid growth of tools and solutions available in the space now is probably the best time to move your online store to Jamstack eCommerce architecture.

Headless commerce allows businesses to provide a personalized and brand-consistent experience across channels using APIs that connect the front-end presentation layer with back-end infrastructure that enables the ecommerce experience.

You can use long-form storytelling to increase engagement by creating authentic experiences. Learn from Patagonia and The New York Times how to build trust and grow your online audience. Emotional stories that inspire are more likely to be shared and if you are lucky even go viral. We have created an open-source eCommerce boilerplate to get you started with long-form storytelling.

With site speed becoming an important part of a customer experience making sure that the number of backend requests during runtime has become important.

Break the silos with central orchestration of product information to enable omnichannel ecommerce. A well-executed omnichannel ecommerce strategy enables you to reuse product information across all channels with the use of a PIM. Channels including web-based ecommerce, native apps ecommerce, in-store ecommerce, point of sales, and even in-store digital signage. Building the foundation for modern design-driven and iterative development based on data and insight.

Realtime PIM API means that you can rely on your product information backend to power your eCommerce site directly.

At Crystallize we are information architecture geeks, well at least many of us. We believe in the natural state of product information and providing the building blocks so you can create the product shapes that fit your products and market. This is the underlying design criteria when creating the concept of product shapes in Crystallize. So you can build a tailor-made ecommerce experience and ultimately sell more products. In any channel.

Tell the story behind the product.

I remember the pain of starting my first Server Side Rendered (SSR) React GraphQL isomorphic fetch project (phew, a mouthful). Countless hours went into researching best practices, boilerplates, and how-tos. All of those hours were put into our React GraphQL based ecommerce boilerplate. To install our boilerplate check out: Getting started with Crystallize React components.