Retail and eCommerce highlights this week include: Brands Can Now Extend Adobe’s Personalisation through the Checkout to improve shopper experience and increase conversion. Umbraco acquires Outfield Digital for eCommerce platform and back-office UI builder to bolster composable DXP strategy. Oro has launched OroCommerce 5.1, the latest update of its purpose-built B2B eCommerce platform. Nfinite launches next-generation immersive online shopping experiences, enabling retailers to scale product image creation with a SaaS platform. Shift7 Digital was acquired by Merkle.
Bold Commerce launches headless checkout on Adobe Commerce
Bold Commerce has launched its headless checkout integration with Magento Open Source, an Adobe company. The company collaborated with PayPal to create the new integration.
By introducing a composable headless alternative to Magento’s native checkout, Bold enables brands using Adobe Commerce to elevate checkout experiences without the risk, cost, or complexity of re-platforming. The composable checkout solution seamlessly integrates a fully optimized, customisable checkout experience on top of brands’ existing technology. For many brands, adopting this new checkout will be their first step toward a composable ecommerce infrastructure.
Brands are working to address the nearly half (48%) of shoppers that abandon checkout before completing a purchase on ecommerce sites. To do that, they’re simultaneously pursuing options to make other digital channels shoppable.
But simply extending checkout to new channels isn’t enough. Brands need to have complete control over the experiences they’re offering to shoppers to drive conversions. This means offering checkout experiences that not only fit brands’ business needs but are tailored to individual shoppers and how they’re shopping in real time.
Brands can now modernise their checkout experience quicker, easier and with fewer plug-ins than the platform’s native checkout. With Bold Checkout and PayPal, brands can activate and utilise most payment methods without the need to add plug-ins. This ensures complete payment flexibility for both brands and consumers. The new integration also removes potential performance and security issues that threaten brands’ potential to scale as traffic and transactions increase over time.
Bold Checkout enables retail brands to fully customise their entire checkout experiences with checkout flows. Brands can continually build, test, and iterate multiple custom checkout flows based on shoppers’ profiles and the device, channel, preferred shipping, payment and location they’re shopping from to increase conversion.
Umbraco acquires Outfield Digital
Umbraco, has acquired UK software company, Outfield Digital. It is the developer of the Vendr eCommerce platform and Konstrukt back-office user interface software. The company is an open-source content management system (CMS) provider. The acquisition supports Umbraco’s mission to make it easier for companies to combine the most appropriate technologies to create digital experiences tailored to business and customer requirements.
The Umbraco CMS underpins thousands of retail, government, and professional services websites around the world.
Outfield Digital co-founder, Matt Brailsford, is an Umbraco Certified Master. He has contributed more than thirty software packages to the Umbraco open-source software community over the past eight years. Brailsford has been developing the Vendr eCommerce platform for three years. He sees the acquisition as an opportunity to continue working on the popular platform, with the support of a larger engineering team.
Oro unveils OroCommerce 5.1, making B2B businesses stronger
Oro has launched OroCommerce 5.1, the latest update of its purpose-built B2B eCommerce platform. It has a focus on empowering manufacturing, distribution and wholesale digital commerce. OroCommerce 5.1 is designed to give larger brands even more control over their multi-website, multi-brand and multi-vendor businesses and further improve customer experience with more outstanding self-serve features.
OroCommerce 5.1 contains a suite of powerful features designed to give B2B brands an edge over their competition, including:
- Elevated customer experience through product bundling and kitting capabilities that provide customers with a more intuitive shopping experience.
- Increased control over search functionality includes the ability to prioritise products, personalise results based on customer queries and customise product results based on user feedback.
- Stripe integration and improved search architecture makes for a faster, smoother shopping user experience compatible with a wider range of payment options.
- Greater agility and resilience when conducting business through new organization and user group options that are more powerful and customisable than ever before. This update brings improved capabilities for managing roles and permissions in multi-organisation scenarios.
- More tools for managing vendors and your marketplace with automatic order splitting to separate orders based on a variety of criteria, new vendor permission levels and multiple shipping cost features and options.
- Better scalability, efficiency and security by upgrading to the latest PHP 8.2 and Nodejs 18 releases. It has also instituted a number of fixes in response to feedback from our developers, partners and customers.
Nfinite launches next-generation immersive online shopping experiences
Nfinite has announced a set of new features, including the release of Dynamic Display. It is a major new capability of its SaaS platform. Dynamic Display allows retailers and brand owners to quickly and seamlessly embed interactive, shoppable showrooms on any webpage.
By enabling online shoppers to personalise their experience and seamlessly mix and match items in context, online retailers have seen a boost in ecommerce results. Dynamic Display has shown significant improvements on website and conversion performance. This includes a 2.5X increase in clickthrough rate. A 53% increase in conversion rate and a 2.8X improvement in repeat customer engagement.
Indeed, in a recent report from Nfinite, shoppers report increasing expectations around eCommerce product visuals. 88% of people say high-quality product imagery is important. 77% said product image capabilities increase their confidence in purchase decisions on websites they’ve never purchased from before.
The Nfinite e-merchandising platform eliminates the physical, scaling, and financial barriers that retailers and brands typically face in creating advanced, visually stunning e-merchandising experiences. The company serves 3 of the world’s top 5 retailers. It also offers 3D visual assets compatible with VR and AR applications. Learn more about Nfinite’s platform here: nfinite.app/platform.
Shift7 Digital acquired by Merkle
Shift7 Digital has been acquired by Merkle, a member of the Dentsu Group, a global family of marketing agencies with over 60,000 employees. It helps B2B companies modernise their marketing and sales process. It optimises customer touchpoints and delivers a seamless self-service eCommerce experience. By shifting the way manufacturers and distributors engage with customers online, Shift7 enables brands to increase sales, improve profitability, and forge long-lasting customer relationships.
