Adobe Summit 2020 – Key Takeaways Concerning Magento

Adobe Summit 2020 – The Digital Experience Conference is an online Adobe summit gone digital in the wake of COVID-19 outspread.

The post is all about key takeaways concerning Magento. If you are a Magento guy, developer, merchant, or a marketer, related with Magento in any way, here’s something for you that’ll be helpful in improving the customer experience, offering great features driven by upcoming technologies like PWA studio, GraphQL, Page Builder and headless Commerce.

First of all, applauding the amazing visual 👏🏻

Nobody does visuals and intros better than @Adobe #AdobeSummit pic.twitter.com/MqYY9tGjCa

— Joe Martin (@joeDmarti) March 31, 2020

Let me take you through the virtual #AdobeSummit and offer the gist helpful for Magento Community:

The welcome notes by Shantanu Narayen were about the importance of digital transformation and how Adobe is helping brands to digitally engage with their customers are employees.

• Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen sums it up perfectly: “People buy experiences not products.”
• “Digital isn’t only changing and reshaping our daily lives, it’s driving the economy.” – CEO Shantanu Narayen

Apart from this, Suresh Vittal from Adobe explains the value of data in personalization, stating,

“Customers are expecting brands to treat them like they’ve known them their whole lives. Even in the first interaction”

Furthur, Jason Woosley, from Magento announces the release of Magento 2.4 in Q3 2020 which will be focussed on omnichannel and Progressive Web Apps.

#Magento 2.4 to be released in Q3 2020 as announced by @jasonwoosley_mg 🚀

The major focus on PWA and omnichannel 🚀

Check https://t.co/H8fDPdRlk6 pic.twitter.com/yQ0A8eG6gf

— Meetanshi 🚀 (@MeetanshiInc) March 31, 2020

Going through what the speakers has to say about Magento in Adobe Summit, one by one:

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: How Larson-Juhl Modernized It’s Business:

The term “Teamwork makes the dream work“, itself suggests that great things are never possible by a single person, it is achieved by a group of people. Let’s have a look at the session by Anita Andrews, Manmit Walia, and Gunchal Pental what it is all about:

Larson-Juhl revolutionized customer experience with Magento Commerce
• How it optimized the omnichannel experience across the globe.
• Fast-tracking the transition of support via an ERP system into the Magento Customer Service Portal.
• Adobe, SourceMash, and Larson-Juhl, jointly, provided best-in-class delivery services.

How business top-down approach is helpful:

• Make the customer journey easier and conveniently drive the brand
• Offer the customers ease of ordering by giving them the relevant product details
• Enable self-service features like invoice payment, organizational account management, & real-time status of their orders.
• Provide a clear and concise view of our brand to build customer recognization across the globe for any channel
• Drive traffic to their customers with the robust “Where to buy” feature

Further,

Following these practices, it was successful to increase the number of organic visitors by 15%, conversion rate with an average of 25% and increased average order by 10%!

Page Builder, PWA Studio, and the Magento Commerce Experience

Olena Tkacheva and Andrew Wilcox give an overview of:

• The current state of Page Builder and PWA Studio
• The integration of Page Builder and PWA Studio
• 2020 roadmaps

The key opportunity for merchants to connect with their shoppers lies in improving the customer experience and creating compelling content. It results in a boost in conversion rates, and stay ahead among the competitors.

With Magento Page Builder and PWA Studio, the merchants can deliver engaging, relevant, and fresh content with greater ability and simultaneously improve the performance and the shopping experience. Page Builder allows creating new pages and edit the content 10 times faster!

Adobe’s investment in content creation and modern front-end is:

• Page Builder
• GraphQL
• PWA

Page Builder, a way to quickly launch rich & compelling shopping experience aids in:

• Create engaging websites, and easily edit it for offering fresh and interesting content to the shoppers
• Take control of your brand. Use the customizable page layouts, drag and drop content management and tell the story of your brand!
• Save time and resources with no dependency on designer and developers!

In Magento 2.3.4,  Page Builder updates include:

• Product Carousel – merchants can choose how to display the products
• Product Sorting – Sort by category, list of SKUs, name, price, stock, etc.

PWA Studio, accelerating the build and launch of the modern mobile experience:

• Build frontend optimized for the performance using modern tools and frameworks particularly designed for a mobile-first experience.
• Create immersive and engaging web experiences that adopt native app best practice.
• Lower development cost by unifying the frontend to a single application.

PWA is the most popular open-source project on Github in Magento. With 50% of top contributors from the community and 1700+ members in #pwa slack channel, it is safe to say that PWA Studio’s community is growing!

Some of the brands leading the way in PWA Studio are Xercise4Less, Modli, and Selco

 💪 Page Builder + PWA 🚀

Putting the power, speed, & creative content of Page Builder into the hands of marketers designing PWA studio based store frontend:

• Template Manager – Save any Page Builder content as a template and use it on any other page, block, product or category
• Video Background – content to engage customers’ attention. Store the video on a webserver, CDN, YouTube or Vimeo and use a link to add it to a page builder content

Have a look at Adobe’s roadmap for:

Page Builder:

PWA Studio:

Adobe Sensei Powers Magento Product Recommendations

Misha Kotov from Magento talks about product recommendations as a marketing tool for merchants to increase conversions, revenue and stimulate shopper engagement.

He tells us that the integration of Adobe Sensei and Magento Commerce will bring the power of creating and managing intelligent product recommendations to its feature toolbox.

Giving the stats, he proves that product recommendation is the tool to boost conversion, revenue, and shopper engagement:

Netflix – 75% of all watched content was recommended

Amazon – recommendations drive 35% of their revenue

Also, the below image shows that product recommendation is the favourite tool of Magento merchants:

Here’s the pictorial representation of how recommendations work in Magento?

Moving ahead, Misha explains the steps to implement the product recommendation on a site and how to make the most out of it

With that, here’s the screenshot from his presentation that will help the readers to decide to deploy recommendation type as per the page type:

He suggests some best practices that we can follow:

• Diversify the recommendation type
• Keep your site clean
• Use “More like this” recommendation types on non-gender-specific catalog
• Do not display similar products at the cart that will force the shopper to second guess their decision and it will prove as a barrier in conversion.

Noting an important point, he says that as a backup recommendation, when there is not enough data, display the most popular products! A useful tip 😉

Lastly, he explains how to analyze the recommendation metrics and strategies, and announces the future milestones for product recommendation.

Integrating Magento with External Systems

Abdul Hafeez is a senior solution architect at Kensium Solutions with 8+ years of experience in Magento.

He talks about the challenges Kensium faced with the enterprise clients when integrating external systems like ERP. The session is about using Magento Web APIs, bulk sync, queuing (RabbitMQ — messaging middleware), and GraphQL to handle large volumes of data while integrating with external systems.

He shares with us key points on how one of the Kensuim’s projects with over one million products used these technologies to increase performance and viability. He showed us the performance benefits of data syncs with an external system using a live demo.

Mainly, he talks about:

• Ways to integrate Magento with ERP
• Sync data with real-time messages
• Kensium A-M Connector via RabbitMQ
• Challenges, solutions and tips

According to him, Magento, at the core is E-commerce. Truly said, Abdul!

Further, two types of integrations are discussed, small scale and large scale. And when it comes to Magento framework’s role in helping to integrate with your ERP to handle bulk data integration, the sync between two systems is important, says Abdul.

Integration offers:

• Improved customer overall experience
• simplified operations

Few highlights of Integrating Magento with External Systems:

• Reduced manual entry
• Reduced errors in data entry of product, inventory, customer, order, and shipping
• Streamline inventory synchronization
• Track updates
• Customers are automatically notified when their orders are shipped
• Allow tracking the product delivery
• Easy management of price and product changes with inventory
• The flexibility to add multiple online and offline sales channel without hindering operation efficiency
• Easy handling the increased demand in online orders without allocating extra resources.

Abdul shows three ways of integration along with the pros and cons:

• Batch process
• Event-driven process
• Event-driven with Queuing

Ending the session with handy tips and tricks:

• Ensure to configure app/etc/env.php with correct RabbitMQ access details
• After setup:upgrade in Magento, review if the exchange and queues are created in RabbitMQ
• Limiting the queue size with TTL or max length
• Remove the policy for lazy queues
• Use of transient message
• Keep your queue short
• Split your queues over different cores
• Use of multiple queues and consumers

Best Practices for Omnichannel Shopping Experiences Using Headless Commerce

The session was held by Martin Buergi and Nishant Kapoor from Adobe, which mainly highlighted how headless commerce can be:

• Enriched with immersive content
• Extended with business logic
• Integrated with additional touchpoints

Customers expect a seamless shopping experience in their buying cycle and it can be offered with a flexible platform and a modern API. The session teaches how to evolve your solution and talks about how leading brands are using an API-first and microservice approach to reach their customers on a global level, thanks to Magento Commerce and its order management system.

Some of the key points from this session:

What is a great omnichannel experience:

• How your customers perceive the experience and how it differentiates you from your customers.
• Fast & easy to use
• Examples of Disney, Oasis, and B2B Chinese marketplace show that customers’ perceived value which leads to revenue, loyalty, and customer satisfaction.
• Constant innovation is possible only with a flexible and modern platform and headless commerce is a key ingredient of it.

What is headless commerce:

Headless Commerce Project is easy to use and proves as a key to successful web stores. In terms of Magento, it is independent from frontend API and based on GraphQL

Content Enrichment with Adobe Experience Manager:

Authoring:

• Headless and headful authoring for HTML and SPAs

Delivery

• Headless and Headful (multiple-output formats)
• Support server-side rendered content for SEO

Shoppable experience using the Magento Integration

• Live access to product catalog
• Enrich product data with marketing content
• Core commerce component

How Adobe can help to build the best search landing pages to optimize SEM, social and email marketing campaigns and improve ROAS (return on Ad spend)

• Single Magento backend to display all the discounts and offers and the discounts across all channels
• Real-time data of (to offer seamless shopping experience for customers):(GraphQL and REST APIS)
  • Inventory
  • Pricing
  • Offer
• Build beautiful landing page content using Adobe Experience Manager

Modern Point of Sale

In-store Scan and go:

Adding barcode scanner to your web channel, extend the core Adobe Commerce Cloud feature. You can use AEM/ PWA studio and Magento to add this feature in the storefront. It will allow customers to checkout after scanning the product in the store. Use the point of sale app that is built using Adobe Commerce cloud to validate the purchase at the store exit.

All in all, the presentation covered Magento PWA studio and Adobe Experience manager to accelerate the frontend and the solutions like Magento, AEM, and I/O runtime for the same!

Going Headless with Magento Commerce

The last session, in which Magento guys can grab the key takeaways was from Eric Erway and again, Nishant Kapoor.

Are you a merchant who struggles to scale and provide a consistent user experience to consumers when they are used to consuming content and making purchases across various digital touchpoints?

If yes, this session is for you that talks about how Adobe and Magento Commerce enable businesses to operate headless commerce using the state-of-the-art GraphQL API to provide feature and experience parity across all customer touchpoints.

Key Takeaways:

1. What is headless commerce
2. Why you should care about it
3. How Magento can help execute your Headless Commerce Strategy

Eric explains headless commerce as API-based commerce that decouples business logic, transactional, and data aspects of commerce from presentation.

Key Priorities For Headless Commerce wrt GraphQL in 2020+:

• B2C and B2B coverage
• Performance and Scalability
• Independent GraphQL releases
• Split Deployment

That was all for Adobe Summit 2020 – an all online event key takeaways exclusively for Magento merchants and developers.

Amazing, isn’t it? A lot more of PWA Studio, Page Builder, Headless Commerce, and product recommendation is going to come our way, with an aim to improve the customer shopping experience, increase engagement, and ultimately revenue. 🚀

Interesting! Do let me know your thoughts about these technologies. I would love to read how you are planning to implement them in your next project in the Comments section below.

Do not forget to share this post in social media with a hashtag “#AdobeSummit”

Hope everyone’s healthy and practising social distancing. We are in this together.

Stay Home, Stay Happy 🙂