What is the Future of building Commerce Experiences?

I think we can agree that building a commerce experience with a CMS is an endless battle leading to nowhere. So when I was confronted with building a commerce experience for the first time, my thought process was to integrate the best CMS with the best eCommerce solution.

Some 15 years later I am surprised that these CMS/eCommerce integrations is still the approach CMS providers are taking. In fact, why do we continue to distinguish a Web Experience from an eCommerce Experience? And since today almost all major sites contain monetary components, why do we still deal with such old concepts?

JCR Content Repository-based CMS solutions, like Adobe Experience Manager, Jahia, Magnolia, Peregrine are considered the most modern CMS solutions by both analysts, Gartner and Forrester. Hence it just comes natural to build commerce experiences with these CMS solutions. But is the future of building such commerce experiences really integrating them with eCommerce tools? No!

This is the first article of a trilogy to prove that today there is a significant better and cost-effective way to build commerce experiences with AEM. Article 2 (Example 1 - Extend WKND Site with the JCR Commerce Framework) demonstrates how easy it is to extend AEM's demo site WKND with a shop experience and article 3 (Example 2 - Build 'non-product-related' Sites with the JCR Commerce Framework) demonstrates how you can build non-product-related commerce experiences (like for hotels, insurances, health, auctions), opening the gate for complete new commerce markets.

1) Options for building a Commerce Experience

If we want to build a modern commerce experience, a site that combines everything, from compelling content to monetary elements (e.g purchase components), we currently have two options:

1. E-Commerce Solution - While systems like ATG, Hybris, Magento are strong in managing products and catalogs, they are challenging and tedious when it comes to building author-friendly Web experiences. They are code-heavy and typically used for product-like experiences.
2. Integrations - Integrate the best CMS with an eCommerce solution sounds promising, but it comes with a lot of sacrifices: two systems to maintain, lot's of coding, high costs, longer projects and you give up a lot of the award-winning CMS features and capabilities.

In the past, commerce experiences were rather seldom, hence building such experiences was not really a priority for a CMS. But as of today, almost all major Web experiences require some sort of commerce elements. Therefore it's necessary that we find better ways to build commerce experiences.

2) Challenges of integrating AEM with e.g. Magento

Adobe acquired Magento to add commerce capabilities to it's award-winning CMS AEM (Adobe Experience Manager). While from a marketing perspective the AEM/Magento combination sounds compelling, reality is that it still is a major technology challenge. Managing two (with CIF, three) different systems (technical and authoring), developing a lot of code just to integrate the systems, sacrificing many JCR content repository API benefits (versioning, observation services, full-text search), and more just don't make this a future-proof solution.

The main reasons for this challenging approach is in the way commerce content and commerce functionality is managed. The product data is all managed within the commerce solution, within an RDBMS system. The functionality is buried in closed PHP applications. Therefore, accessing product data and commerce functionality is a very tedious (and costly) process.

The Future - Convert AEM into a "Commerce CMS"

Let's assume we could "move" all the product data (commerce content) and all the commerce functionality from a traditional eCommerce solution into AEM.

This would shift the control over commerce content and commerce functionality to AEM. This would come with a lot of advantages, not just eliminating a costly and time consuming integration.

• Authors create commerce content directly in AEM, taking advantage of all the award-winning AEM capabilities. Authors also use templates and components to build the Web pages and populate the paragraphs with commerce content.
• Developers create templates and components the AEM way, taking advantage of the commerce functionality available via API as needed (e.g. for promotions, carts, checkouts).
• Create dashboards using AEM templates and components to gather information about the commerce activities of visitors.
• Use all Adobe marketing tools (Target, Analytics, S&P) to analyze the Web experience.
• And all the above at a fraction of the costs you invest for an integration of AEM with an eCommerce tool.

Doesn't this sound like how we should be building Commerce Experiences?

The Future is here - a JCR Commerce Framework for AEM

After almost 4 years of development, me and my team are proud to introduce a JCR Commerce Framework for AEM, which works precisely as described above:

• Authors use the Web app to create all Commerce Content, from product data, promotions, wish/watch lists to configuring payment/shipping/taxes/currency modules, carts or checkout, all within AEM (no integration).
• Authors also use the Web app to manage Commerce Environments, e.g. define hotel rooms, insurance policies and more, but also add new properties to existing commerce content elements, dynamically (no IT involvement required).
• Developers use the Commerce API (manage by OSGi framework) to build templates and components, but also model classes, Sling Servlet extensions and whatever is required to build the commerce experience.
• The Commerce Functionality is built as an "API-like" solution. Not only can developers pick classes and methods to build custom functionality, they can easily extend existing modules with custom methods. For example, this API concept allows to build unlimited flavors of checkout processes, easily.
• Marketers can use the full set of Adobe tools to monitor/analyze/update the Web/Commerce experience, since all content on the site comes from one source, AEM.
• Perhaps one of the biggest advantages: AEM customers can build non-product-driven commerce experiences, e.g. Hospitality (hotels, boutiques, pools/spas, restaurants), Insurances (policies, rate calculations), Healthcare (health plans, open enrollment), Auctions (all types of offerings), etc.

Check out the following two articles to see how these commerce experiences are being built.

This is the first article of a trilogy on the Future of building Commerce Experiences. Check (Example 1 - Extend WKND Site with the JCR Commerce Framework), the second article, to see how we added a shopping experience to the Adobe WKND demo site. Then check the third article (Example 2 - Build 'non-product-related' Sites with the JCR Commerce Framework) to see how the JCR Commerce Framework JECIS can be used to build the commerce environment for a Hotel resort with a Restaurant and Boutique.