Creating Better Customer Experiences with Adobe Commerce (Magento)
A staggering 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned before checkout. Issues like slow load times, poor search functionality, and a lack of payment options contribute to friction — and in some cases, businesses aren’t even aware that the friction is impacting their sales.
eCommerce businesses need a platform engineered to provide a smoother user journey. We generally recommend Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) for this reason; while Adobe Commerce isn’t the right option for every business, it’s a powerful platform for finding and removing key pressure points on the user journey.
In this article, we’re going to discuss some basic concepts for optimizing customer UX in Adobe Commerce.
However, it’s important to remember that any eCommerce platform needs significant customization in order to deliver the best possible ROI. Your platform needs to complement the way that your business works instead of forcing a specific workflow; that’s where an experienced Adobe Commerce partner can provide value.
If you’re struggling with high cart abandonment rates, schedule a demo to see how Blue Stingray can help.
Adobe Commerce UX Features: Personalization, Optimization, and Scalability
Any eCommerce platform should be capable of providing an intuitive storefront and a fast, secure checkout process. That’s not what sets Adobe Commerce apart; the reason to use a platform like Magento is the high degree of customization, which allows you to monitor the customer journey and make key improvements.
For example, Adobe recently refined their Sensei AI, which is designed to create hyper-personalized experiences that drive sales. Personalized product recommendations alone can increase purchase rates by as much as 70% and boost average order value by 33%.
We recognize that AI is a bit of a buzzword at this point, and product recommendation widgets have been part of the eCommerce landscape for decades. But Sensei AI has several key features that deliver a higher degree of personalization for shoppers:
- AI-Powered Search: Lightning-fast, intelligent search delivers relevant, “as-you-type” results. It dynamically adapts to customer behavior and sales trends, reducing the time it takes for a shopper to find what they need.
- Dynamic Recommendations: Beyond simple “you might also like” widgets, the platform uses 13 different AI-powered recommendation types. It intelligently orders how products appear on category pages to maximize sales based on real-time performance and business goals.
- Unified Customer Data: Adobe Commerce integrates with a Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP) to create a “360-degree view” of each shopper. By unifying data from your e-commerce site, CRM, and even offline channels, you can deliver consistent and relevant messaging at every touchpoint.
Note that real-time CDPs require complex data integrations. Without clean, unified data from all your business systems, AI won’t deliver results (and you might walk away assuming that AI is useless for your industry).
An experienced partner can help you manage those integrations, even with legacy systems. Blue Stingray can also define the merchandising rules that guide the AI to meet specific business objectives — for example, promoting high-margin items to the customers that actually need them — and monitor the implementation of personalization features to make sure that they’re appropriate for the user.
Building a Truly Seamless Omnichannel Journey
Customers don’t distinguish between your website, your mobile app, and your physical store; to them, it’s all one brand. They expect a consistent and convenient experience across every touchpoint, which is why you need an omnichannel strategy.
Adobe Commerce provides several key features that can serve as the foundation for this unified journey:
- Progressive Web Apps (PWAs): A PWA delivers the speed, engagement, and feel of a native mobile application directly through a web browser.
- Buy Online, Pick Up In-Store (BOPIS): This feature blends the convenience of online shopping with the immediacy of brick-and-mortar retail. The BOPIS workflow in Adobe Commerce allows customers to purchase online and retrieve their items from a physical location.
- Persistent Shopping Carts: Customers frequently browse on one device and purchase on another. The persistent cart feature saves a logged-in user’s cart across multiple devices and sessions.
Once again, it’s all about the implementation: In order for persistent shopping carts to work as intended, your store will need a smooth and intuitive account creation and login process that encourages customers to actually use it. To avoid issues with BOPIS, you’ll need robust, real-time inventory synchronizations. And PWAs can be a significant development project — in some cases, as substantial as native app development.
An Expert Adobe Commerce Partner in St. Louis
Adobe Commerce provides the raw materials to build a world-class customer experience. It can provide you with more data, more tools for utilizing that data, and significant competitive advantages — but only when you use the customization capabilities in a thoughtful way.
A 5% increase in customer retention can boost revenue by as much as 25% to 95%. Retention is built on consistently good experiences, but that means something different for every type of business.
At Blue Stingray, we take the time to understand how businesses work, which helps us create experiences that deliver on customer expectations. For example:
- A parts catalog for generators and components will require a completely different approach than an eStore with filing and note-taking supplies.
- A disc golf company might have high demand for newly released products, requiring optimization of key systems to handle sudden surges in traffic.
- An industrial e-commerce site might require a custom REST API to simplify supply chain management.
- A B2B e-commerce site might require customer-specific ordering portals so that each client can have their own pricing, discounts, regional tax needs, and bulk order options.
We’ve handled all of those types of projects — which is why they’re hyperlinked!
But we also recognize that our next project will be completely different. While some basic customer expectations are predictable (like fast checkouts and intelligent product recommendations), others are unique. Your Adobe Commerce partner should be capable of finding those challenges and creating novel solutions.
Find out more about Blue Stingray’s e-commerce services, or sign up for a demo, on our Magento page.
