When thinking about the e-commerce customer experience, it’s all too easy to focus on the front end—and rightly so. So what happens in your digital stack, behind the scenes, and beyond impacts your customers’ overall experience.
It would help to consider every aspect of their journey from top to bottom, from landing page to check out, and all stops. A capable digital experience platform such as Contentful lets you create a seamless and top-notch experience that leaves customers with only good vibes.
#1 – Static Site Generator
This is what makes your website fast. You can host an entire web app on a static page, and it’ll run just as quickly as a well-coded single-page application. In addition, several eCommerce sites use Jekyll to power their online stores. Jekyll takes all of your content (blog posts, product descriptions, etc.) and turns them into HTML files.
#2 – API Management
You must understand how APIs work and how they can assist your product development. An API management system helps to facilitate interactions between users, data, applications, and devices. For example, creating an API is known as API Development or API Integration. This process involves a lot of testing, quality assurance (QA), documentation, and support.
#3 – Content Management System
This is where you manage all of your website’s pages, including editing text and content. Wix and Squarespace are two examples of CMS platforms that eCommerce stores can use to power their online store.
#4 – Analytics Platform
Every good customer experience starts with data. So whether you need to track online conversions, make informed decisions on your product mix or run A/B tests on your site, you’ll need an analytics platform.
#5 – Personalization Engine
Tailoring each digital customer experience to individual tastes and behavior is not just important; it’s necessary. So you need a personalization engine that can process data from multiple sources, including your website(s), eCommerce platform(s), CRM(s), and even social media accounts.
#6 – Dynamic UI Engine
A digital experience platform is only as good as its Dynamic UI Engine, enabling brands to create a seamless and personalized customer journey. This technology helps you deliver relevant content at scale by using machine learning algorithms that make sense of your customers’ past behavior to predict their future needs.
#7 – Backend as a Service (BaaS)
BaaS means that you don’t have to worry about setting up servers, databases, or scalability. Instead, all of these services are managed in the background by BaaS providers.
#8 – Frontend Development Framework
React.js or Vue.js – Depending on which framework you are already most familiar with, you will want to choose one of these frameworks to use in your eCommerce platform development.
#9 – Single Page Application (SPA) Framework
AngularJS was one of the first frameworks that utilized single-page applications and gained popularity quickly. One of its most notable features is two-way data binding, which effectively eliminates code duplication between views and models.
#10 – Collaboration Solution
According to experts at Contentful, “Speed or time to value is the critical measure of success.” Getting all team members and stakeholders on one platform is crucial to minimizing time in your eCommerce digital customer experience strategy. Without a collaboration solution, it’s hard to stay organized and share ideas with internal and external teams.
Technology can help your business, but only if you use it wisely. Therefore, it’s important to understand how each tool affects your customer experience and what you hope to accomplish.
