Sitecore XC9 Places Brands and their Customers in the Driving Seat

With the launch of XC9 (Experience Commerce), the Sitecore Commerce offering has truly come of age. Not only does it offer a fully-featured, state-of-the-art eCommerce offering, but with Sitecore XP integration, organisations need look no further for a single platform to deliver a unified, personalised marketing and commerce experience across any channel. Wow! It really is worth thinking about the potential of that for a moment.

XC9 Delivering Contextual Commerce

In the early days of eCommerce, the goal was for customers to make a single purchase. In today’s landscape of mobile devices, connecting savvy and tech-aware customers with brands and other customers on Social Media, organisations must work much harder to engage potential customers and then develop and maintain customer relationships. The power of contextual commerce is in delivering the rich and multi-faceted experiences that today’s online consumer has come to expect and so deliver those outcomes.

Contextual Commerce allows brands to systematically convert a casual browser into a fierce & loyal brand advocate. Typically your Sales & Marketing teams will develop campaigns to drive your potential customers to your site. When a potential customer arrives at your site, is when the power of XC9 is unleashed. Sophisticated analytics combined with powerful engagement mapping & visualisation tools allow you to guide a potential customer towards their first purchase. The same tools then allow you to analyse, tailor & personalise each site visit and ensure that a customer’s first purchase is not their last.

XC9 Features

• Personalised & Contextual Commerce
• Seamless Sitecore Experience Marketing & Content integration
• Support for Multiple Catalogs, Inventories & Multi-Currency Pricebooks with powerful built-in Management tools
• Integrated Customer & Order Management
• Powerful Promotions Engine (with 22 OOTB promotions)
• SXA-powered Storefronts (with over 40 commerce-specific components)
• Commerce Analytics & Reporting
• Customisable Pipelines to enable complex and highly-bespoke integrations

XC9 Technology

With the release of Sitecore XC9, Sitecore Commerce now runs entirely on a state-of-the-art microservices based architecture built on the .Net Core Framework and with intrinsic support for running on PaaS infrastructure.

The XC9 Commerce architecture was developed from the ground up by the same team who developed the legacy Commerce Server platform on which earlier versions of Sitecore Commerce were based. In addition to their 20 years of Commerce experience, the XC9 product team enjoy very close links with product teams within Microsoft, often serving as a proving ground for the latest Microsoft development technologies. For partners and organisations delivering eCommerce solutions on XC9, this brings the confidence from knowing that the highest levels of technical expertise have been applied to the development of the platform.

Here at Switch we can already see that with XC9 we can deliver for our customers a truly data-driven, personalised shopping experience with the consumer front-and-centre and fully engaged across all communication channels. Contact us today to find out how we can help you on your XC9 journey.

— Mike Kinner

¹ Sitecore, 2017, Sitecore Experience Platform Brochure

² Sitecore, 2018, Sitecore Experience Commerce DevOps Guide, accessed 9 August 2018, http://commercesdn.sitecore.net/SitecoreXC_9.0/DevOps-Guide/Sitecore-XC-9.0_DevOps_Guide.pdf