When you decide to take the step towards e-commerce or improve the digital presence of your company, the steps offered by different CMS platforms are almost a booklet, where the last thing is the content.
Contentful Agile Ecommerce is a set of tools within a CMS Headless platform (more on this later) that breaks many of the paradigms imposed by traditional CMS such as WordPress, Drupal or Magento.
Digital commerce is an aggressive environment, the digital customer is demanding and with changing preferences, businesses strive to keep pace and offer a convenient omnichannel experience.
But along the way they encounter different platforms, tools and systems each with their own unique standards and requirements, templates and forms that add unnecessary complexity.
Add to all this their lack of compatibility or interoperability, scattered data and content, re-work on the part of developers, designers and editors.
This is where Contentful and its developments as Agile Ecommerce come to make a big difference, find out why in this post.
Here is the list of Ecommerce platforms that challenge the Status Quo.
What is Contentful?
When we talk about Contentful we refer to a Headless CMS hosted in the cloud that promises simplicity, agility and an unparalleled customer experience, probably this terminology does not clarify much the picture, so let’s detail a little more.
Contentful is a CMS (Content Management System) or content management platform that allows you to create and manage web environments.
The vast majority of CMSs on the market, even the largest, are based on a closed front-end (or design features), loaded with predefined themes and templates where a website ends up being similar to others.
And the last thing that matters is the content, data that you have to edit and adjust, for example, for landing pages, catalog descriptions and other presentations.
This is where the Headless approach makes a difference.
This working environment decouples the front-end from the back-end, giving the creative team all the freedom to present content in layouts and structures as they see fit.
A decoupled approach that enables agility, originality and collaborative work between developers, designers and editors.
Contentful the company
It is worth mentioning who is behind this new form of content management.
The developer company with the same name was founded in Berlin in 2013 by Sascha Konietzke and Paolo Negri.
Nine years after its founding Contentful has locations in Germany and the U.S. with around 600 employees and global reach and business partners.
In this short time it has captured renowned brands such as Aldo, Nike, Ikea, Spotify, Red Bull, among others; whose creative teams have relied on the simplicity and power of integration to manage content and digital products in a single infrastructure.
In Mexico and Chile NU Tech is a commercial partner of Contentful as an enabler of this modern tool to simplify and personalize e-commerce experiences.
Contentful Agile eCommerce
Agile Ecommerce by Contentful is the company’s offering for e-commerce solutions.
Contentful Agile Ecommerce allows programmers and publishers to manage and scale content in a flexible and extensible way, through a powerful application programming interface (API). Contentful integrates with a wide range of e-commerce solutions for managing and optimizing digital assets to save time and effort.
Here are some of the Contentful Agile eCommerce differentiators responsible for its rapid growth:
- Easy creation, testing and customization of omnichannel eCommerce experiences.
- Ability to shape content according to changing business needs
- Freedom to adapt via back-end structure in an agile manner
- Adaptations in record time based on future channels, market trends or business requirements
- Easy integration with existing channels and new technologies
- And always relevant, localized and context-sensitive content.
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Contentful Agile eCommerce Implementations – Success Stories
Here are some companies that found in Contentful Agile eCommerce the support to simplify and unify their digital sales channels:
Nordstrom/Trunk Club
Mid- to high-end men’s and women’s fashion and department store.
For years they used different CMS solutions, optimized for specific channels such as web and mobile App.
They ended up in cumbersome content asset management processes located in different silos, with inefficient APIs.
Contentful gave them the possibility of a single data center in the cloud for all their silos and Apps, which allowed their creative team to focus on valuable content instead of requirements for each CMS.
Atlassian
Project, team, communication and collaboration management software.
Thousands of unstructured content was leading teams to the infamous ‘copy & paste’ action, plus collaboration between projects was difficult and their deliverables disconnected.
Contentful’s omnichannel management allowed them to manage shared content through a simple interface for quick change editing; where roles, permissions and workflows were streamlined driving internal collaboration.
Here is a list of best practices for implementing an e-commerce business.
Equinox Luxury Fitness Club
U.S. health, beauty and fitness franchise with some 106 locations.
Their digital content platform was limited, they had difficulty launching new products and strategies, publications were slow and laborious.
Contentful Agile Ecommerce represented the unified, standalone solution for repurposing their content and streamlining new releases in line with the market.
A simple editorial interface and governance allowed the development and content teams to align on an API architecture that enabled new tools and functionality to scale their brand.
Nike Inc
A marketing and sportswear colossus that needs no introduction.
In partnership with Demodern, a design agency specializing in VR & AR, they developed a ‘digital wall’ with interactive applications for their major US stores.
Contentful’s interface via API in Adobe AIR enabled the production of a working prototype in just three days.
According to the brands’ project executives ‘such a short turnaround time would have been unimaginable if they had opted for their own back-end’.
That’s all we will offer in this installment dedicated to a new way of implementing and managing digital commerce, remember that in NU Technology we are enablers of valuable technology for your eCommerce or online store.
These solutions are not exclusive to large corporations and with our support and accompaniment are within reach of your business.