5 Things B2B IT Professionals & Developers Need From an Ecommerce CMS

B2B buyers hear about products on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter while browsing on their tablets and smartphones. They see ads while browsing other sites and attending webinars on their lunch break. Before they download a whitepaper, visit your blog, or sign up for a trial, this is all happening.

The customer journey is long and involves a ton of digital touchpoints, with Gartner pointing out that 27% of B2B buying groups spend their time doing research online. Given these complexities, businesses need the right tools in place as part of their ecommerce tech stacks.

IT and developers are the stewards of these solutions, ensuring that these systems work together and everyone else, like their counterparts in marketing and sales, has everything they need to get the job done. So they can’t afford to be held back by clunky legacy software or an influx of support tickets and requests interrupting them because the marketing team can’t update the latest landing page without their help.

Having the right ecommerce CMS can solve these potential issues before they even become true problems. But to pick the right one, you’ve got to make sure it checks all the boxes.

Developers and IT staff are crucial for the success of any software system; however, they can often be held back by cumbersome tools that aren’t fit for succeeding in today’s ecommerce environment.

Complex legacy systems may have been appropriate in years gone by but over time, they have become difficult to maintain. This means that developers need to spend longer than they want to struggle to integrate the latest tools and technologies the business needs to advance.

Another issue that crops up as a result of this is that departments that need to work together and share information like marketing, IT, and merchandising end up becoming siloed. This, in turn, puts added pressure on developers as they need to assist these departments with other tasks. This pulls them away from their core responsibilities and makes teams wonder why they have so few resources available to them.

The consequences of not having the right ecommerce system at your disposal are vast, so those in the B2B industry need to ensure that it meets all of their requirements.

Developers want their ecommerce CMS to follow a headless approach and use API-first architecture. As the customer journey now spans a host of different channels and touchpoints, they need the ability to deliver content and shopping experiences to these channels easily.

With headless architecture, developers are given the freedom to choose the best frameworks and tools to use when creating shopping experiences rather than be restricted by pre-defined templates. APIs make the connections to those channels much easier so that ecommerce experiences can be created for the brand website and ecommerce shop, but also IoT devices, digital kiosks, and other areas where the audience may come across content.

Companies can’t afford to have the other tools within their tech stack isolated from the CMS. A modern ecommerce CMS should provide native integrations with the most popular tools so that staff can toggle between software without feeling overwhelmed. With native integrations, developers can save precious time implementing the CMS as well as the other tools critical for the ecommerce journey.

Unlike legacy systems that have long implementation processes that are drawn out for months, a modern ecommerce CMS should be quick to implement to avoid slowing down the latest campaigns. Also, developers should have access to low code tooling, making other development tasks faster and more efficient.

For B2B companies, multiple hosting options are critical, whether they want to maintain complete control over the system in-house, rely on fully-managed cloud services, or use a hybrid of both models.

Threats to an ecommerce shop can be not only detrimental to the brand but also to the internal systems, personal customer information and more. An ecommerce CMS that caters to a B2B audience should have authorization and authentication services, roles and permissions, and other security features to keep information safe so that IT and developers can spend time on other tasks.

Marketers are the primary users of any CMS platform, but that doesn’t mean developers shouldn’t have access to the right tools to make everyone’s lives easier. Magnolia offers a digital experience platform (DXP) and headless CMS that arms developers to create digital experiences and empower their marketing counterparts.

With Magnolia, developers can choose the frameworks they want, whether that be React, Angular, or incorporating modern approaches like Jamstack. They can realize the benefits of jamstack ecommerce like a faster time to market and improved shopping experience for customers. REST APIs and GraphQL are available so that the exact contact required can be queried and Magnolia’s Light Development and low code tools enable developers to get more done, even if they aren’t familiar with a particular language. Magnolia also features a headless accelerator that includes a library of UI patterns and task automation to make headless projects go much faster.

Swiss retailer Migros lacked a unified architecture that supported multiple sites and needed an easy migration process to a new CMS that would allow for a faster time-to-market and easier content editing for marketers. They found the answer in Magnolia and could save over 50% in annual infrastructure costs.

Wondering if your CMS checks all of the boxes? Consider this handy checklist to make sure you meet all your developer’s requirements.
 

You’ve checked off your IT and developers needs, but what about your marketers? We have a handy checklist to help you out there as well.