Composable DXP for Modern Ecommerce Experiences

Ecommerce is currently undergoing a major shift, and facilitating the experiences that customers desire when shopping online is no easy task. A lower price or faster shipping are no longer enough to differentiate. Brands must also provide a high level of personalized content across multiple channels (not just web) and create a unified shopping experience from product description to checkout.

In this article, we’ll explain what a composable DXP is and how it can be used to create modern ecommerce experiences. When commerce leaders and tech teams understand headless, composable and what true fusion of content and commerce can bring—they can start building a strategy and architecture.

A digital experience platform (DXP) enables organizations to manage and optimize the entire digital customer journey.

Nowadays, consumers can do their shopping on several different channels. From desktop, to mobile to social media platforms and online marketplaces, shoppers have multiple options to choose from. A DXP allows businesses to connect all of these channels and create a seamless and personalized experience as customers navigate their journey.

Surely, using different software systems and integrating them is nothing new. What led to the emergence of the DXP concept is the proliferation of the various customer experience channels—and the need to unify these into a platform that would centrally address the entire customer life cycle.

Read More: What is a DXP? (Digital Experience Platform)

There are two approaches to digital experience platforms, and each has some implications for businesses.

First is the suite DXPs. These software suites provide all-in-one solutions through one vendor. Typically, these platforms include a CMS, an ecommerce system, a DAM, analytics, and perhaps other capabilities. However, a suite platform locks you into one vendor and provides you with several tools that you may never use, many of which lack the functionality you truly need.

Second, a composable DXP that removes the limitations of all-in-one, tightly coupled approach. Composability allows you to leverage a best-of-breed approach so that you can choose the right tools to create the ideal digital experience for your different audiences (be them customers, partners or even employees). This way, you can make use of the unique content, data and processes in all your platforms. What’s more, with a headless approach, your front-end is decoupled from back-end commerce functionality, which means you can freely create front-end experiences and user interfaces without being limited by the complexity of back-end systems.

A composable DXP provides the foundation for you to digitally transform your business and allow you to embrace content and commerce successfully.

Many enterprises have existing legacy infrastructure that initially allowed them to do everything they needed. However, it has become apparent that an ecommerce system alone may not satisfy the need customers have for engaging experiences. With a composable DXP, you can easily integrate your existing ecommerce system with a headless CMS built to deliver high-quality content experiences on every digital channel.

Flexibility - Easily integrate anything you need to provide differentiated shopping experiences, whether that means a different payment method for shoppers or the latest AI tool for your internal teams. This flexibility allows you to experiment and change these tools as you require.

Customizability - You can customize your software stack so that it fits perfectly with the needs of your team, existing tools, and processes. You can also choose the channels and presentation frameworks that provide the best experience for your shoppers.

Better Personalization - You can tailor experiences to the specific preferences of your shoppers and allow your brand to adapt more quickly, even as those preferences change. A composable DXP connects your entire customer ecosystem and allows you to draw on the insights required to personalize customer experiences.

The beauty of a composable DXP is that it enables you to select the best tools for each job. You have the freedom of choice to select the DXP partners that work for each of your core functions. When it comes to building a DXP for today’s modern ecommerce experiences, here are some of the key capabilities you need:

Your ecommerce system is an essential component of your composable DXP. It allows you to process all digital transactions for online shopping, manage products and catalogs, and provide other requirements of your ecommerce store.

For modern ecommerce experiences, a platform that supports headless ecommerce is ideal for powering your ecommerce functionalities in the backend. Using APIs to connect to the CMS and the front ends, you can create an appealing user experience, no matter the channel.

Combining content and commerce wouldn’t be possible without a Content Management System (CMS). A CMS allows marketers and developers to create stories around your products, compelling landing pages and other content-rich experiences.

A modern headless CMS at the center of your DXP provides APIs enabling developers to use content in any front end on any channel where customers may want to shop. It also provides marketers with user-friendly features to create, edit, preview, and publish content to each of these channels.

Building rich shopping experiences requires brands to have thousands of digital assets. From images and videos to documents, audio files, and more, a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system helps house all of these assets and makes it easy for users to quickly and easily locate them to include in pages and campaigns.

For any successful ecommerce store, search functionality is essential, especially as many brands have thousands of products. Making search functionality available throughout various channels can enhance the customer experience by allowing customers to quickly search for the products they’re looking for without browsing through the entire catalog.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system or Customer Data Platform (CDP) stores all of the information about your customers, from their previous purchases to their current interactions with your brand. Integrating a CRM/CDP into your DXP allows you to leverage that information to improve the customer experience at every stage of their journey, personalizing and optimizing it as necessary.

Connecting analytics to your DXP allows you to gather data from ecommerce transactions and customer interactions, draw insights, and leverage those insights to make better decisions. The right analytics tool can let you see which products sell most as well as the best-converting pages and marketing campaigns you’ve published.

These are the typical back-end systems that make up a composable DXP for ecommerce, but depending on the industry and business logic, some will not be part of, and some different others will.

These stand-alone, but tightly integrated services will be wrapped with whatever user interfaces needed - your online shop, a mobile app, a point of sale or digital signage in a physical store, and so on.

Evolving consumer habits and new technologies have changed how customers shop online and placed additional pressure on brands to deliver the experiences they crave.

Magnolia’s composable DXP provides the tools companies need to withstand that pressure and deliver the modern ecommerce experience that successfully combines content and commerce throughout the digital customer journey.

Create harmony between the multiple shopping channels your customers frequent, and deliver a dynamic content experience from the initial stages of the customer journey, all the way through to checkout.

With WYSIWYG editing, preview, and a user-friendly interface, your content authors can create content for any channel without developer assistance. Magnolia also features additional tools and Connector Packs that help you accelerate the ecommerce experience, integrate your ecommerce platform, build your storefront, and scale as your brand grows.

Wondering if your brand can see success with Magnolia? So did Marella. Their existing ecommerce platform was already powering multiple websites and allowing customers to make purchases with ease. However, their marketers needed greater control over the entire customer journey and needed to manage all of the editorial content for the brand without added complexity. With Magnolia, Marella was able to manage content on multiple channels more easily and deliver a high-quality omnichannel shopping experience for their customers.

Learn more about Marella’s journey and the power of Magnolia by reading their case study.