Contentful Announces Agile E-Commerce Solution
Contentful recently announced an agile e-commerce solution aimed at helping retailers manage content across multiple channels more effectively. The new solution expands Contentful’s content infrastructure solution—which provides a central hub for creating, editing, and managing content—to e-commerce.
“The problem is that traditional CMSs are too rigid and really limiting in terms of keeping up with the pace of what digital looks like today,” says Heidi Tretheway, director of brand and marketing communications at Contentful. “Traditional CMSs were built to format and deliver content only to a single channel, like a website or an app. Our solution for e-commerce is content infrastructure that allows you to deliver your content to any digital platform.”
Such platforms could include websites, apps, digital displays, smart watches, conversational interfaces, even something that has yet to be invented, she notes. “That’s a key way we’re moving away from that traditional CMS that locks you into just one platform, one channel,” Tretheway says. “And then if you want to go build another channel, you need another CMS and then suddenly you just have a mess of lots of little CMSs, which does nothing for scale or standardization, which is something that e-commerce enterprises are really craving.”
Because Contentful’s content infrastructure platform unifies content on a single hub and allows it to be used seamlessly across all digital channels, e-commerce retailers can make quick adjustments during busy periods, such as the holiday season, and ensure that customers have a consistent experience regardless of channel, she says.
The e-commerce solution aims to enable retailers to optimize and repurpose content across multiple channels “Something that retailers are realizing now is that digital is a lot more than just a customer acquisition channel—digital is really core to the products themselves,” Tretheway says. “Even if you’re selling a car, you’re not just building steel; you’ve got your website for people to do research on it, a watch app to remotely unlock it, a mobile app to schedule your services, or even the digital display in the car itself. All of our customers who are e-commerce companies are also digital companies, and where they’re really experiencing pain is that the traditional CMS has not been built to handle all of the digital channels that they’re now responsible for serving.
“Their customers expect customization, personalization, across all the digital channels, and the traditional CMS just isn’t able to support that level of digital delivery,” she adds.