Sitecore Shocks Industry with New Commerce Release – and it’s surprisingly good!
They’d successfully kept it under wraps. But with much pomp and pageantry, Sitecore unveiled Sitecore Commerce 9 last week at their largest expo, Sitecore Symposium.
Now known simply as Sitecore Commerce, its latest releases bridge the gap between content management and E-Commerce. Using the latest lightweight architecture, much of the platform has been rebuilt from the ground up, using Microsoft’s new .NET Core technology, putting the company on the forefront of E-Commerce development.
When announcing the new platform, Sitecore had this to say: “Sitecore Commerce delivers a core framework for Sitecore that leverages the latest Microsoft technologies to provide lean, extensible, hostable services for rapidly and agilely delivering commerce functionality for customers either on premise or in the cloud.”
So what does that look like?
Sitecore revealed that they’ve incorporated lessons learned from years of field commerce experience to develop their latest platform. As a result, many components that have proven integral to the E-Commerce process were completely rewritten. Order management, pricing methods, or promotion management have now been designed to be much more intuitive and simple to manage.
‘Intuitive’ is one of the key words that describes the new platform. Marketing efforts and customer profiling are much easier and more understandable, allowing you to speak directly to your customer and view them with a 360-degree lens. You can get to know their preferences and their behavior and tailor the experience to them. This means that the user will feel that elusive personal touch, the digital ‘sales clerk’ that knows how to give him exactly what he wants. And this doesn’t have to stop after they have bought from you. Post-purchase management has been improved as well, increasing the potential to create return customers.
Connecting with Sitecore’s acclaimed CMS and embedded in its Experience platform, Sitecore Commerce makes the connection of E-Commerce and content management much simpler, enabling a seamless experience-driven commerce solution. It helps you keep your inventory, can integrate physical and virtual products in the same shopping cart, and enables you to easily run promotions or manage the customer's entitlements. Every change can be tested against previous versions, telling you exactly how your improvements turn out.
This combines well with Sitecore’s known modular approach, which is enhanced in these new releases. If you only sell virtual products, you don’t need inventory management, right? So you don’t have to install it either. This goes for most modules, which can be combined at will and means developers can work on a single module without having to update the entire platform.
A further advantage lies in the possibility to create unique user experiences across platforms, be they mobile or Desktop. The linkup between CMS and E-Commerce isn’t bound to one kind of screen, but picks up the customer wherever he may be.
And there’s good news for Microsoft Dynamics AX customers. Whether you want to run a local or pre-built integration you can, thanks to an AX connector layer in the environment.
Furthermore, Sitecore seems to have stepped up its development speed considerably compared to its rivals. The newly-announced Sitecore Commerce 9 is based completely on the latest technology stack from Microsoft that is intended to replace their long running .NET Framework. “The Commerce server has been removed and replaced by .NET Core services” says Niteco’s Chief Technology Officer, Linus Ekstrom. “This should improve performance as well as enable Sitecore to run fully as PaaS on Microsoft Azure since they have now removed all dependencies to the legacy Commerce Server.”
With a strong track-record in Episerver and Sitecore, Niteco is well placed to deliver .NET solutions. What’s more you can be guaranteed that the solution we offer is an independent recommendation that suits your needs not our interests.
So feel free to direct your inquiries about Sitecore Commerce to us. We will get your E-Commerce project going.
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