In today’s digital world, there is a paradigm shift in the way online business is done. A few years back, merchants were just speeding up to make their presence felt in the digital world. That’s the focus area on which their systems are built on - this is majorly an on-premise mode and pays attention to the kind of products being sold online. Now, with everyone coming to online platforms, the buying needs have drastically changed, both in terms of shopping experience and platform adaptability to support an increase in traffic.

From content’s perspective, user expectations have grown exponentially. When they come to an online store, they expect the store to understand their needs and requirements, and offer them relevant content. In the last few years, the focus on personalization has increased.

From a platform perspective, in-house or on-premise versions of ecommerce are in order to scale up to meet the customer demands. Also, the time and efforts to build on-premise solutions are too high as compared to SaaS based platforms.

These platforms (SaaS), hosted on cloud, take care of the scalability, but the other factor, which is TTM (Time To Market) makes the distinction among SaaS based products. The one which offers more features and less time-to-market, will definitely be the choice of the day.

Let’s speak about the two faces of an online retailer having a successful presence. Firstly, a rich, contextual, and personalized content. Secondly seamless integration with some rapid and quick sales channels, wherein customers can complete their journeys and place orders.

Sitecore, being leader in CMS, and Shopify the leader in SaaS based ecommerce system, is a perfect collaboration to give your customer a rich, personalized and fluid commerce experience. Further, with Sitecore xDB, you can store all your customer journey information and can utilise that data to plan and execute content marketing.

Let’s read about some features of Sitecore and Shopify that can be leveraged to build a content + commerce experience and lastly will also look at the ways of integrating between two systems.

Sitecore Features:

• Sitecore xDB can store every piece of information about your customer at one place. This data can be used across all your channels to deliver a unique experience to every customer.
• It has the capability to store what all pages customers have visited on a site, their social mentions of your brands, the emails they have opened and what they have purchased in the past. This can help to track exactly where individuals are in their respective customer journeys, and how closely they match the prototype your ideal customer profile.
• Real-time analytics to query and report on all data: Sitecore analytics can be used to learn which campaigns are working and how visitors are navigating to your site. Sitecore analytics help you create or edit content accordingly.
• Marketing Automation feature of Sitecore is an easy and user-friendly interface to quickly set up automated marketing campaigns. Sitecore marketing automation can be used to automate the frequency and personalization of your customers interactions over any channel at any time.
• Content Personalization: Sitecore personalization allows one to control the content a visitor sees in real-time on the basis of their behavior. As the next step, one can use this data stored in Sitecore xDB to develop a more personalized online and offline messaging strategy.

Shopify Features:

• Provides all the functionalities that an ecommerce (D2C or B2C) store needs
• Provides integration support to all the major ERP/CMS systems
• Provides integration to all major payment providers
• Provides integration to all major shipment providers
• Exhaustive collection of themes which can meet any of your store design requirements
• Out of the box responsive support for all pages- Mobile, Desktop, Tablets
• Recover lost sales by automatically sending an email to prospective customers with a link to their abandoned shopping carts, encouraging them to complete their purchases
• Support for more than 50 languages
• Provides support for major countries and state tax rates
• Allows easy integration with Facebook wherein users can browse products and make purchases without leaving Facebook
• Flexibility to create discount codes and promotions from Shopify Admin panel
• Provides integration to all major social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr
• Support to create multiple variants for a product
• No limit on the number of products to be sold on store
• Optimizes the product page for search engines with product specific meta tags, titles, and URL handles
• Intuitive mobile apps that sync with your online store
• 24x7 support to take care for your problems

Integrating Sitecore and Shopify

To integrate the two systems, the simplest and the quickest way is to utilise the “Buy Button” feature of Shopify. Here are some high-level approaches and steps to connect:

• Configure your Shopify store with all required integrations at the backend, Example payments, ERP, shipping etc.
• Next, export your Sitecore product data to the Shopify store under a single collection
• Enable the "Buy Button" feature for that collection. This will generate the “buy button access code”
• In Sitecore site product details page, you can add the buy button and save the changes
• Your content site is ready for online transactions
• Simply browse through the products and start buying