Commerce applications are becoming more complex, evolving from simple online stores into cross-channel ecosystems that collect data and build robust profiles from every customer interaction.

As there is a resurgence of in-store shopping experiences, brands have a fresh opportunity to enhance that data to provide relevant and unified experiences to customers across digital and physical locations and channels.

For enterprises, integrating a commerce platform with all their purpose-built data systems is key to creating seamless operations and a connected, personalized customer experience through digital channels.

The complexity of commerce ecosystems.

The process of creating this dynamic, digital, data-based ecosystem is difficult, as enterprises face significant challenges related to data management, business agility, and strategic focus.

The data management challenge.

Enterprises are storing data they’re collecting across an extensive set of systems. This data includes behavioral data about site visitors, social interactions, shopper behavior on various platforms and in web searches, communications with customers, email open rates, and other elements. Additionally, businesses are simultaneously managing data about their product catalog, inventory, pricing, orders, and much more. By doing so, businesses are striving to construct a comprehensive view of their shoppers and discover where those customers see value.

The business agility challenge.

Managing large volumes of data and facilitating seamless shopping experiences requires applications with diverse functions, often sourced from multiple vendors for cataloging, search, personalization, content management, and order management.

IT teams can feel constrained by the complexity of such a system. Disparate schemas, extensibility models, and developer tools from various vendors demand that they construct complex, point-to-point integrations. Layering such solutions over time can cause commerce environments to become fragile, difficult to alter, and expensive to maintain.

As IT teams stitch together more services into their commerce application, changes to a single component could have an outsized impact on the entire digital environment. This impact makes it harder for IT to rapidly adapt to changing business needs.

The strategic focus challenge.

In this context, IT teams often prioritize maintenance over innovation. According to Forrester, maintaining systems is one of IT leaders’ top three challenges. The 2023 Deloitte Global Technology Leadership Study reports that 48% of IT budgets go toward optimization while only 21% support new value-generating business models or entering new markets.

Lacking agility and an inability to dedicate time and resources to building cutting-edge operations puts enterprises at a competitive disadvantage. Technology is shifting rapidly, and businesses are competing to reach customers on their preferred platforms even as those preferences and platforms change. The stakes are high.

The need for seamless integration.

Enterprises manage many purpose-built systems of record to organize their data, including Product Information Management (PIM) for product data, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for customer information, and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for inventory and pricing.

IT teams must integrate all these systems with the enterprise commerce platform to ensure seamless operations and excellent customer experience. These integrations provide concrete benefits, such as the ability to show real-time pricing and up-to-date inventory on product detail pages, and the option to automatically send orders to an ERP for fulfillment.

But constructing this network of integrations isn’t simple and can be costly. The process involves working with disparate APIs, data models, authentication mechanisms, and more. To integrate these systems and maintain them at scale, developers need a flexible way to orchestrate data, APIs, and events among them.

A unified commerce platform.

Adobe Commerce is a composable ecommerce solution that lets you quickly create global, multi-brand B2C and B2B experiences — all from one platform. Businesses use it to deliver personalized, highly responsive storefront experiences that boost traffic, conversions, and gross merchandise value (GMV).

Introducing Adobe Developer App Builder.

Adobe Developer App Builder is an extensibility solution that makes it easier and more affordable to extend and integrate third-party services with Adobe Commerce. It’s a cloud-native and serverless platform that allows developers to quickly create event-driven integrations to systems like ERPs, CRMs, and PIMs. It automatically scales resources to their needed levels, and developers don’t need to customize Adobe Commerce for smooth functioning, which reduces the effort and cost of maintaining integrations.

Say hello to the integration starter kit.

While Adobe Developer App Builder provides the platform, the integration starter kit is an accelerator that sets up all the templates an IT team might need and can cut the cost of building those integrations in half.

The templates work as foundational blocks to integrate with systems such as SAP S4/HANA, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, and Epicor. The integration starter kit enables bi-directional data synchronization, and it comes equipped with onboarding scripts, best practices, and pre-built data flows for common data types like products, orders, customers, stock, and shipping status.

One of the main advantages of the integration starter kit is its speed. It can cut down on development time by around 50%. In addition, the starter kit makes a commerce system more resilient as the configuration of the connections, validations, and data mapping are less prone to fail if an error occurs. It also enables the system to be more flexible, allowing IT teams to adapt without disrupting the entire tech environment.

Key benefits of using App Builder and the integration starter kit.

App Builder and the integration starter kit offer important benefits that help enterprise IT teams work faster and more effectively to manage digital commerce, including:

• Faster development and lower cost of ownership. Pre-built data flows reduce development time and cost, freeing up staff time and financial resources to be invested in other high-value areas of the business.
• Data synchronization. App Builder enables event-driven synchronization for products, orders, customers, and other factors, as well as serverless functions for data transformation.
• Architectural blueprints. The App Builder includes onboarding scripts and blueprints for rapid integration and best practices for easy maintenance.
• Pre-built integrations. App Builder supports integrations with common enterprise systems, while third-party vendors and partners use the starter kit to create pre-built integrations between Adobe Commerce and software like Salesforce, SAP, Epic, and HubSpot.

Use cases.

The Adobe Developer App Builder and the integration starter kit have a range of use cases that can enhance enterprise workflows and reduce cost and effort for IT teams, such as:

• Order management. The system can synchronize orders created in Adobe Commerce with an order management system to optimize order fulfillment or synchronize fulfillment status back to Adobe Commerce.
• Product information or subscription management. The system can synchronize product information from PIM or subscription platforms with the Adobe Commerce platform, enabling better sales and account management.
• Customer relation management. The system can synchronize customer information or leads from Adobe Commerce to a CRM system, ensuring that accurate and up-to-date customer data is available in a single location.

Enhance commerce operations with effortless integrations.

Seamless integrations are essential for businesses to compete in the fast-changing world of modern commerce. Integrating disparate systems like ERPs, CRMs, and PIMs into a commerce platform can help streamline operations, promote agility, and provide a connected customer experience.

IT leaders often juggle numerous applications, integrations, and systems that they’ve already built, making them hesitant to adopt a new, promising solution because of time or resource constraints.

Adobe Developer App Builder and the integration starter kit simplify and improve commerce operations by facilitating integrations, automating processes, and enabling real-time synchronization. These tools reduce development costs while helping businesses deliver better shopping experiences to every customer everywhere they are.

Discover how to stay competitive, become more efficient, and find new opportunities for innovation and growth in the evolving digital commerce environment.