Enterprise retailers usually need to implement advanced and interconnected strategies to succeed in the digital commerce space. They have lots of carriers working with them to deliver products faster everywhere, process payments from different providers, integrate with various marketplaces and channels across their users’ journey, and so on.
In order to make these strategies truly effective, when deciding on a digital commerce platform it’s incredibly important to evaluate its flexibility and customization capabilities. The rise of architectural patterns based on concepts like Composable Commerce and MACH also formalizes the relevance of adopting and advocating for a modern technical stack in the digital commerce ecosystem, making it vital for brands willing to grow their digital presence.
At VTEX, our answer to this trend is VTEX IO, our own low-development platform focused on digital commerce composability strategies. By using this solution, enterprise retailers can create unique experiences for their customers and connect their whole ecosystem of solutions into a unified journey. At the same time, these merchants can leverage our reliable and secure serverless infrastructure with the fastest time-to-market in terms of implementation.
Take a look at VTEX IO’s benefits below!
An important part of VTEX IO is our storefront development technology called Store Framework. Using this technology, VTEX merchants willing to provide the best user experience on their websites can deliver a customer-centric storefront to their customers.
When it comes to storefront customization, the biggest advantage of using VTEX IO is enabling collaboration between developers and business operators. Store Framework delivers an intuitive and easy-to-use JSON abstraction to accelerate technical teams, but it also accompanies the Site Editor, a native and powerful Content Management System (CMS) so business users can stay completely independent from engineering.
Performance is also at the heart of VTEX IO storefront development technologies and the numbers speak for themselves. A reference company for technology and electronics, Motorola grew its sales by 300% only in UAE with VTEX IO in its DTC ecommerce website for the region.
Composable Commerce is here to stay and change our market — for the better.
According to Gartner, organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace the competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation by 2023. While it seems to be a technical concept, composable commerce is in fact deeply related to meeting business needs and designing a future-proof digital strategy.
Bringing a composable approach to the table, enterprise retailers can deliver more to their customers, faster, and also keep their operations always connected. It’s all about being in harmony with a complex ecosystem of solutions to deliver the best shopping experiences in every single sales channel.
VTEX IO makes it possible to:
VTEX’s architecture has been ready to deal with this scenario for years now. By using VTEX IO, our merchants can craft their own composable experiences too, combining the platform’s core commerce capabilities and tailor-made extensions inside our environment through VTEX IO apps. The VTEX App Store, our marketplace for app distribution, is also another source of composable components for retailers using VTEX IO.
These capabilities were key in enabling Pague Menos, one of the largest pharmaceutical chains in Brazil, to implement a successful omnichannel strategy with VTEX. Even with a huge and far-reaching brick-and-mortar operation, cross-channel logistics options for online customers were implemented leveraging VTEX IO composability tools and these already represent 33% of the total sales of the chain.
All that has been said until now probably sounds like music to your ears but, as an enterprise retailer used to this complexity, you might be wondering how hard it could be to implement such advanced strategies. We already talked about the opportunity cost of not replatforming, but VTEX IO benefits for enterprise companies also get migrations covered.
VTEX excels in time-to-market, with an average of 109 days to build a complete store from the ground up. Carrefour’s migration, for example, included moving more than 7 million SKUs and 13 million customers from its previous platform to VTEX. Plus, it connected +3,000 external sellers on the marketplace and created new integrations between physical and digital experiences. Using VTEX IO as a whole enabled the project to run quickly and smoothly even during the beginning of the pandemic.
Not everything in the digital commerce space is about creating new stuff — maintaining what has already been created is also important for enterprise retailers willing to grow. Just as you need to update your catalog when launching a new collection or manage promotions and discounts during a special event, dealing with technical infrastructure is a must-have for companies developing their own composable and customized experiences.
Big sales events such as Black Friday can greatly illustrate this scenario. In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the whole world had its first completely digital BF, with sales growing more than 20% only in the US according to Adobe Analytics. Handling all of this growth in traffic and transactions would usually demand intensive infrastructure provisioning and planning, but VTEX IO customers can rely on us for the health of their applications running on our platform.
VTEX IO is serverless by default, which means that VTEX maintains the infrastructure layer in which stores and integrations run just as we manage the servers behind our core commerce modules like the Catalog, the Order Management System (OMS) and the Checkout. This saves time for our customers so they can focus on their “real” business, and still guarantee the reliability and scalability of the applications developed in our environment.
Customer examples fully leveraging VTEX IO in key moments like these include C&A and Grupo Soma.
VTEX IO enables the online retail industry to achieve their best. The platform not only empowers brands to build customized and performative storefronts, delivering the best user experience to end-consumers, but it also offers native composability capabilities that unlock bold and innovative strategies and keep their whole operation always connected and integrated.
All of this is achievable through an easy, fast migration and a first-class, reliable and secure infrastructure, so you’re always available to your customers in the right channel and at the right moment.
Learn more and contact us about VTEX IO.
The CCX Company, in collaboration with VTEX Commerce Cloud, expresses gratitude for having had the opportunity to enhance its understanding of the advantages, trends, and other elements addressed in the current topic. This article was jointly developed and is brought to you by the VTEX Commerce Cloud team.
