How Shoppable Landing Pages Unlock Commerce Experimentation

Creating a shoppable landing page should be easy. But, for many commerce brands, standing up a shoppable landing page requires heavy IT involvement. These types of delays don’t work for marketing teams or agencies that want to run a timely campaign or collaboration. Elastic Path is changing that by introducing easy-to-create, no-code shoppable landing page capabilities — making it possible to experiment with your existing commerce platform without the wait.

Let’s dig into why commerce experimentation has been so difficult to date, and how shoppable landing pages will become fresh ground for experimentation.

The challenge with commerce experimentation 

Given the nature of commerce, it’s not always seen as a place to experiment. Real dollars and cents are involved, and campaigns tie into important backend systems. Physical retailers can easily try out new endcap designs, floor layouts or displays (bananas in the cereal aisle, anyone?). But, for ecommerce, the same flexibility is much more complicated.

To work around the complexity, some brands resort to shadow IT build-outs on Shopify. While it’s easy to set up a landing page in Shopify, breaking the order flow leads to compounding problems with fulfillment, customer success, and more.

After all, your business-critical backend systems are there for a reason. That’s why we asked, “What if you had the freedom to experiment with shoppable landing pages, while working with your existing systems?”

The purpose of a digital experience is having a canvas on which to experiment, abstracting away the complexity from the backend system. You drive the experiences on the frontend, rather than your backend system dictating the restrictions. The next phase of composable commerce combines frontend flexibility and experimentation gracefully with backend systems via Elastic Path Integrations Hub.

Next, let’s look at some real-world applications of this technology.

Real-world shoppable landing page use cases

We believe shoppable landing pages should be simple. That’s why we recently acquired Unstack to bring commerce, content, and customer data together for business users with a merchandiser-friendly, low-code visual editor. Using Unstack, merchandising teams can create turn-key storefronts for a range of commerce platforms, as well as shoppable content with enhanced tracking and analytics and effective on-site personalization to enhance commerce and marketing strategies.

By pairing Unstack with our existing products such as Product Experience Manager (PXM), digital teams can use existing checkout systems and order management systems without replatforming — dynamically creating experiences on the frontend  to respond at the speed of your business, not the speed of your IT system. Here are a few examples of what’s possible. 

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Social media influencer or celebrity campaigns 

You never know when an influencer will have a viral success “moment.” Imagine a golf brand has a year-long contract with a pro that wins the Masters in an upset. Before, it may have taken weeks or months to spin up a custom, shoppable landing page featuring the winning golfer’s apparel. By the time the page gets up and running, the moment has passed. 

Now, it’s easy. Brands have all the assets in their toolkit already — the relationships, approved language, branding and merchandising. Now they can spin up a new page in Elastic Path as a part of their own website, leveraging it for marketing purposes while tapping into the existing checkout flow. Any kind of digital marketing campaign that requires a shoppable landing page — whether it's run by an agency or a brand itself — can be created in minutes, rather than weeks.

Dynamic product bundling

Selling paddles and a life vest with a kayak shouldn’t involve rocket science. But, tightly coupled catalog architectures have been a big hurdle for brands who want to offer product bundling on a shoppable landing page. This leaves opportunities to generate incremental revenue on the table. As I recently wrote, How to Supercharge Your Product Catalog Without Replatforming, with PXM, all of the capabilities required to build bundles are built from the ground up as decoupled, independent services to give merchandisers incredible flexibility. 

These capabilities are delivered out of the box in our business user tooling, Commerce Manager, eliminating the need for custom development work or off-platform CloudOps to manage custom code. 

Brand collaborations

Ever shop a brand collaboration to find the item you want on one brand’s site, but not the other? This is yet another example of a catalog configuration and data integration issue that shouldn’t be happening in 2023. Like the dynamic product bundling example above, PXM can help get around these issues by integrating collaboration landing pages with the backend systems controlling inventory management and order fulfillment.

Experiment using your existing commerce system

To sum up, with Elastic Path, all types of shoppable landing campaigns can be seamlessly integrated with your existing commerce backend systems. Our flexible, no-code frontend combined with a loosely coupled, composable architecture and Integration Hub makes building these campaigns easy — even with a complex commerce system embedded behind the scenes. 

Let’s make 2023 the year of marketing and merchandising the moment!