Introducing Organization Management from Elastic Path

Enabling Centralized, Multi-Store Commerce Management With Ease & Speed

Elastic Path is thrilled to announce our newest capability, Organization Management. This capability empowers businesses to easily manage their environment across multiple, unique stores, streamlining operations and reducing costs. With Organizations, businesses can create and manage multiple commerce stores across different business models (franchises, distributor/ supplier networks, etc.), brands, or any other entity in a matter of days, not months.  

In this blog post, we will dive into the business problem Organization Management solves and how business can take advantage of this capability today.

The Business Problem

Consider the following business: a manufacturer of veterinary supplies only sells their products to authorized veterinary offices and hospitals. These businesses sell the manufacturer’s products alongside their own products and services such as grooming supplies and services. These downstream businesses want the ability to provide a commerce experience for their customers, but oftentimes they do not have the time or resources to deliver a customer facing commerce experience. Traditionally thought of as a B2B2C model, this has historically been difficult to create and support. Think of all the nuances in a single instance of a commerce platform: integrations need to be set up and managed. Product and pricing created, deployed, and synched, customer and order data synchronization… the list goes on. Layer on the uniqueness of each individual downstream business, for example they may only sell a subset of the manufacturers products, and the complexity increases. 

In traditional platforms, the most common approach to support B2B2C models has the manufacturer replicating their commerce instance for each of their partners and creating custom processes to support synchronization of products, integrations, etc. At the end of the day, this approach, while feasible, is too complex and requires too many resources to support it.  For example, IT creates the resources required for each unique store, programmers build and configure integrations for each store, devops must maintain each store with patches and updates, and support is providing fixes unique to each store environment. This reality has held back companies from embracing this business model, resulting in lost revenue.

Managing Organizations with Traditional Platforms

The Power of Organizations: Multi-Store Management 

At Elastic Path, we saw this problem and were determined to figure out a way to empower businesses to bring this unique and lucrative model to life- without the cost & headaches.  That’s why we are excited to share Organization Management. 

Organization Management enables an elegant and efficient way to manage multiple stores, connected in a single environment.  The term 'store' in this context refers to an Elastic Path Composable Commerce store, which supports data segregation and access management across multiple business units in an organization or between organizations. 

The parent organization is where products, categories, pricing, catalogs and integrations can be defined, which are then shared with downstream stores in the organization. This immediately takes away one of the biggest challenges with supporting a multi-store business model - supporting the sharing of information across multiple stores. Commerce teams do not have to worry about replicating data and recreating integrations, they are automatically shared downstream, and are controlled by the parent organization.

Managing Organizations with Elastic Path

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This scenario also happens frequently in multi-brand organizations, where each brand wishes to maintain their own brand identity, creating their own promotions, etc. We often see each individual brand endeavoring to make their own platform decision as a means by which to maintain this control. This creates an inordinate amount of complexity and technical debt in the parent organization which is likely looking for ways to consolidate their technical solutions. With Organization Management, the parent organization can now manage all brands in a single environment. Integrations to internal and external systems can be managed centrally with a ‘write once use everywhere’ methodology.

Each downstream brand will have their products ‘streamed’ to their individual store. This enables consistency of product information across the organization, while still giving the brand full control over their site experience. This is the ever-elusive win:win scenario! The parent organization can consolidate technologies, reduce customizations, and centrally manage integrations while still allowing brands to fully control their own unique brand experience. 

This flexibility to manage multiple stores at the organization level allows businesses to streamline their operations, reduce costs, and ensure consistency and accuracy in their customer experiences. By managing product and catalog data (via Elastic Path Product Experience Manager) at the organization level, merchandisers can easily update their catalogs across all stores, saving time and effort while allowing for greater control over their sales strategy, while also providing individual store administrators the ability to personalize their own experiences

Whether businesses have one or multiple commerce experiences, Organizations provides a single, integrated location for managing and monitoring their stores, helping them to save time, reduce errors, and gain valuable insights into their overall business performance.

Key Features & Benefits of Organization Management

Organization Management  includes features that will benefit existing and new Elastic Path customers who need the flexibility and control to manage multiple stores in order to meet their business goals Integrations Hub

• Flexible & Centralized Product Data & Catalog Management: With Organizations, merchandisers have the ability to manage EP PXM data at the organization level. This means they can create an organization's products, hierarchies, pricebooks and catalog that can be easily shared across all the stores in the organization. This is especially useful for businesses that have multiple stores catering to different selling channels, regions or sub-brands. By managing EP PXM data at the organization level, businesses can streamline the process of updating their catalogs across multiple stores. Instead of making changes individually for each store, merchandisers can make updates at the organization level and have those changes reflected across all stores that use that particular catalog. This not only saves time and effort, but it also helps ensure consistency and accuracy in the product and catalog data. It is important to note that data in the stores will be segregated which means only store users in a given store will be able to access that store’s data. Additionally, Store Admins will have full control over which of the organization's products and product categories they want to sell in their store. They'll also be able to customize the pricing for these products in their store, giving them greater control over their sales strategy
• Centralized Commerce Operations: With Organizations, multi-store sellers can now manage all their stores from a centralized system, eliminating the need to log into separate admin systems for each site. This significantly reduces the time and effort required to manage multiple stores and enables more efficient scaling of commerce operations.
   
• ‘Write once Use everywhere’ Integrations: Organizations includes support for instant-on integrations, via Integrations Hub,  that can be shared and managed across all stores in the organization. This eliminates the need for creating and maintaining custom integrations, further reducing development and maintenance costs. Businesses can seamlessly integrate their existing stores into their organization, ensuring a smooth and efficient transition to centralized integration management.
   
• Single Point Configurations: Organizations allow businesses to define and manage settings at the organization level that apply across all stores. This streamlines the process of managing multiple stores, reduces the potential for errors, and ensures a more consistent and efficient process. For example, businesses can define a default currency at the organization level and easily override it for specific stores as needed. This streamlined process is much simpler than defining currencies individually for each store, saving businesses time and effort.
   
• Access Management: The administrators at the organization level - called Org Admins - automatically have super admin permissions for all the stores in the organization. This means that if a store admin encounters an issue or needs assistance, an Org Admin can quickly jump in and help out without needing to be added as a super admin for each individual store. This streamlines the process and saves time and effort in resolving any potential issues at the store level.Organization Management is a powerful capability that enables businesses of all sizes to fully manage their multi-store use cases, unlocking additional revenue opportunities.This unique capability centralizes commerce management, streamlines operations, and reduces costs. 

What’s Next

We're looking forward to seeing how different businesses will benefit from the new Organizations capability.  But, this is just the beginning. Our team is continuously working to add more innovative functionality to our multi-store management solution, so stay tuned for what's to come. As always, we love to hear from our customers and learn how they are leveraging Organizations to grow their business. We look forward to sharing their success stories with you and helping more businesses achieve their commerce goals.

How to Get Started

Organizations is now available to all existing users of Elastic Path Composable Commerce. To try it out, please contact our Customer Success manager, who will be glad to assist you with the set-up of your own organization. 

Learn More

We are excited to share this new capability and look forward to seeing how our innovative customers use it to optimize their business.  To learn more, checkout the Documentation.