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Apr 3, 2023 | 4 minute read
written by Abisola Adeyemo
Shoptalk is an annual tradeshow where thousands of retailers come together to discuss the latest trends, technology, and future of retail. Our team was thrilled to attend once again in Las Vegas this year- meeting partners, prospects, and clients to talk about the state of the retail industry and discuss their digital vision and initiatives for the upcoming year.
In this blog, I’ll share some of the key trends and learnings from the showfloor.
While the idea of Composable Commerce is becoming more prevalent in discussions from prospects, partners, and sessions, the understanding of the general concepts of what it entails and the benefits for brands is still lacking.
There is a general understanding of headless commerce, from sessions explaining the agility and flexibility to increase speed-to-market and lower TCO. However, there still needs to be more clarity in the market on the difference between headless and Composable Commerce.
In short, Composable Commerce builds upon a headless commerce architecture. We have a Composable Commerce Architecture Guide which explains the nuances and differentiation between the approaches.
Start building the commerce experience your unique business demands with a free Elastic Path Commerce Cloud account. Get in touch with us and we will setup a Free Trial store for you for six weeks.
The idea of omnichannel experiences is nothing new for retailers. Today’s market requires the flexibility to reach customers across touchpoints and channels whether through mobile, in-person, or in-store. However, the conversation has now shifted from not just reaching the various touchpoints, but to creating a unified experience across channels.
What does a unified customer experience look like? It’s more than just creating a seamless experience across touchpoints. It’s understanding the customers and creating experiences that align with their needs.
This also looks like making a concerted effort to provide assistance through AI chatboxes and video on your brand’s websites and through mobile. There is a growing expectation for customers to be helped throughout the buying experience and those means are a notable strategy to assist with this. In the more traditional omnichannel perspective, unified commerce also looks like providing platform support for social selling and curating personalized content that suits their needs.
As we’ve seen over the last couple of years with a global pandemic, inflation, economic uncertainty and more, a merchandiser’s ability to pivot is a required skill to meet market changes.
Whether you’re weathering the changes between pre-pandemic and post-pandemic shopping patterns or dealing with cultural or socio-economic shifts for consumers, brands need to leverage flexible and agile merchandising strategies to make changes and iterate at speed.
That starts with having a deep understanding of the customer through data and by utilizing a platform that will give you the best-in-class digital experiences.Elastic Path’s Show Presence
Last but not least, the energy at Shoptalk was impeccable. Meeting hundreds of retailers and chatting it up about how we’re de-risking Composable Commerce for brands was exciting and purposeful.
The first day of Shoptalk we announced Integrations Hub. Integrations Hub is a library of no-code, instant–on integrations that reduce the time and cost of implementations so you can get live faster and vastly reduce your TCO. This is a game-changer for some many brands who are concerned about the cost and work to manage a multi-vendor solution. We handle the hosting, management and monitoring. Integrations are enabled so quickly that we even held a competition at the booth challenging people to enable one of our integrations within 5 minutes or less.
Our booth also featured our customer Vivrelle, a first-of-a-kind luxury membership club that gives customers the opportunity to borrow luxury handbags, jewelry and accessories. At the booth, we demonstrated how we power their membership business model and enable one-click checkout through our EP Payments solution. We even raffled off one of the Vivrelle luxury handbags to those who participated in our demo.
Overall, Shoptalk was one for the books with many lessons and valuable conversations. It was a great way to get excited about the future of retail. We’re looking forward to attending again in the future.