This year’s Adobe Summit looked slightly different from usual, as the COVID-19 pandemic prompted it to switch to a virtual event incorporating a set of on-demand videos with a specialized Magento Commerce track. 

Although we haven’t all been able to meet in person this year, Adobe and Magento have unveiled several major updates to their commerce ecosystem.

If you’re a Magento guy, developer, retailer, or marketer, or even remotely related to Magento, here are the key takeaways that Adobe is working on regarding Magento.

1. Magento has announced the release of Magento Commerce 2.4.0 in the 3rd Quarter of 2020
2. Revolutionary customer experience with Magento Commerce through the adaptation of omnichannel and an ERP system integrated into the Magento Customer Service Portal
3. PWA Studio is accelerating the build and launch of the modern mobile experience through building a frontend that is optimized for the performance using modern tools and frameworks particularly designed for a mobile-first experience
4. Create a quick launch and a rich and compelling shopping experience through Page Builder
5. Adobe Sensei powering Magento Product Recommendations to increase conversions, revenue, and stimulate customer engagement
6. Magento framework’s role in helping to integrate with the ERP system to handle bulk data integration, sync between the two systems, boost sales, improve performance efficiency, and enhanced CX
7. Headless commerce with features of omnichannel is enriched with immersive content, extended with business logic, and integrated with additional touchpoints
8. A Headless Commerce Project is easy to use and proves as a key to successful web stores. In terms of Magento, it is independent of frontend API and based on GraphQL
9. Several B2B and B2C features such as Support server-side rendered content for SEO, enhanced shoppable experience using the Magento Integration, live access to the product catalog, enrich product data with marketing content, core commerce component, and much more

Let me take you through a virtual tour of some of the highlights for Magento that deserve much appreciation and offer the much-needed optimism in the current situation. 

Shantanu Narayen’s welcome notes focused on the significance of digital transformation and how Adobe is assisting brands to engage digitally with their customers.

• Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen sums it up perfectly: “People buy experiences, not products.”
• “Digital isn’t only changing and reshaping our daily lives, it’s driving the economy.” – CEO Shantanu Narayen

Besides, Suresh Vittal from Adobe emphasises the benefit of data in personalization, stating:

• “Customers are expecting brands to treat them like they’ve known them their whole lives. Even in the first interaction”

Furthermore, Jason Woosley from Magento announces the release of Magento 2.4 in Q3 of 2020, which will focus on omnichannel and Progressive Web Apps (PWA). 

Sessions by Anita Andrews, Manmit Walia, and Gunchal Pental during Magento Summit demonstrated how Larson-Juhl, one of the leading companies of manufacturing and distribution of custom picture frames, revolutionized customer experience with Magento Commerce through the optimization of omnichannel experience across the globe.

They also illustrated that Larson-Juhl helped to fast-track the transition of support via an ERP system into the Magento Customer Service Portal, where Adobe, SourceMash, and Larson-Juhl, jointly, provided best-in-class delivery services to their clients.

• Through this, the customer journey is made easier and convenient to drive the brand and execute the marketing plan
• Offer the customers ease of ordering by giving them the relevant product details
• Enable self-service features like invoice payment, organizational account management, and real-time status of their orders
• Provide a clear and concise view of our brand to build customer recognization across the globe for any channel
• Drive traffic to their customers with the robust “Where to buy” feature

The biggest motivation for merchants to interact with their customers lies in enhancing customer experience and creating persuasive content. This leads to an increase in the rate of conversion and remains ahead of competitors.

With Magento Page Builder and PWA Studio, merchants can offer more attractive, relevant, and fresh content and at the same time boost efficiency and shopping experience. Site Builder lets you build new pages and edit content 10 times faster! 

The key opportunity for merchants to connect with their customers lies in improving the customer experience and creating compelling content. It results in a boost in conversion rates, and stay ahead among the competitors.

Adobe’s investment in content creation and modern front-end is:

• Page Builder 
• GraphQL
• PWA

It is a way to quickly launch a rich and compelling shopping experience that aids in creating engaging websites and easily edit it for offering fresh and interesting content to the customers.

Take control of your brand by using the customizable page layouts, drag and drop content management, and the brand will speak for itself!

Furthermore, save time and resources with no dependency on designer and developers. It is a complete DIY system.

For the Magento 2.3.4,  the Page Builder updates include:

• Product Carousel – merchants can choose how to display the products
• Product Sorting – Sort by category, list of SKUs, name, price, stock, etc

PWA is the most popular open-source project on Github in Magento. With 50% of top contributors from the community and 1700+ members in PWA Slack Channel, it is safe to say that PWA Studio’s community is growing.

PWA Studio is accelerating the build and launch of the modern mobile experience through building a frontend that is optimized for the performance using modern tools and frameworks particularly designed for a mobile-first experience. 

It also creates immersive and engaging web experiences that adopt native app best practice. Furthermore, it lowers development cost by unifying the frontend to a single application.

Putting the power, speed, and creative content of Page Builder into the hands of marketers designing PWA studio based store frontend will provide:

• Template Manager – Save any Page Builder content as a template and use it on any other page, block, product or category
• Video Background – content to engage customers’ attention. Store the video on a web server, CDN, YouTube or Vimeo and use a link to add it to a page builder content

Adobe has promoted it as a marketing tool for merchants to increase conversions, revenue, and stimulate customer engagement.

The integration of Adobe Sensei and Magento Commerce will bring the power of creating and managing intelligent product recommendations to its feature toolbox.

Adobe has also provided us with the stats to demonstrate that product recommendation is a tool to boost conversion, revenue, and customer engagement. Below are some examples for it:

• Netflix reported that 75% of all watched content was recommended
• Amazon reported that recommendations drive 35% of its revenue

One of a senior solution architect at Magento talked about the challenges that Kensium Solutions faced with their enterprise clients when integrating external systems like ERP. He explained about Magento Web APIs, bulk sync, queuing (RabbitMQ — messaging middleware), and GraphQL to handle large volumes of data while integrating with external systems.

Integrating ERP gives a boost to sales and performance and benefits the data syncs with an external system using a live demo.

Further, two types of integrations were discussed in the Summit; small scale and large scale. And when it comes to Magento framework’s role in helping to integrate with the ERP system to handle bulk data integration, the sync between the two systems is very important.

Integration offers improved customer overall experience along with a simplification of operations. What else do you need!

Furthermore, there are several benefits of integrating the external system with Magento which are listed below:

• Reduced manual entry
• Reduced errors in data entry of product, inventory, customer, order, and shipping
• Streamline inventory synchronization
• Track updates
• Customers are automatically notified when their orders are shipped
• Allow tracking the product delivery
• Easy management of price and product changes with inventory
• The flexibility to add multiple online and offline sales channel without hindering operation efficiency
• Easy handling the increased demand in online orders without allocating extra resources.

It can integrate using the three ways; Batch Process, Event-driven Process, and Event-driven with Queuing.

Headless commerce can be, or maybe it already is, enriched with immersive content, extended with business logic, and integrated with additional touchpoints. A Headless Commerce Project is easy to use and proves as a key to successful web stores. In terms of Magento, it is independent of frontend API and based on GraphQL.

Customers expect a seamless shopping experience in their buying cycle and it can be offered with a flexible platform and a modern API. The important thing is to note how to evolve your solution and how leading brands are using an API-first and microservice approach to reach their customers on a global level, thanks to Magento Commerce and its order management system.

A great omnichannel has its unique features such as:

• How your customers perceive the experience and how it differentiates you from your customers
• Fast and convenient
• Customers’ perceived value which leads to revenue, loyalty, and customer satisfaction
• Constant innovation is possible only with a flexible and modern platform and headless commerce is a key ingredient

Headless Commerce Project is easy to use and proves as a key to successful web stores. In terms of Magento, it is independent from frontend API and based on GraphQL.

1. Headless and headful authoring for HTML and SPAs
2. Headless and Headful (multiple-output formats)
3. Support server-side rendered content for SEO
4. Enhanced shoppable experience using the Magento Integration
5. Live access to product catalog
6. Enrich product data with marketing content
7. Core commerce component
8. Build the best search landing pages to optimize SEM, social and email marketing campaigns, and improve ROAS (return on Ad spend)
9. Single Magento backend to display all the discounts and offers and the discounts across all channels
10. Real-time data (to offer seamless shopping experience for customers) of GraphQL and REST APIS
11. Building beautiful landing page content using Adobe Experience Manager
12. Adding barcode scanner to the web channel and extending the core Adobe Commerce Cloud feature

Adobe is on a track to make Magento the best e-commerce platform in the world (if it’s not already the best till now). 

Amazing, isn’t it? 

A lot more of PWA Studio, Page Builder, Headless Commerce, and product recommendation is going to come our way, with an aim to improve the customer shopping experience, increase engagement, and ultimately revenue. 

And if you’re still not sure what to expect in the coming days, then do reach out to us so we can better explain it to you!

Till then, Stay Home, Stay Safe!