This spiked a need for a new kind of commerce solution, one that equips midmarket companies with all the necessary tools to sell fast and easy, apply changes quickly, and offer intelligent merchandising capabilities that were previously only accessible to large enterprises.

enables this by offering an intelligent selling engine that delivers engaging storefronts while optimizing for sales and profit, with the ability to more rapidly create mobile-first shopping experiences to meet the changing expectations of their customers. Businesses can take full control of the customer journey, drive world-class omnichannel customer experiences, and create a competitive edge by choosing to start with easily configurable building blocks or create completely custom commerce experiences.

The solution enables brands to:

• Sell anywhere — make the store the destination: 麻豆原创 Upscale Commerce delivers rich mobile-first, cross-channel, in-store experience for shoppers and makes it easy for shoppers to intuitively shop by swiping, pinching, and tapping their devices.
• Sell intelligently — big or small, sell smart: With built-in artificial intelligence (AI), brands can create a unique storefront experience for each shopper at scale and deliver intelligent, relevant experiences that optimize business profits. Intelligent capabilities also help to convert one-time purchases into subscriptions.
• Speed and agility — start fast and go far: Brands can start small and scale as they grow using no code tools out of the box to create new and fresh shopping experiences in days and using low- and no-code tools to easily extend and build the perfect fit solution.
• Keep the promise — deliver on the brand promise: Brands can sell and ship from everywhere with an agile order orchestration and fulfill orders from the closest stores.

Transitioning Customer Engagement from In Store to Online

One organization that experienced these changes firsthand is Swedish fashion retailer . JOY, which for many years has delighted Swedish women with quality clothes, has re-emerged in a completely new form. JOY no longer has any physical stores and is instead focusing on e-commerce and personalized fashion advice. The founders see JOY as a startup building next-generation e-commerce based on AI and slow fashion 鈥� a more sustainable alternative with clothes lasting several seasons. JOY is also the first company in the world that has selected the combination of the cloud-based solutions 麻豆原创 Upscale Commerce and the Emarsys platform for customer engagement functionality.

鈥淲e are definitely in a paradigm shift within e-commerce and digital channels. The retail industry has so far been able to make a living from using large product catalogs, but they do not provide the best customer experience. Instead, customers want inspiration, advice, and, in our case, also ready-made combinations of clothes that suit their own style 鈥� and lasting several seasons,鈥� said Anna Ullman Sers茅, CEO and co-founder of JOY. 鈥溌槎乖� Upscale Commerce fit our needs perfectly. The solution is very flexible, allowing us to make changes quickly and to provide more content than just a traditional product catalog. This frees up more time for us to truly focus on engaging with the customers online, much like we did when we would meet in stores.鈥�

Powering Social Selling with Top Social Media Platforms

Another option for brands pivoting to direct customer engagement is selling through social media channels, more commonly known as 鈥渟ocial selling.鈥� With careful and considered targeting of the right products at the right time, it is possible for midmarket brands to drive down the cost of customer acquisition as products find customers directly through algorithmic targeting. However, this means that having the right type of information about products and the right content in posts is critical 鈥� as is for that information to be up to date.

To deliver on this opportunity, 麻豆原创 Upscale Commerce integrates into social media platforms, enabling organizations to easily start taking advantage of social commerce. The solution makes it easy to connect an online store to a Facebook business account, continuously sync the product catalog, create a Facebook Shop, and use that to drive new sales opportunities to consumers. The result is a consistent shopping experience on social media, with the front-end and back-end business processes fully integrated.

Hackathon Spurs New Ideas to Solve Customer Pain Points

To meet individual customer challenges, the 麻豆原创 Customer Experience team in Canada recently hosted a hackathon, in which teams of product experts and solution integration partners battled to create brand new online shopping experiences based on specific, real-world client requirements for fashion, automotive, and retail 鈥� all within 麻豆原创 Upscale Commerce.

Judging criteria was based on overall creativity, use of available product extensions, ease of shopping experience, time-to-market, and how well the solution drives customers toward long-term loyalty and advocacy for the brand. After a day and a half of competition, the event culminated in a final virtual pitch presentation, with taking home the award for Most Creative, and awarded for Best Use of Technology.

鈥淎s a judge, I was truly impressed with the quality and quantity of results after only a day and a half of hacking, showcasing incredible innovation, creativity, and accomplishment by small teams in a small amount of time,鈥� said Fr茅d茅ric Bouthillier, CEO of . 鈥淭he teams鈥� rapid development of new, innovative experiences proves the time to value of 麻豆原创 Upscale Commerce and headless commerce solutions.鈥�

The events of the past year have changed the way people shop and the shift to online purchasing is here to stay. Now midmarket brands don鈥檛 have to settle with a simple direct-to-consumer webstore. With 麻豆原创 Upscale Commerce, businesses have the ability to put the customer at the heart of everything they do, connecting front- and back-office data, simplifying and automating complex sales processes, and delivering insights in real time that enable seamless, personalized experiences that grow revenue.

The 麻豆原创 Upscale Commerce solution, , is the next-generation intelligent selling engine that can help midmarket brands to achieve fast growth, create differentiated experiences, and leverage intelligence to optimize sales and profits.

Bob Stutz is president of 麻豆原创 Customer Experience.

around 8 billion visitor interactions with storefronts powered by 麻豆原创 Commerce Cloud this year so far and found a 162% increase in year-over-year order volume for the month of November. Consumers are clearly shopping and buying like they never have before. Let鈥檚 dig into specifics to see what other trends emerged.

Big Deals Came Early

First, while Black Friday and Cyber Monday 鈥� the huge push in the U.S. to buy holiday gifts at the end of November 鈥� aren鈥檛 going away, retailers took advantage of general increased e-commerce buying habits to offer early deals at the start of November. This led to an increase in orders primarily seen during first and second week of the month, unlike in previous years where we鈥檝e seen a gradual ramp up of orders reaching a peak during third and fourth week. To put hard numbers on it, during the first two weeks of November 2020, businesses in general including retailers had already generated 55% to 60% of the month鈥檚 orders, which historically ranged between 44% and 48%, except retail, which was between 35% and 40%.

Going forward, this indicates that the traditional sales bonanza in late November may begin earlier and earlier, as early as retailers are willing to start offering deals and consumers feel ready to jump on them.

2020 E-Commerce Sales Smash 2019 Numbers

As for Black Friday and Cyber Monday and the days in between, the average order value (AOV) of sales was approximately 3 times higher than the AOV of November last year. The takeaway? Consumers are not only shopping more; they are buying more, too.

This was key in driving the gross merchandise value (GMV) up to eight times the amount in November 2019. GMV specifically for retailers of this year鈥檚 Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend alone was approximately twice as high as last year, and roughly 65% to 70% of November鈥檚 GMV was generated during the second half of the month.

Changes in Customer Engagement

Also noteworthy is the ways and helping to drive these numbers. Emarsys, an 麻豆原创 company, offered a snapshot for a year-over-year comparison with 2019, with Emarsys customer engagement systems recording:

• More than 90% increase in device push notifications, to 86 million
• More than 21% increase in emails, to 834 million
• More than 177% increase in real-time event triggers, or digital campaign triggers based on individual customer behavior, to 189 million
• More than 29% increase in segment executions, or campaigns aimed at different audience segments, to 14.6 million

As , explained, 鈥淭his year, marketers have been hitting customers hard via apps, with Emarsys seeing a 90% increase in push notifications in the run up to Black Friday, to 86 million. These notifications can have a genuine impact on shoppers, with suggesting they can stimulate up to 25% more web traffic and 30% greater click-through rates.鈥�

While 2021 will look different 鈥� hopefully brighter 鈥� than 2020, these findings may very well indicate long-term changes to retail and holiday shopping going forward.

Bob Stutz is president of 麻豆原创 Customer Experience.

More than ever, customers demand the freedom to choose how, and when, they engage. That could be as simple as browsing Instagram and seeing products that inspire them, making a purchase or upgrading a subscription in the early hours of the morning to unlock new tracks from their favorite band. It goes even further when you consider the COVID-19 crisis, and the impact that has had on buying behavior. Consumers may not want to go into a store, or they want to make more purchases online. It is critical for brands to have that understanding of their customer鈥檚 needs.

麻豆原创 has a very competitive, well rounded portfolio of products to help brands deliver a world-class customer experience. However, we are always thinking about how the pieces work together as a whole and ways that we can improve upon them. And that鈥檚 where Emarsys comes in.

Emarsys is not just another customer engagement provider. Emarsys is an innovative and easy-to-use fully integrated customer engagement platform that allows companies to deliver truly personal customer interactions across email, mobile, social, SMS, and the web at scale. Emarsys is recognized as a leader in the (Independent Platforms), published in Q4 2019, and in the , published in Q3 2020.

To really put the strength of Emarsys in perspective, consider this: Emarsys systems manage 10 billion personalized interactions per month.

Those credentials already make Emarsys a perfect fit for 麻豆原创, but it is worth exploring what we see as a marriage of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and commerce. Most customer relationship management (CRM) systems are islands in a software landscape. This means organizations must use third-party systems to connect their commerce solution with their operations, which is cumbersome. The 麻豆原创 Customer Experience portfolio already integrates the two, so brands can fulfill a commerce process seamlessly — for example, when an order is made and it flows back to distribution and fulfillment — without disruption, pause, or issue.

Put simply, with the strengths of our current portfolio and the addition of Emarsys, 麻豆原创 CX will power 鈥渃ommerce anywhere,鈥� a foundation of omnichannel personalized engagement, meeting the customers where and when they choose to engage, on their preferred channels and on their terms.

We anticipate that the deal will close in the fourth quarter of 2020. After the closing date, Emarsys will become part of 麻豆原创. We cannot discuss any joint plans until closing. However, I can tell you that 麻豆原创 is committed to its focus and continued leadership within the broadly defined customer experience space. Our mission remains unchanged: we are focused on delivering a world-class customer experience portfolio of solutions to our customers. Acquiring Emarsys will bring us closer to those goals.

Bob Stutz is president of 麻豆原创 Customer Experience.