“IBM & SAP just pretend to manage content. Salesforce admits it doesn’t.”

Sören Stamer
Jul 25, 2017 · 4 min read
By Moyan Brenn, Flickr.com, CC-BY-2.0

It’s an open secret in the eCommerce market: Commerce platforms offer plenty of functionality but consistently fail at content management.

If you work for any major brand or retailer, you might have heard your commerce vendor pitching content management and experience management as part of their offering. The truth is: If you still rely on your commerce platform to do all of the content management for your online store, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Most commerce vendors offer some basic CMS features. And those tend to be good enough for some customers. But if you are a high demanding customer, selling things that are expensive or exclusive or hard to explain, you will certainly need more.

A few days ago, I discussed this topic with the CEO of a global digital commerce agency. For years, they’ve partnered successfully with a wide range of commerce players including IBM, SAP, Salesforce, Magento and others. As a result, he’s seen it all. This CEO is a no-nonsense kind of guy who knows to separate spin from fact. This is what he said to me:

“IBM and SAP just pretend to manage content. Salesforce admits that it doesn’t.”

While this might come as a surprise to new buyers of these platform, it’s an open secret with partners and longer-term customers.

For years, it is common knowledge among brands and retailers that customer experience is the key to success. That is especially true in the world of eCommerce, where competing vendors are never more than a click away. No wonder that digital experience management is such a hot topic for them. Anyone who tried to get serious about content and commerce, however, quickly realized that commerce platforms fail at all but the most basic content requirements — and sometimes even at those.

Luxury brands and retailers were the first to jump ship. Their success is entirely dependent on the quality of the end-to-end customer experience. While they needed to standardize the processes in their commerce platform to be able to scale and lower their costs, they can’t afford a standardised — and therefore ordinary — customer experience. That is the one area where brands need to be as unique as possible.

To implement these content driven commerce strategies, many chose more sophisticated content management systems to integrate with their existing commerce platforms. The more seamlessly these systems work together, the better. Their success then paved the way for retailers and B2B brands to do the same.

So don’t let the marketing messages of commerce vendors confuse you. Content management is a strategic capability that all brands have to master for future success. It is way too important to get it wrong. Sophisticated content management does a lot more than simply storing some text snippets and images, it enables your brand to be unique and will be one of your most strategic assets going forward.

Sophisticated content management empowers enterprises with a broad set of functionality:

  • It handles all assets and their complete lifecycle across the entire customer journey — online, offline, noline.
  • It assembles assets into micro-experiences, in multiple languages, on multiple sites, for multiple countries, in multiple channels and optimized for multiple devices.
  • It acts as a home for all your content and enables you to guarantee both consistency on a global scale and adaptability on a local scale.
  • It empowers you to update hundreds of sites with a single click, to add new channels in hours, and to relaunch all global brand sites in a matter of days.
  • It enables you to render the same content in a million ways and personalize the experience to find the best variant for every single customer.
  • It uses artificial intelligence (A.I.) to understand your content and optimize your customers’ experiences on the fly.
  • It empowers your business users and your subject matter experts.

Sophisticated content management is the key to delivering outstanding experiences.

It is mission critical for every brand — because content matters.

About CoreMedia

CoreMedia has become a preferred content management vendor in the luxury, fashion and beauty space. We enable the global market leader in luxury online retail, YOOX Net-A-Porter (YNAP), to build outstanding customer experiences. Boots and dm drugstores also chose CoreMedia for their online stores and in-store kiosks. Fashion brands like Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and an iconic Italian footwear company all updated their digital shopping experiences with CoreMedia as well. And this trend didn’t stop at B2C. B2B brands like Graybar and Emerson have adapted the same technology to massively improve their B2B e-commerce experience.

Today, CoreMedia offers out-of-the-box integrations with leading commerce platforms like IBM WebSphere Commerce, SAP hybris, Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Magento, plus reference implementations for SAP YaaS and home-grown systems. CoreMedia’s Digital Experience Platform enables brands and retailers to seamlessly add sophisticated content management to their existing store — efficiently and fast.

Sören Stamer

Written by

CEO & Co-Founder of CoreMedia — empowering brands to orchestrate truly ICONIC experiences with CoreMedia Content Cloud

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade