Unlocking Personalized and Unique Digital Commerce Experiences
How aligning with Shopify helps brands grow and enhance their digital commerce ecosystem
By Logan Patterson, Wil Brooks, Andy Wegleitner, and Jared Moore
As was evident in 2023’s tremendous holiday shopping results, ecommerce has continued to grow at a fast pace as most shoppers today start (and often end) their shopping journey online. Eclipsing the $250B mark, holiday online retail sales present an undeniably large opportunity for retailers to better attract, engage, and sell through digital channels. However, competition is fierce between online brands striving to meet customers’ high expectations for their online shopping experience.
This poses a tricky problem for technology: How in the world can you build a commerce solution that understands who your customer is and delivers a personalized experience that accurately reflects your brand’s value proposition?
Several major players are trying to solve this issue, but one that has established itself as an industry leader is Shopify.
After successfully working together to bring next-generation commerce technology to our clients and hyper-personalized experiences to Shopify customers, Slalom is officially aligning with Shopify at NRF 2024. Considered an industry leader by Gartner, Shopify is a global commerce company that provides essential internet infrastructure and tools to start, scale, market, and run a retail business. Shopify is behind some of the world’s most trusted brands, powering over half a trillion dollars in global commerce with merchants in 175 countries. This partnership will bring innovative commerce solutions to our clients while amplifying the features that distinguish Shopify as a commerce technology leader.
Creating personalized experiences for every customer
Data, data, data. In this highly competitive digital world where retailers are constantly trying to differentiate themselves, we continue to see commerce leaders do so by leveraging customer data to enable hyper-personalized experiences. When it comes to customer-centric strategies, Shopify leads the charge, using a combination of customer, engagement, payment, product, and other shopping data to curate experiences for anyone who visits a Shopify-powered site.
One capability that sets Shopify apart from the competition is its ability to combine customer data sources with its commerce platform data — such as Shopify CRM, Shop Pay, and marketplaces — to build look-alike audiences so that it can deliver real-time personalization at both the audience and individual level.
Having a deep understanding of your customers, who they are, what they like, and what they do has become harder over the last few years. While, on the one hand, a cookie-less world is happening in front of our eyes, there are also numerous new technologies meant to “solve” these problems. Shopify has invested in creating its own customer data repositories as well as building native privacy-compliant tracking and notification mechanisms so that brands can set some of the worry aside.
While there are several ways that personalization can manifest, Shopify does this by:
- Leveraging intelligent product-detail page recommendations
- Showing continuous shopping for returning customers
- Creating personalized bestseller lists to drive click-throughs
- Integrating user-generated content across the funnel
- Retargeting in-session based on behavioral triggers
- Timing social retargeting with smart recommendations
- Automating personalized messaging
In today’s world, consumers demand bespoke experiences across all digital touch points. Shopify’s highly personalized and data-driven platform is a differentiator for clients as personalization develops customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, and a competitive advantage.
Expanding from ecommerce to multichannel digital commerce
The marketplace has become so saturated with new brands, platforms, and channels that companies must keep up with constant change to remain competitive, as consumers look in various places to find what they want.
However, while retailers may be overwhelmed by the explosion of new ways they can connect and sell to their customers, Shopify has built a fully integrated platform to help brands meet their customers where they are in their journey.
With Amazon creating its Marketplace and social media companies integrating selling features directly into its platform, Shopify has ensured it can not only create integrations with each channel but also leverage the Shopify Marketplace Connect to link the various marketplaces that brands are selling products to provide visibility on inventory, order fulfillment, and channel performance in one place.
A flexible, fast, and scalable enterprise solution
Every client has a unique business that supports the commerce experience that they are trying to deliver, and Shopify’s platform allows for a variety of approaches to standing up, maintaining, and evolving clients’ commerce stacks. We often help our clients sort through whether a headless (fully composable tech stack with unique modular components across multiple platforms), a hybrid (composable front end with full-stack back end), or full-stack (all-in-one platform) solution architecture is the best fit for their customer, their business, and their technology organization. Shopify can deliver on all these types of solutions, providing clients with the flexibility to take the approach that leads to the right level of customization and total cost of ownership.
One of Shopify’s biggest differentiators is its ability to launch commerce sites with speed and simplicity. Shopify brings a deep list of out-of-the-box commerce features and functionality to the table, accelerating time to realize value and avoiding the lengthy and complex implementations that have plagued retailers. Shopify also boasts a massive ecosystem of trusted partners that can quickly integrate and unlock new capabilities to meet retailers where they are.
In addition, Shopify is highly scalable (picture having over 40K checkouts completed in a minute) and reliable (over 99.9% uptime), which is why it is the trusted commerce platform for some of the world’s largest retailers. Our commerce clients want to see results fast, and Shopify empowers retailers to do so.
“Shopify’s alignment with Slalom brings unparalleled value to businesses seeking a consulting firm who deeply understands the technical, business, and strategic aspects of enterprise commerce transformation,” said Ritu Khanna, VP, Partnerships, Shopify. “Together, we are excited to ignite a new era of innovative commerce experiences for our joint clients.”
Leveraging Shopify to bolster digital commerce capabilities
Commerce clients often seek personalization at scale, with multichannel experiences and flexible solution architecture, and Shopify knocks it out of the park in these areas. This alignment with Shopify will amplify the value we deliver to our clients by giving them access to a leading commerce platform that can unlock high-impact digital commerce capabilities, elevate the customer experience, and drive meaningful business metrics.
Slalom is a next-generation professional services company creating value at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity. Learn more and reach out today.
