One of the exciting sessions at Engage was all about headless commerce, titled "Unlocking the Path to Experiential Commerce." The session was co-presented by leaders from our technology partner Elastic Path, our joint agency partner TA Digital, and myself.

Presenters:

• Chad Hooker, director of product management at ElasticPath
• Joe Brannon, global commerce practice director at TA Digital
• Dr. Ali Alkhafaji, chief technology officer at TA Digital
• Meagan White, senior product marketing manager at Acquia

As we announced prior to Acquia Engage, Acquia has formed a partnership with Elastic Path to help brands realize the opportunities of open source content management and headless commerce solutions.

In our session, we talked about trends and best practices for experiential commerce. Here are just some of the highlights.

Commerce is Changing

As consumers shift away from transactional interactions and toward personalized relationships across channels, brands will need to focus on the customer experience. The era of an extensible and decoupled-based approach to content and commerce is rapidly gaining traction so organizations can easily create and deliver content across multiple touchpoints.

Brands Still Struggle to Monetize Experiences

In the beginning, there was the big monoliths that were built to be largely focused on online catalogs. Flexibility and experience optimization was an afterthought.

The monoliths are tightly coupled in terms of the transaction and the experience layer, and any changes need development or IT resources – making it difficult for marketers and merchants to quickly make updates based on customer demands.

Templated solutions were introduced to give brands a pattern to follow, but it didn’t allow for easily adding or customizing stores for multichannel. From there, service assemblies were created to combat this, but these can’t really scale to meet the vast needs of the organization.

Overcoming These Challenges with a Headless Architecture

A decoupled approach can present many benefits like greater flexibility, the option to personalize and innovate, and most importantly, the ability to deliver a great shopping experience for consumers.

I talk about the benefits of headless commerce here. In short: A decoupled model future-proofs your business and ensures you can enable commerce experiences rapidly across touchpoints as customer expectations change.

To wrap up the session, TA Digital talked about their fully managed experiential commerce solution called CommerceFactory, that leverages both Elastic Path and Acquia.

If you want to learn more about it, you can visit their CommerceFactory page or watch our webinar here.

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