Giving eCommerce business users more content control

Technology evolves about as quickly as the second hand moves around its dial. But as technology speeds up, businesses, too, must do their best to keep up at the same pace. The challenge, however, revolves around the ever-growing duties of eCommerce development staff. With IT departments being rained down on with new responsibilities and requests, the growth of an online store is inevitably stymied. And that’s where IBM and its WebSphere Commerce business users come into the picture.

In its much-anticipated feature pack 7, IBM announced several enhancements for those on WebSphere Commerce version 7. The announcement was replete with upgrades to its current site search capabilities, order management framework and responsive design techniques. It also introduced its new Commerce Composer, which will forever change the roles of business owners whose job is to grow eCommerce revenue.

Essentially, the Commerce Composer will put business users behind the wheel when it comes to driving positive customer experiences. According to IBM, it will “enable greater business user control over store creation, management, and preview by offering the ability to create and modify page layouts and content without the need for IT.”

By doing so, changes to online stores won’t have to stand in a queue, waiting for development teams to find the time to address them. Reducing the time to market will inherently increase competitiveness. When businesses upgrade to the new feature pack, thereby adopting the Commerce Composer tool, business users can: 

• Take advantage of a rich set of layout templates and apps to create and build dynamic, compelling pages that offer shoppers a personalized browsing experience.
• Enjoy a more streamlined approach to managing page content by using fewer Management Center tools and screens.
• Continue to use the powerful, precision marketing capabilities that are offered by the marketing tool, such as web activities and marketing experiments. These capabilities are supported in a number of apps in the Commerce Composer apps library.
• Apply layouts consistently across categories and other page types by using the same layout template, and even the same layout, for multiple pages.
• Create layouts for specific devices (desktop or mobile) and responsive layouts that adapt to any device.

In the release, IBM highlighted the availability of detailed instructions and tutorials, but to attain further assistance implementing these new business user roles, feel free to contact NetSphere Strategies. And stay tuned to our blog, where we will dive deeper into the new feature pack and its cutting-edge capabilities.