In the age of digitization, eCommerce has become the primary medium for conducting business, and the number of online stores has grown significantly in the past few years. With the growth of eCommerce comes a range of risks that can threaten the growth of your online store. These risks include lack of omnichannel experiences resulting in customer loss, unexpected website downtime, data security and safety, and more. Fortunately, Adobe Commerce (formerly known as Magento Commerce) offers a range of products to help your eCommerce business to overcome these challenges.
Also, Adobe Commerce, which is currently recognized as the face of eCommerce success, powers up to 25% of businesses that operate online. More than two million websites, including those for Nike, Lenovo, Samsung, Ford, and Nestle, use Adobe Commerce.
5 eCommerce business challenges and solutions
In recent years, the eCommerce sector has grown significantly, and nearly all businesses are now online. With this expansion came an increase in the dangers associated with operating an online business, some of which are inevitable without careful planning.
So, here are few eCommerce business challenges and how Adobe Commerce help you overcome them-
#1. Absence of data analytics
Challenge: Data is becoming increasingly crucial for every industry, and eCommerce businesses can better assess their successes and failures and base their decisions on factual data. Your company needs to choose an eCommerce platform that offers capabilities for data analytics and in-depth information.
How Adobe Commerce helps: One of the advantages of Adobe Commerce Cloud is that it seamlessly integrates with Adobe Analytics, allowing your business to better visualize and understand the data. With Adobe Commerce and Adobe Analytics integration, you can analyze data across channels and devices, prepare visualizations to gain insights, and optimize your strategies to deliver better CX.
“Check our resource here to learn more around Adobe Analytics implementation practices for online retail.”
#2. Headless Commerce
Challenge: There is an entire array of devices with varied screen sizes and resolutions. To offer effortless buying experiences, your online store must be optimized for all devices and channels- web, social media, app, web portal. This is where headless commerce is an interesting proposition. With disjointed frontend and backend systems, your developers can create native app-like shopping experiences across devices without the need for extra optimization or tailoring. As your backend remains untouched, you can change frontend as per trends and market dynamics.
How Adobe Commerce helps: As a leader in the eCommerce industry, Adobe has state-of-the-art features and capabilities in place to allow online merchants in building headless storefronts.
- Adobe Commerce provides online retailers with complete flexibility around building custom frontends, leveraging leading-edge technologies.
- Regardless of channels and devices, Adobe Commerce architecture employs the same APIs and services to deliver consistent online solutions.
- As it goes with a headless architecture, you can deploy n-number of changes to the front ends independent of the backend, thus imparting agility to your online store.
- Adobe Commerce PWA Studio provides integrated content tools like Page Builder to deliver responsive app-like shopping experiences across mobile, desktop, and web.
- Adobe Commerce + Adobe Experience Manager integrated together form a powerful duo for content management and build complex yet personalized solutions based on user journeys.
- For additional capabilities, you can seamlessly integrate with other external frontend platforms.
#3. eCommerce SEO and getting online stored ranked top on SERPs
Challenge: You can increase your online store's visibility and searchability with the help of eCommerce SEO, making it easier for potential customers to find your products and services. You can improve organic internet traffic and consequently sales and revenue by optimizing your website for search engines. A solid SEO strategy can also help in building client trust in your business.
How Adobe Commerce helps: Adobe Commerce SEO is a more functional and easy-to-use dashboard with competitive meta-data capabilities. It provides you with canonical tags to prevent content duplicity. With minimized JavaScript and security improvements, you improve your site’s performance, positively impacting your eCommerce store’s rank on search engines like Google, Safari, and Bing. And the best part, it is perfectly optimized for mobile devices and screens, improving your overall traffic and on-the-go experiences.
“Read more about Adobe Commerce SEO here.”
#4. Data security and safety
Challenge: For an eCommerce business, its customer data is like a gold mine. Also, hackers are constantly searching for such sensitive data online. They either steal and sell data for millions or utilize your clients' payment information to make money. Regardless of their intentions, a data breach can cost your company billions of dollars. Customers will experience a violation of confidence, and you will suffer reputational harm that is hard to measure.
How Adobe Commerce helps: For starters, Adobe Commerce eCommerce platform is a PCI-certified Level 1 Solution, thus providing PCI Compliance. Other than this, there are several other security assurances that merchants can enjoy with Adobe Commerce:
- Tools like security scanning allows online retailers to assess all their sites and get real-time updates about security risks, unauthorized access, and malware attacks.
- Adobe Commerce Fastly provides DDoS (to point attackers to the network instead of server) and CDN (to prevent any direct access to the parent server) protection from Layer 3-7. For magnanimous Layer 7 attacks, Adobe Commerce developers can prepare custom rules for headers, cookies, client IP addresses, or request path.
- Additional security is provided by the Fastly web application firewall (WAF) to discourage injection attacks, malicious inputs, data loss, HTTP violations and other threats.
- Adobe itself conducts periodic regular penetration testing to run security vulnerability assessment and monitor sites for risks.
- Adobe Commerce employs Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), encrypted via AES-265 algorithm for data storage, thus adding an additional layer of security.
- In Adobe Commerce, all code is deployed as read-only, reducing the chances of PHP injections. Moreover, as developers control who gets access to the deployment target, they can easily reject any insecure requests.
- All data from application server and logs is stored on production servers and in backups, history is stored on its user interface, and source code changes are stored in Git.
#5. eCommerce Website Downtime
Imagine that your online store is having a big sale. You've spent a lot of money and effort revamping your website to increase sales. Also, you've made investments in things like customer service and advertising. Then, on the big day, abruptly, your online store goes down.
You are unable to appear and serve your clients on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. This kind of scenario would be a complete disaster for any eCommerce company and can cost them a significant amount of earnings. Your website can go down for various reasons, and it can be a technical issue with your hosting service, or the server you're using might not be able to handle the volume of traffic, etc.
How Adobe Commerce helps: Proactive monitoring, scalability, cloud deployment, automated backup and restore, maintenance mode, and expert support are just a few of the features that Adobe Commerce offers to assist in minimizing and managing eCommerce store downtime.
- Adobe Commerce Fastly fixes your cache issue that results in loading delays on your website. It provides your users with a stale copy when new content is taking longer to fetch so as to provide an uninterrupted experience to your users. This process gives enough time to your CDN for fetching the requested webpage from the origin server.
- When delivering personalization, developers need to cache private content for faster retrieval to improve site performance and speed. With Adobe Commerce, you can handle private content in a client’s web browser instead of the server, for example, the checkout or payment information.
- Adobe Commerce Site-Wide Analysis Tool allows you to generate reports around insights, system warnings, and recommendations to improve your online store’s overall health.
What else does Adobe Commerce offer?
Needless to say, Adobe Commerce is a powerful and customizable eCommerce platform that offers numerous features and advantages to help you create a successful online store. It gives you the flexibility, scalability, and security you need to thrive in the cutthroat world of eCommerce, whether you're just starting out or an established enterprise.