Most all-in-one ecommerce platforms were created 20-plus years ago — and it shows. They simply can’t keep up with today’s customers, who demand high-speed access across channels like websites, mobile apps, social media, and even in-store displays. 

That’s why many ecommerce companies are ditching their legacy vendors and replatforming to a modern, API-first, composable stack. Recently, we offered an in-depth article to explain what this kind of replatforming entails, how you can benefit from replatforming your ecommerce site, and how to ensure your project is a success. 

Today, we want to follow up by making the case for using Contentful as the hub for your new ecommerce platform.

What can Contentful do for your ecommerce platform?

Contentful is designed to address the needs of a fast-moving ecommerce site by improving backend content operations, speed, and flexibility across the board. 

Rather than requiring a single, centralized content team, Contentful offers a central content authoring hub that can be used throughout the enterprise. That way, different content groups across business units or geographical locations can seamlessly work in parallel to create compelling shopping experiences.

But that might sound vague, so let’s get into specifics. Here’s what you can expect to gain when you include Contentful as the hub for your ecommerce platform.

1. Modern, centralized content production

Due to their extremely limited content capabilities, legacy ecommerce applications make for a tedious and fragmented content-production experience. Here’s just one example of how that plays out: To add an ecommerce product to a page, your content team needs to walk to a separate application, search for content, copy and paste, over and over again. 

In contrast, Contentful offers a connected experience. It integrates seamlessly with a variety of ecommerce apps like Shopify Plus so you can access their functionality from within Contentful itself. Now, your team can perform tasks like adding ecommerce products without ever leaving the content-production environment. 

It’s all possible thanks to Contentful’s App Framework, which also integrates with the other parts of your platform, like your DAM, CRM, and PIM. This way, it enables fluid access to all the tools and functions your team needs for ecommerce content production.

2. Blazing-fast, scalable sites

Contentful can readily accommodate a Jamstack architecture to give your content the fastest load times possible. Integrate Contentful with static site generators like Next.js or Gatsby and build-deploy platforms like Netlify or Vercel, and you’ll offer your customers content at blazing speeds wherever they are in the world.

And, as you likely know, every second of loading time cuts 7–10% off your conversion rate. That means speeding up your website won’t just improve the customer experience, it will result in better SEO with sites such as Google, and make direct, quantitative improvements to your bottom line.

With Contentful as the hub of your platform, you’ll also have the advantage of cloud-based auto-scaling. If a Black Friday sale brings a huge spike in web traffic, this architecture can provision more resources and absorb demand automatically.

3. Content across channels, devices, and locales

Most legacy ecommerce platforms will force you to recreate each piece of content for each different channel, device, and locale. That’s a hassle, not to mention a drain on time and expertise. 

One of Contentful’s core benefits is the ability to create a piece of content once and then render it in all the places where your customers find you. It will render for any kind of device, like a mobile device, computer, store display, and so on. It can also serve content on any kind of channel, including websites, social media apps, and more.

Contentful also supports robust, granular localization tools. With minimal effort, your team can republish one piece of content in different languages and dialects, but also customize media assets as needed for different locales. That way, you can use Contentful to reach and delight your customers wherever they are.

4. Sophisticated content

Where legacy apps often limit you to displaying items in simple rows, Contentful empowers you to create dynamic content that can truly connect with your customers.

For example, your team can build dynamic, inspirational content that better showcases your products with videos and images. They can also personalize the content in a variety of ways. That could mean adding a call to action, showing your customers relevant recommendations for other products that might fit their preferences, and more.

5. Seamless campaigns and launches

Using the limited content capabilities built into your legacy ecommerce platform, your team might spend two weeks generating more complex assets like landing pages. With Contentful, they can do it in as little as two hours. 

The Launch app makes it easy to create and launch campaign content. Your team can generate multiple pages, with multiple images. They can render them for a range of devices, channels, and locales. And then they can set it all to go live at the same time — without any dangerous code changes — for a tightly coordinated launch that wows your customers.

6. Zero-risk updates

To update content with your legacy apps, you likely rely on your engineering team to push code right when you need the content to go live. This is extremely dangerous, especially on days like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, since you risk breaking your site on the busiest shopping days of the year.

Contentful’s Launch app eliminates this risk. You can schedule any content changes to be published at different times, with no need for dangerous code updates that can lead to lost revenue.

7. Democratized content creation

Where legacy applications required developer resources to generate new product, landing, or promotion pages, Contentful makes it possible for a wider variety of personnel across your company to generate content. 

That means, for example, you can have non-technical merchandisers spin up new landing pages without any help from developers. This reduces strain on your developers, and significantly democratizes the content creation process across your company.

8. Better numbers

Taken together, these benefits make for a better-performing ecommerce operation. As part of your new composable ecommerce platform, Contentful brings improved conversions, a better cart-to-checkout rate, and a higher average order value. 

The evidence

You don’t have to take our word for it. Below, you’ll find three leading companies that outgrew the limitations of a legacy ecommerce platform and decided to replatform. They all included Contentful as the hub of their new ecommerce platform, and every one improved their numbers significantly.

Bang & Olufsen

• Challenge: Luxury Danish headphone and speaker company B&O had long relied on a single monolithic platform for both ecommerce and content capabilities. They found it difficult to generate more sophisticated content and to create an omnichannel experience that met their customers where they were.

• Solution: The company opted to replatform to a composable architecture stack, with Contentful for content and Commercetools for ecommerce. 

• Outcome: B&O significantly expanded its content capabilities and improved the customer experience. With Contentful, the company is now shipping innovative, inspirational brand content to the website, mobile devices, and even in-store signage.

• 60% increase in conversion rate

• 27% increase in average order value

• 5X faster load times

Read the case study: Bang & Olufsen makes ecommerce gains selling high-end audio products with Contentful

TELUS Digital

• Challenge: The digital-product arm of Canada’s fastest-growing telecom corporation had its content spread across seven CMSes and content repositories for more than 30 digital properties and products. Keeping all of its content up to date required manually updating each piece in each silo.

• Solution: TELUS centralized its content operations with Contentful.

• Outcome: The company is now able to create a piece of content once and render it across various devices and channels with customer personalization. The platform also sped up its content creation speed dramatically: When Apple launched iPhone X, they were the only company in Canada offering the phone for sale for the first 15 minutes after its release.

• 14% increase in conversion rate due to personalization

• 4X improvement in sales YoY

• 30% increase in page load speed

Read the case study: TELUS is first to market by transforming its content operations

SWAROVSKI OPTIK

• Challenge: The Austrian optical instrument company exports 91% of its products, making it imperative to launch content, products, and features across three customer segments and nearly 100 countries. Their monolithic tech stack wasn’t up to the task.

• Solution: A composable ecommerce platform built on Contentful for content and Commercetools for ecommerce.

• Outcome: SWAROVSKI OPTIK’s new platform sped up their website significantly. It also offered localization tools that enabled the company to re-render content for different languages and dialects — and customize as needed rather than starting from scratch.

• 92 countries with custom content

• 7 languages localized by country and region

Read the case study: SWAROVSKI OPTIK merges headless content and commerce

Wrapping up

As you consider moving from your legacy all-in-one ecommerce platform to a modern, API-first, composable stack, you’ll be faced with a lot of options.

If you choose Contentful as the hub for your new ecommerce platform, you’ll gain centralized content production that enables teams across your enterprise to build blazing-fast, scalable content experiences. You’ll create sophisticated content that better reflects your brand. You’ll democratize the content-creation process, and even launch content across sites, locales, and in different languages — at any time you want. And you’ll do it all without performing dangerous code pushes that risk bringing down your store when you need it most. 

In short, you’ll modernize your content operations to simplify the process of creating powerful, compelling shopping experiences that connect with your customers. And you’ll improve your numbers in ways that are easy to measure.

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