Going to the store. Calling your salesperson. Clicking on a website. All ways people have bought in the past and will continue to buy in the future, but now they expect the purchasing experience to be seamless. Commerce has evolved from a distinct action that someone took to a passive activity that’s part of everyday life. Enabling the impulse buy by removing friction is every company’s goal, and commerce platforms need to provide that ability online or they will be replaced. Digital commerce is no longer just the shopping cart. It is a whole ecosystem of customer touchpoints that need to communicate between each other and predict what customers will need at each individual touchpoint. The latest Forrester Wave for B2B Commerce highlights these trends and validates the importance of each component in a commerce platform in their determination of which technology companies are named the Leaders, Adobe and Salesforce, and in naming commercetools a Strong Performer. Avionos is proud to partner with all three companies to provide commerce solutions across all touchpoints to our joint customers.
Since our founding, Avionos has been looking for new ways to deliver outcomes for our customers and to do that, we needed partners that shared a similar vision. We quickly realized that some partners were completely aligned, while others were looking in a different direction. At Avionos, we knew deployments within the cloud weren’t the future, they were the present, and the long delivery cycles of eighteen months to two years for a commerce implementation were outdated. We needed partners that aligned with this vision and we found them in Adobe, Salesforce, and commercetools.
Two years ago, Adobe purchased Magento Commerce to expand their enterprise commerce offerings and integrate it with their wider marketing and customer experience capabilities. Magento Commerce can be used to power a traditional storefront experience, while also providing the framework for seamless commerce experiences across all customer touch points from your salespeople to mobile phones to always connected consumption devices. The power and flexibility of Magento’s offering and the tight integration into the rest of the Adobe enterprise suite for driving experiences brought Avionos to Adobe years ago, and it is good to see Forrester recognize the same things in Adobe and Magento that Avionos did.
With Salesforce B2B Commerce, Avionos saw a partner that placed customers at the center of everything in the same way we did. For us, it was always about delivering great experiences to our clients so they could deliver great experiences to their customers. With Salesforce, they took the common wisdom that commerce was centered around orders and fulfilment and turned it on its head making the customer and their needs central to commerce. This pivot allowed them to create a platform that understands the complexity necessary in B2B buying with the flexibility in how to offer it to their customers. B2B Commerce Cloud is deeply integrated with the rest of the Salesforce platform from Sales Cloud to Service Cloud and into Einstein Analytics.
As a growing organization, Avionos knows that it is not just the large enterprises that drive the conversation forward, but it’s often the upstarts and smaller companies that push the incumbents out of their comfort zones with their vision and direction. In the commerce space, that smaller company pushing the industry forward is commercetools who has taken a SaaS microservices approach to their platform. Commercetools has built the core building blocks allowing their customers to provide commerce services across all customer touchpoints without tying the commerce capabilities to the front-end it was initially designed with. This flexibility provides a rapid time to market for testing and validating new commerce initiatives and even setting up online pop up shops that have a short lifetime without major overall investment.
Avionos knows there is not a one size fits all solution for every organization’s commerce needs. It’s why we leverage multiple technology partners to provide our customers with the capabilities they need to deliver for their customers. We love working with these platforms and love delivering solutions to our customers based on their needs. We realize each customer has different needs which is why we provide solutions across our partners including the Magento Commerce Fast Start and Salesforce B2B Commerce Quick Start which provide robust commerce capabilities with a rapid time to market.
