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Transcript

Today’s program ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce Product Update. It’s now my pleasure to introduce your first presenter for today, Rohan Bhatt, Senior Product Marketing Manager with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ. Welcome Rohan. Thank you so much and welcome everyone and thank you all for joining us for this webinar on some of the incredible new capabilities that we’ve introduced to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce over the last few months. We are so excited to showcase some of the latest commerce innovations and share a sneak peek at what’s coming up next within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. As a brief introduction, I’m Rohan Bhatt. I’m a Senior Product Marketing Manager. I’m joined by my colleague Surya Lamech, who is also on the product marketing team. We are supported today by a few product managers who will be answering some questions in the Q&A so please feel free to go ahead and post your questions there as we go through the discussion today. For today, we’re going to cover three key themes. First, we’ll share how you can increase conversion rates in sales using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce AI-powered merchandising and ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Cloud integrations. Up second, we’ll show how you can simplify integrations and custom development while reducing time to market and maintenance costs using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Developer App Builder. Third, we’ll discuss how you can deliver a faster experience and support larger catalogs via platform and Cloud enhancements. At the end of today’s presentation, we will round it out with a sneak peek at what’s coming in the next six months. Be sure to stick around all the way through the end of the presentation. With that, I want to get into it and we’re going to start out with a focus on driving conversion through personalized experiences. To start us out today, I want to think about what matters to your customers. What is it that they care about? What helps them move from initially discovering your company or brand all the way through to engaging with you and converting? When we look at what really drives customers through to conversion, ultimately, there are two pillars that matter most. The first is product discovery or showing the right products to the right customer just in that right moment. The second is an engaging shopping experience, which ultimately comes down to delivering impactful content, offers, and messaging across every touch point to guide customers through to conversion. These areas form what we call personalized commerce experiences, and optimizing each of them can have a major business result. In fact, research recently done by Deloitte Digital shows that personalized experiences can drive one-and-a-half times increases in revenue per customer and twice the customer engagement. To bring the most value to you, we’ve been laser-focused on delivering innovations within these two areas. I want to start by taking a look at the first pillar of personalized product discovery, which covers site search, personalized product recommendations, and the browsing experience. Often when we look out in the market at what companies are doing to facilitate product discovery, we see a few blockers that stand in the way of getting super effective with servicing the right products to the right customers. The first is an inability to consider buyer context. What that means is that historical and current behavioral actions that shoppers are taking on your site aren’t captured and then shared to the features that then enable those customers to find the products that they need, like site search or recommendations. The second is a lack of automation via artificial intelligence. It’s really easy to personalize if we’re only talking about creating those personalized experiences for one or two customers. But when we think about all of your customers across all the different brands and regions that you have, all that scale, it becomes much harder to do. That’s where we need to rely on AI and automation to actually make that happen. Today we’ll talk about one of the innovations that we’ve introduced that really elevates the product discovery experience within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce, and that’s in the area of site search. Now, site search is so important to get right. Nearly 40 percent of visitors to e-commerce sites jump right up to the search bar at the top, and those searchers convert twice as much as non-searchers. But we see that over 60 percent of top performing sites today have below acceptable levels of search performance. Then we need to think about, well, why is that? What are the issues that we see companies facing when they don’t have an optimal search solution? There are really a couple of top issues that we see commonly with site search. One is that searches lacks visibility. Instead of a big search bar across the top, it’s a little bubble in the corner, it’s hard to find that search experience. Another is requiring exact jargon and lack of typo tolerance. Customers can’t search as they would naturally search, and instead companies will expect those customers to use the language that they use for their products. Also, companies tend to be the experts in knowing what they need to sell. Lack of active merchandising in the search experience, raising the most relevant products to those customers can be detrimental. Another one is lack of dynamic filters and facets to show relevant attributes. Those should change depending on what products customers are searching for to allow them to narrow down their search. Lastly, customers are moving really fast. They need searches you type, they need autocomplete, and they need that experience to be incredibly fast. The great news is the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce license gives you free access to live search powered by ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Sensei. If you aren’t familiar with it, it’s a powerful SaaS microservice that helps you cover all of those issues I just discussed. It’s got results as you type and typo tolerance. So as customers are engaging, they get immediate results on each keystroke. It’s got synonym management, which means that your customers can search in the terms that they want to use, and it allows it to map back to the terms that you might use for your product. It has intelligent faceting, which is powered by ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Sensei. So that means that the most relevant filters and facets are surfaced for each search as the customer is searching. It has inventory status handling, so this is a newer one to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Live Search. It means that you can now hide out of stock products easily so that customers can only see in the search results what they can actually buy. Lastly, it’s got lightning fast results. So you can return search results in under 200 milliseconds so that customers don’t have to wait around. While Live Search was already a very powerful tool, recently we’ve enhanced it with intelligent Live Search results optimization. So let’s talk about what this is. This new feature is using AI algorithms to personalize and optimize the ranking of the search results as customers are searching. So this is dynamic in-session personalization. For example, the recommended for you algorithm surfaces the most relevant products for a given search, and those rankings of the product sort order in the search results are just adjusted in real-time to reflect the shoppers certain behaviors and their affinities. Within this, you get the balance of control and AI automation. So you can select which algorithm you want to use from a set of them, which I’ll mention in a moment, and then you can let ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Sensei do the rest to optimize the product ranking within Live Search. Lastly, this is blending both textual relevance, which Live Search has always used, with AI-driven optimization to re-rank the products to make that really super relevant product discovery experience for each customer. So with this feature, you can select from a set of five AI algorithms so that includes recommended for you, most viewed, most added to cart, most purchased, and trending. Our goal with having multiple algorithms here is that we know that companies sometimes optimize for different parts of their conversion funnel or for hot products that were recently introduced. So we wanted to really give you the flexibility to choose which algorithm makes the most sense when you’re looking at re-ranking for Live Search results. The recommended for you algorithm is particularly powerful. So it’s using shoppers historical and current behavioral actions that they’re taking on the site to then create a set of affinities and then delivering the product re-ranking and the search results based on that, personalized to that individual customer within the session as they’re searching. So with all that said, we wanted to not just tell you about it, but we also wanted to show you what it looks like. So let’s just check out a quick two-minute demo of the new feature here. You’ll hear the video is from Ryan Manor, one of our PMs who is answering questions on the call today. So if you have questions as you watch this, please don’t hesitate to drop them into the Q&A. So with that, let’s run the video.

Hi, I’m Ryan Manor, Product Manager for Live Search. Today I’m going to be giving a quick demo of our new intelligent merchandising capabilities. I’ve got an instance pulled up here with the Luma catalog and some product view data put into it so that we can demo. I’m going to go over and I’m going to select the rules tab, and I’m going to click add a new rule. Now, we’re in the Live Search merchandising screen. This will look very familiar to anybody who’s used Live Search in the past with the addition of this new ranking type section in the left-hand side. To start, I’m going to select what query condition I would like to use. Today, I will say query is yoga, and the results for my yoga query will now populate on the right-hand side. Now, I can choose what kind of ranking strategy I would like to use for this result set. These ranking types will look very familiar to anybody who’s used product recommendations in the past. They’re using very similar models under the hood, and so anybody who’s used product recommendations will have a pretty good idea of what kind of effects these ranking types might have on their search results. I’m going to select most viewed, and we’ll see that product order update in real-time as that algorithm is applied and the ranks are updated. We see the Carmen yoga pant jump up, as well as the set of yoga straps, and we see some of those other results fall down the order. This is a blend of both the textual relevance to the query that each of these products have, as well as these intelligent merchandising algorithms, in this case, most viewed, having some weight on that search result that nets out to this final product order. From here, I can apply any manual merchandising I would like. In this case, I will say pin, and we will say the yoga adventure video to position one. We’ll see that update, and then I can go down and give my rule a name.

Now, I can save my rule, and it’s live on my site. Thanks for watching.

Awesome. Really cool to see that. Now, just to give you a bit of a peek around the corner at what’s coming in this area of product discovery, we’re bringing this same intelligent re-ranking algorithms to category browsing as well. You’ll be able to surface the most relevant products for each customer on the category pages using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Sensei to re-rank those products, and this gives you that fine balance of control and automation that we discussed with Live Search. You can drag and drop or pin products on the category pages just as you always have been able to within each category page, but now you can also allow ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Sensei to automate that ranking in real time, and that’s coming later in this year.

So that wraps up product discovery. The other major area of innovation that we’ve targeted within the personalization and conversion theme for today centers around the shopping experience. So today we see companies facing a number of difficult challenges to personalizing the customer experiences. Delivering compelling and timely experiences requires having a single source of truth and being able to pull data together from a variety of different sources. So we often see that companies lack the ability to automate the way that content and promotions are delivered. There’s no real-time actioning, which means that you can’t respond to a customer, say browsing on your site for a certain category or a certain brand, and then deliver that content in line with their experience accordingly.

And at the core, all of this relies on data, not just the guidance, but having clean, actionable data, centralized and consolidated into a single source of truth. Most companies are facing a proliferation of systems that just makes it super difficult to stitch together data for a unified customer profile. In fact, today only about 25% of companies out there actually have a single 360 degree profile for each of their shoppers. The volume of data is very, very high and the quality of data is then often overwhelming and quality varies, making it really hard to identify those critical moments or insights for engagement. And even when companies get a better handle on their data, they often find that their manual processes around segmentation and campaigns make it hard to respond to the latest data and create unique experiences for each customer and touchpoint.

And so with that, I want to talk about our data sharing capabilities, which we’ve launched over the past year, comprised of two extensions called data connection and audience activation. So the best way to think about these capabilities is really in terms of a round trip to both share and activate your data. So if we look at the top of this diagram, we’ve launched the data connection extension, formerly called the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Platform Connector, which takes data from ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce and sends it into ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Realtime CDP or to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Platform to enrich customer profiles, inform segmentation and send to other ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Cloud applications. Along the bottom of this diagram, you can see audience activation, which allows us to make real-time CDP audiences available in real time within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce to then personalize the commerce experience.

So let’s take a closer look at each of these two parts, starting with data connection.

So here’s how it works. We start out by collecting data from a wide array of different sources, right? We know that both known customer data from systems like CRMs, email systems and more and unknown data like first-party cookies are fairly top of mind. With this feature, we now also pull in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce events including behavioral actions that customers take on your sites and order status data like whether an order’s been canceled, returned, et cetera. Real-time CDP then stitches that commerce data with data from all other sources into unified profiles and prepares it for activation. As I mentioned before, data is only useful if it’s acted upon. So as your customers engage, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce then becomes the trigger that we can personalize based upon across personalized ads, marketing campaigns, e-commerce site experiences and deep analytics into the customer experience.

If we go one click deeper, we can see how this enables a multitude of powerful personalization use cases. So with a single extension download, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce automatically tags your sites and collects 17 out of the box events with options to add more custom events. Those include behavioral events like add to cart, log in, search requests, view to page, category views, checkouts and more.

It also collects server side events, including things like order history, which is currently in beta, and we’ll be adding inventory, pricing change data and other catalog data in 2024.

Those events are being collected in real time using an edge data stream, translated into a consistent data schema, which is used across ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Cloud applications, and then shared to activate so many use cases across advertising, e-commerce, marketing, analytics, and even shared to other third party systems through event forwarding. So you can see a whole slew of use cases that this rich data enables. For example, stopping an ad campaign when a customer’s already bought that item so that you’re not wasting those extra dollars. Or e-commerce use cases like A, B or multivariate experience testing or determining the next best offer to serve to a customer. We can also activate that data for marketing use cases like sending abandoned cart campaigns or welcome email series or order status notifications if an order’s delayed or out of stock or back in stock. All of those are viable messages to customers using these events. And we can also think about analytics use cases, using commerce data to deeply understand not only the business, but also the customer and what their journey looks like.

So for example, with data connection using both ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce and ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Target, you can use shopper data to conduct testing, whether A, B testing or multivariate testing, understanding which experiences drive higher engagement and conversion rates, and then automatically shifting traffic to the winners.

Or data connection can send ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce events to power deep analytics within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Analytics or customer journey analytics. As many of you know, you have standard e-commerce reporting built into ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce already, but you can then also join that with rich reporting and analytics for deeper customer understanding. So for example, you can do campaigns analysis to link campaign performance to purchase performance on your site. You can get pathing and traffic reports to understand which channels customers are coming from when they hit the site and how they flow through the conversion funnel. And you can get inventory analysis to understand inventory flows and support planning for the business. So those are just a few of the multitude of analytics use cases that this can unlock.

ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce data also fuels omni-channel journeys in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Journey Optimizer. So for example, you can use shopper events to re-engage at-risk customers, or those who have abandoned their carts to drive them through to purchase. We already have customers that are using this data connection extension to deliver hundreds of abandoned cart journeys today. You can also use shopper profiles to segment traffic to different journeys, personalized upsell or cross-sell campaigns, deliver welcome series and more. So that covers sending those ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce events to other experience cloud applications.

But what if we want to look at the bottom of this flow, audience activation? With this integration, we can use all of that powerful data that we discussed to create AI guided segments in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Realtime CDP, and then bring those audiences back into ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce to use for personalized content and promotions.

So ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce is now a destination within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Realtime CDP, which makes setting up this integration extremely easy with audience activation as an extension download. Once configured, segments can be built and managed entirely within Realtime CDP, based on data from ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce and any other business systems that connect to Realtime CDP.

So let’s go one level deeper to understand how this combined solution works. First, Realtime CDP creates those unified customer profiles we talked about earlier, by ingesting and unifying all known and anonymous data from across all of your business systems, including ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce, ERP systems, CRMs, point of sale systems, and more. The data is stitched together for a comprehensive view of each customer, and those profiles can then be used for both segmentation and activation in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce.

Second, Realtime CDP uses customer AI, which is powered by ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Sensei, to create granular segments based on propensity models, which are predictive models that essentially calculate the likelihood of a customer to convert, so that’s take a specific action, or to churn, which is not take a specific action. Merchants can also define rules to create precise segments based on shopper behaviors, and of course, all of this is supported by Realtime CDP’s built-in privacy and governance frameworks. And then a third part of this is activation, so customer profiles are placed into audiences based on the segment rules set up by the merchant in Realtime CDP, and the audiences are then made available to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce in realtime for personalization.

So what specifically can we personalize within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce using Realtime CDP audiences? Well, today there are two things, content, which is dynamic blocks within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce, and promotions, which is cart price rules in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. However, in the future, we plan to allow you to personalize the entire experience using Realtime CDP audiences, including things like product recommendations, search results that we talked about earlier, product browse order, and more. So this is just the beginning of a really powerful data sharing value pipeline for you all. So let’s check out a quick five-minute demo video so that you can see how a shopper’s experience would look with this level of personalization in place. So let me just cue that up and start the video.

Welcome to this exciting new demo for Realtime CDP audiences in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. Let’s dive into a demo for CitySignal, a B2C telecom and a digital platform for a B2C telecom company focusing on driving loyalty and upsell to higher margin consumer electronics. Today, we’ll show how they can use the power of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Realtime CDP and ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce to achieve a single view of their customers and activate personalized commerce experiences. We begin our demo with an anonymous shopper visiting CitySignal’s website, powered by ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. Prior to delivering personalized experiences, you can see the iPhone 13 Pro dynamic block, which we change over the course of the demo. We can see that this customer is anonymous based on this profile viewer panel, which we’ll use to show what’s happening behind the scenes for events, attributes, and segment membership. Our anonymous shopper decides to browse for a new phone, so he clicks on the Phones tab in the navigation menu. From there, the anonymous shopper then opens the Samsung Galaxy S22 product page and explores the product colors and storage amounts. We’ll look back at our profile viewer tool to see what impact these behavioral actions have had on our anonymous customer. Even though we don’t know much about the shopper, we’re already starting to build out their real-time customer profile. ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Realtime CDP has already placed the shopper into a segment called interested in Samsung phones in real-time based on their behavioral shopping data. Despite them being anonymous, we can now already personalize their experience. Our anonymous shopper now decides to browse for other devices and clicks back on phones to do so.

Now with our understanding that this is a Samsung customer, we deliver a Samsung branded dynamic block showing the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, since we know that this customer’s interested in Samsung phones based on our segment qualification, and we can try to drive upsell to the premium tier. As a reminder, this is all happening while our shopper’s anonymous and based on real-time actions. After seeing this banner, our anonymous shopper is curious to check out the new Samsung S22 Ultra. He’s excited about the powerful new features and is a little hesitant about the price, but he selects his color and memory option and goes ahead and adds it to his cart.

As soon as our customer clicked on the dynamic block, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Realtime CDP added him to another segment called interested in premium tier Samsung phones, which we can see here in the segment profile viewer.

Next, he remembers that this site has information saved to his account. So our customer goes ahead and signs into the site as he wants to go through the checkout process as quickly as possible.

As soon as the customer logs in, he becomes a known shopper and Realtime CDP stitches his anonymous browsing behavior with his known customer information in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Platform.

In attributes, we can see that this customer has a gold loyalty level, which is data flowing in from an external CRM system. In segments, we can see that this customer now has multiple segment memberships, including those from earlier in the session and both registered user and gold membership. We also see that this customer has purchased from us before as he’s in the previously purchased Samsung smartphone segment. Now we have new context. We know that our customer isn’t trying Samsung for the first time, but is instead upgrading his phone. Now that we know all of this about the customer, we can deliver an ultra specific personalized offer based on his loyalty status, his upgrading status and interest in Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra.

Our shopper sees a brand new dynamic block on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra product page that shows gold members like him can receive a 20% discount on accessories purchased with an upgrade to the Samsung S22 Ultra. While he was slightly hesitant about the premium phone before, with this discount, he feels like it’s just right for him and is excited to check out the accessories that he knows he needs such as a case.

With the phone in his cart, he scrolls down to the product recs unit, related products where he adds this phone case to his order.

As the customer heads on over to checkout, he populates his checkout information.

The customer sees that the 20% discount is applied in his cart under order summary and is pleased with his selection. He enters his credit card information and then seamlessly checks out.

Our customer has fulfilled CitySignal’s goal of bundling multiple products and selling top tier devices due to the loyalty offer and is excited that he’ll receive his accessories when he receives his phone.

All right, awesome. So hopefully from that demo, you can see that the benefits of this combined solution are really powerful. So first, as you just saw, you can now personalize content and promotions in real time as the shopper is engaging with your site. Second benefit here is rather than struggling with siloed data across sources, you have a single centralized place to build and manage all of the customer data and segments. And then you can monetize that in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce.

Third, real time CDP provides those sophisticated AI powered segmentation tools, such as creating segments based on propensity to convert or propensity to turn. Those segments can be put to work quickly and easily in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. And then finally, all of this is happening in real time with the ability to process segment qualification on the edge rather than with batch processing. And so mobility from one segment to another and resulting commerce experiences are now happening within milliseconds based on shopper behaviors for real time personalization.

So with that, I will hand over the floor to Surya to talk about how you can further simplify integrations and custom development. Surya, feel free to take it away.

Thank you, Rohan. Hi, everyone. Thank you for attending. I’m Surya Limak, product marketing manager with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ. My focus is on our platform, extensibility, integrations, performance and scale.

So today I’m gonna cover all of the enhancements we’ve made and all the new capabilities we’ve released, where it relates to our platform and specifically around extensibility.

Now, commerce is getting increasingly complex. Businesses are striving to provide experiences across multiple channels and touch points. So those could be in store, on the web, native apps or in channels like social marketplaces. They need to support additional business models, B2C, B2B, D2C, maybe buy online, pick up in store and so on. In order to implement these kinds of commerce platforms, they’re relying on more and more services to provide all those individual capabilities. And these services and solutions might be coming from different vendors. Now, the challenge businesses face when implementing commerce systems in this way is that first launching capabilities is more time and effort intensive. So you need to integrate services from multiple vendors, you need to build custom storefronts, UIs, extensions and so on. And that takes a lot of development effort. When you’re using all these services together and want to share or provide a more cohesive journey to your shoppers, then data is required, sometimes in real time, across different services. So it might originate a data event, might originate in one system, it might be required in another service or another system. And it’s hard to share that data across all of these with proprietary data exchange formats and no real standard way to exchange this data. And once you build all of that, then you need to maintain it. So there are all these custom capabilities, integrations, UIs, et cetera. And over time, these need to be updated, these need to be enhanced and maintaining these, including the underlying structure and runtime is costly.

ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ’s focus for our platform is to help our customers build a more agile commerce platform. And we start with a scalable commerce foundation. What do we mean by that? Our commerce foundation includes all of the core capabilities businesses need to get up and running really, really fast. So when you think of commerce, the core capabilities are things like cart, checkout, managing your product catalog, customer accounts, managing multiple regions, brands, stores, and so on. So our goal there is to get you up and running really fast and provide a secure, scalable, and compliant environment for you to run your commerce business on.

Now add to that advanced capabilities, and Rohan spoke about a few of them, including search and recommendations and so on. So ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ provides a number of composable business services for advanced capabilities. Now these services can be adopted by businesses as they need them. So you don’t have to roll them all out at the same time, but when you do choose to adopt them, they work natively with the foundation, which means that our customers don’t have to write all the code to share data across these services or bring them together to power the storefront. But we take it a step further, and it’s not just our services, but we provide you with the tools and technology to also integrate in third party services. So we realize you’re gonna rely on multiple services. Maybe you use search from a different vendor, or maybe you use recommendations from somebody else. And our goal is to provide you with a uniform way to integrate those services along or into your larger ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce ecosystem.

Now, even with that fully featured foundation and all of the advanced capabilities that we offer, and third parties offer as well, businesses do need to build sometimes custom apps and custom services to meet their unique needs, especially in commerce where every business does things a little bit differently. So we also provide you with a platform to build custom apps. Those can be single page apps or custom microservices for things like different kinds of rules and integrations, and all of these in a serverless environment. And across all of that, we make it easier for you to share and capture data and events from one service, share it across other services, whether that’s our foundation, our advanced capabilities, third party services, or custom apps that you may have built and making it easier for you to build these and lower your cost of ownership over time.

So if we look at our platform, the core commerce platform today, all the way to the left, you see the commerce foundation containing things like I mentioned around the cart, checkout, managing your catalog and so on. And then we have a number of services. Rohan spoke in depth on a few of them, but they include things like live search, AI powered search, product recommendations, our catalog service, which is essentially a new kid on the block. We released that most recently, have payments and sales channels. Now, all of these services can be scaled independently. They all auto scale. All of these business services are always up to date. So they are SaaS based, always up to date, making it easier for our business or for our customers to adopt new capabilities as we roll them out, which is quite often constantly. Like I mentioned, they auto scaling to meet your unplanned and planned demand. And we reduce the cost of ownership by minimizing any integrations required to make these work together. So all of them work together without requiring you to stitch together all these API and the data across them. So with this approach, our customers get the benefits of microservices without all of the engineering complexity that goes along with them. Now, moving on to extensibility for our foundation and for our commerce platform. As of today, all of our services and the foundation are headless. They have 100% API coverage across all the capabilities that we offer, which means that it’s easy for you to deploy these in a headless manner with different storefronts, third party storefronts, or whichever channel you may need to use these in. We provide you with API orchestration. So we’ve introduced API orchestration earlier this year with API mesh, which allows you to stitch together API from third party sources with us. We added ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ I O events, and that essentially is commerce events. So over 700 events originating from commerce. These cover things like changes to your product catalog, changes to customer accounts, order information, et cetera. And we can pipe them through to other applications or custom apps that require them in near real time.

And finally extensibility of our native capabilities. So we introduced serverless extensibility, which means that you can build your extent. You can extend our native capabilities in a cloud native environment, where you don’t have to worry about provisioning all of the resources that those customizations require to run. Now, all of this is done outside the core commerce foundation or any of our servers, any of our services. And what that means is that you can build all these rich experiences using third party services, our services, custom code, et cetera, without actually customizing the commerce code. And that makes it simpler for you to maintain and upgrade the platform over time, lowering your cost of ownership.

Now at the heart of our extensibility is ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ developer app builder for commerce, which we released at the start of this year. App builder is our unified extensibility platform, and it works, it’s unified in two ways actually. First of all, it’s available from multiple ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ experience cloud solutions. That means that you can use the same technology to extend ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ experience manager or ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ experience platform, the same skills, same tools to do that as you do for ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce. But it’s also unified in that it offers you all of the tools and services that you need to build out and integrate ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce within your larger platform. So you start with integrating third party services, but it also makes it simpler to replace existing services. So if you don’t wanna use pricing from ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce, you can use our API mesh to bring an API from a third party pricing service and replace capabilities that are core to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce. You can extend native capabilities. That means let’s say you want to build, say custom pricing rules for your custom rules for your cart. You can build an app for that. If you wanna extend the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce admin UI, we introduced back office or admin UI extensibility in our June release. And that allows you to build custom single page apps outside of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce and inject them into the admin panel. That means that you can customize the admin panel without actually changing any core code for ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce. You can even build event driven apps that listen for those 700 plus events that we have in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce and act on them, or maybe transform that data and push them out to some back office system.

And finally, we provide you with all of the resources and infrastructure that you require to run these apps. That means that things from storage to compute, event management, security, access control, all of that is provided within app builder. So your developers simply need to write business focused apps and let ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ take care of running them, scaling them and distribute. An app builder is available for all ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce customers. And it’s included with your license if you’re running in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce on cloud or managed services.

Oops. All right, sorry. So we highlight three, or we focused on three broad areas for using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ developer app builder. The first is around back office integrations. And when you look at back office integrations, typically it’s around synchronization of data between your commerce platform and back office systems like ERPs, a product information management system, CRMs, auto management system and so on. So we of course provide you with our high throughput batch API for batch type of integrations. But now with the introduction of events, you can also have real time integrations or event driven integrations. For example, an order gets created in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce. Maybe you want to push that order out to your auto management system and you can use our events and app builder platform to transfer that data across. And you have complete control about which events are subscribed to, what data goes with the events and where those events are routed to. In addition to providing you with all the API, we’ve also just in this past June, introduced, opened up our marketplace, the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce marketplace to accept apps from third party vendors like systems integrators, as well as software vendors to publish apps and list apps for ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce to support some of the most common integrations with systems like subscription management, BIMs, ERPs and so on.

The second area that app builder helps with is composable storefronts. So this is an area where you potentially rely on multiple services to power your storefront. And these services, each of them might need to be added. You may need to adopt new services in an agile manner or replace existing services. With IAP orchestration, it takes that complexity out of the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce foundation or from your storefront. And you can use our mesh layer to add new services, replace them, remove them and so on. But it’s not just about stitching those, it’s not just about integrating those services in, but at the API mesh layer, you can extend those API, you can transform those API, and you can cache the responses of those API as well at the edge to provide light and fast experiences to your storefront. And of course, this is a globally distributed environment, along with all of the security and access controls that you have control over.

And finally, we make it easier for you to build custom apps and microservices in a modern development environment. So everything is running in Node.js, you use JavaScript to write this code, which means that you don’t need in-depth knowledge of the internals of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce or any of our services. You write this in a cloud native environment, serverless environment, which means you don’t have to provision any of the resources or any of that. All of that is managed by ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ. And we provide you with a developer tooling to write your code or rather build and deploy your code as well. That includes the UIs, it includes the CLIs or the command line interface, includes CI CDs through GitHub actions and the runtime services that you require for it.

So summarizing our approach to extensibility and to our platform in general, and how do we help our customers be more agile? We start with a rich foundation and supporting services, all of which that work together natively. So they lower your cost of ownership, but you choose how you roll them out, which services when you adopt them, and when you’re ready to adopt them, turn them on and they work together very, very seamlessly. We provide you with a comprehensive API. So all of our services are now API first, which means that you have access to deploy, to the API to build or to deploy in a headless manner with third party storefronts, if you choose to or different channels, but we also provide first party storefronts, again, decoupled where you choose. So whether it’s PWA or ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Manager, out of the box admin UIs, and you can use them, you can extend them, or abandon them or and just build using a completely headless approach with third parties. API orchestration so that it’s not just enough that, so it’s not just our services that work together, but you can easily incorporate other services into your ecosystem with minimal development. Most of it is done through configuration.

And then serverless extensibility for you to build those event driven apps, microservices, single page apps. And finally, a standards based exchange, data exchange mechanism for you to share data across your entire ecosystem. So whether that’s our foundation, our services, third party services, or custom code that you might have rebuilt, you can use our mechanisms to capture that data on the storefront, our storefront, third party storefront, doesn’t matter, back office events, and then share them across your entire ecosystem to deliver a cohesive customer journey.

So moving on, let’s look at some of the updates we’ve made for performance and scale.

So at a high level, if we look at how we’ve optimized ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce, and I would say this journey began about two years ago, but in the past six months, we’ve made a lot of major updates to the platform. So starting with our foundation, our goal there is to provide our customers with a lightweight foundation with a focus on performance. And we’ve done that by reducing the footprint of the commerce foundation. In fact, over the past few releases, you may have noticed some of the capabilities that were part of the foundation have actually been removed and released as independent services and modules that you deploy as you need, which means we are reducing the footprint, providing you with a lightweight foundation. Now we introduced auto scaling for that foundation, which means that the platform on cloud can now scale to meet your needs based on your peak demands, based on your variable loads, and so on. And we also introduced asynchronous processing for some of the high or the resource intensive tasks. And an example of that is auto processing. So now we can asynchronously process orders, allowing you a much higher throughput of orders that can be processed concurrently.

We’ve introduced a number of read optimized services specifically to power the storefront. So these are all SaaS services, highly available, globally distributed, and generally responding in under 200 to 300 milliseconds to power lightning fast shopping experiences. And I’ll dig into that a little bit more with our catalog service in the following slides.

And lastly, we’ve offloaded a lot of the processes that are resource intensive. An example of that would be our pricing index. So as B2B customers and even B2C customers with very, very large catalogs, hundreds of millions of products in their catalog with complex pricing rules, et cetera, you may realize that the indexing of that pricing is very, very resource intensive, which means that people who have very large complex catalogs and also have frequent changes to those catalogs, this could become a bottleneck for them. So we’ve offloaded pricing or indexing into a SaaS service, reducing the time by orders of magnitude so that now your foundation instance does not have to use resources to index the pricing. We’ve also, as I mentioned with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Developer App Builder, we have made it simple for you to offload all customizations to a serverless environment. So all of your integrations, managing of your events, sending them to different places, custom single page apps, they all run in the distributed serverless app builder environment and taking it away, taking it off the commerce, the core commerce platform, making it not just much more scalable, but much easier to upgrade as well. So if we look purely at our foundation, so these numbers that I have up here are benchmark of the commerce foundation. So this is not even with all of our storefront services added in. The improvements we’ve made help our customers now work with 500 concurrent admins, generally under 300. And when I say generally, that’s the 95th percentile under 300 millisecond average response time. We support over 200,000 orders per hour with asynchronous auto processing, much larger cart sizes, 750 items in cart, close to 250 million skews and 2 million page views. But keep in mind, as I said, this is just the foundation without even those storefront services, which we’ll dig into in a minute that we’ve released in the past year.

So sticking with the commerce foundation, earlier this year, we introduced auto-scaling for ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce for our cloud customers. This is available on the web tier for customers who are running on a scaled architecture. And when using auto-scaling, now we can automatically add and remove resources to be able to respond in real time to traffic spikes. So this ensures that you have stable performance for your customers, whether it’s for planned increase in traffic or even unplanned events that require that. It improves the experience for our customers and your developers no longer need to manually respond, admins no longer need to manually respond to traffic spikes in order to maintain performance. Now you have control over how it’s auto-scaled, meaning that you can set policies and targets. So for example, after a certain use or increase over baseline, so 20 minutes above baseline, then you want to add resources. Or once the CPU utilization comes down and stays down for a certain amount of time, you want to reduce resources. So you can set those policies and targets, and that allows you to optimize costs, resources and your infrastructure availability.

So now taking a step towards our services, let’s talk about the catalog service. This is the latest service that we introduced to the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce platform. And the catalog service is a high performance SaaS service that provides catalog data to all of your storefront related experiences. So you can use a catalog service to power pages like your product detail pages, product listing pages, category pages, and so on. It’s incredibly fast, scales automatically, and it has a simplified catalog schema that doesn’t change. So it’s optimized, normalized for you to read and power any of your storefront experiences, whether those are ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ powered storefronts or third party power.

Now you can use the catalog service standalone with just the foundation, or it also works with search and other services that are part of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. The APIs can run alongside the foundational APIs, so it augments the APIs that we already provide. And it’s compatible with the API mesh orchestration layer that I mentioned, which means that it’s very easy to incorporate this into your ecosystem. It’s highly available, so we provide four nines availability and it’s available in multiple regions. And most importantly, this is available for any ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce customer, starting with 2.4.4, it’s included as part of your license.

So just sharing some of the benchmarks for our catalog service, measured with 2.5 billion effective SKUs and 500,000 requests per minute, our target SLAs are under 200 milliseconds in the 95th percentile.

So if you’re not using the catalog service yet, or if you’re not familiar with it, we highly recommend you take a look at it and incorporate it into your commerce ecosystem. With the commerce catalog service, you can expect up to 10 times better performance for read or for your storefront, as compared to just using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce standalone. You can achieve much better lighthouse scores and better website conversions. There’s no maintenance since it’s a SaaS service, so you don’t need to worry about upgrading or patching it. And of course it supports much, much larger and complex product catalogs for B2C as well as B2B use cases, and it’s headless. So whether you’re using our storefront, our headless storefront or third party storefronts, you can use the catalog service with that.

So with a few minutes remaining, I would like to walk you through very quickly some of the upcoming capabilities. Now, to be clear, this is our roadmap, which is subject to change, but we’d like to share with you what you can expect in the second half of this year. Starting with personalization, we will be releasing enhancements to our developer experience and performance improvements for product recommendation service. We’ll be introducing optimizations for our intelligent browse capabilities. And you heard about audience activation from Rohan earlier. Audience activation will be available now for personalization also within mobile apps. In addition to that, and on ongoing basis, we’ll continue to add additional events for data sharing, that include for things like inventory, price change, catalog data, and so on.

For B2B commerce, in our June release, we recently released line item discounting and negotiations. So that’s already available to you, but upcoming for the second half, we will support more complex buyer and company structure. So advanced company and buyer management, advanced quoting capabilities, including quote merge and split. And finally on our platform updates, we’ll be introducing blue-green deployment, HIPAA readiness for our infrastructure and the core of our other foundation, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce Foundation. And the last introduction, the last update is that we will be introducing a new commerce application server, specifically for GraphQL API. So this will be a server available just for high performance or high throughput GraphQL APIs, and to power your storefront. So all of this can be expected in the second half of this year.

Now, before we close out, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to attend this. We expect these webinars to be ongoing, and it’s a forum for us to connect directly with you.

While we don’t have the date for the next webinar, we do expect these to be quarterly, and the next webinar will be focused on B2B. A recording of the session will be up on Experience League within the next day or two. If you’re not familiar with Experience League, you can go to ExperienceLeague.ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ.com, and you can find documentation, guides, videos, tutorials, and a lot more information to help you get the most value out of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce on Experience League. And with that, I am going to hand this back to Phil. Thank you.