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Transcript

And now I’d like to hand the session over to Rowan Bott, who is a Senior Product Marketing Manager here at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ, and who will introduce us to today’s event. Go ahead, Rowan, the stage is now yours. All right, well, welcome, everyone. And thank you all for joining us on this webinar on some of about some of the incredible new capabilities that we’ve introduced to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce over the last few months. We are so excited to show you how to use ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce and we’re excited to showcase some of the latest ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce innovations and share a sneak peek at what’s coming up next within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce.

For intros, I’m Rowan Bott. I am a Product Marketing Manager. I’m joined by my colleagues, Ed Kennedy and Surya Lehmek, also on the Product Marketing team. We’re supported by product managers who will be answering questions in the Q&A. So please feel free to post all of your great questions there. So for today, we’re gonna cover three key themes. First, we’ll share how you can increase conversion rates and sales using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce AI-powered merchandising and ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Cloud integrations. Second, we’ll share how you can drive B2B sales with some of our new B2B capabilities. Third, 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.

We’ll also cover our release schedule for next year at the end of the session. So please be sure to stick around for that.

So up first, let’s talk about how you can increase conversion through some major product updates to our AI-powered merchandising services. And I actually wanna start here with a poll. So I’m gonna poll the audience here. I’m curious what you’re using today for site search. The reason we’re asking this is because we’ll talk about a lot of the great stuff we have coming within some of our search tools. So I’m just curious to see from the audience today, what do we have in terms of site search? Are you using Open Search, which is the native search capability within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce? Are you using Live Search powered by ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Sensei? Are you using a third party tool like Algolia, Bloomreach, Coveo or others? Or do you not know? If you can take a minute, that would be awesome if you can submit an answer here.

All right, we’re hitting about a third of our attendees answering. If we could get everyone to answer, that’d be awesome. Looks like they’re coming in hot. All right, I’ll give you guys like 30 more seconds.

We’re at over half, almost 60%, still coming in.

All right, awesome. I’m gonna move us forward. Last three seconds, three, two, one. All right, here we go. All right, interesting. So we’ve got a pretty even spread here across Open Search and third party tools, as well as some in the Live Search bucket.

I think after today, there are some really exciting things we’re talking about around Live Search. So I encourage you all to explore it and check it out and maybe we’ll pique that interest and start to get that bar up even higher. So we’ll start with a highly anticipated new feature that was launched in October, which is called Intelligent Category Merchandising in Live Search.

So when we talk about personalization, showing customers the right products in the right moments based on their own affinities and their behaviors is really important. And while in the past we gave you the ability to personalize the search results and product performance, the category pages or the browse experience for customers was left out. But 60% of customers start their shopping journey by browsing category pages.

We know that you wanna personalize the browse experience, but it’s really hard to do. It absorbs time and effort, especially for those with large and rapidly changing catalogs. And even when you do merchandise category pages, they tend to be static, just like the ones that you see on the right. So when you do merchandise category pages, they tend to be static, showing the same product order for every customer that comes to the page. And so that’s where Intelligent Category Merchandising comes in.

Intelligent Category Merchandising in Live Search leverages ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Sensei to automatically re-rank products on each category page to boost the relevance and conversion for every shopper. So this feature gives you the ability to select from a set of intelligent ranking options for control over the merchandising experience. And I wanna go a level deeper and actually kind of explore what this feature looks like and how it works.

So prior to this release, you could manually boost, bury, pin and hide products on individual category pages, but the results on those category pages were not personalized to the shopper as they were shopping. With this new feature, you can now use AI ranking algorithms in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Sensei to automatically re-rank category page results to personalize and optimize them while the shopper is shopping on the site. So what does that mean? Well, first it means that product sequences, so the order of products on the category pages are now dynamic and personalized within the shopping session. Second, you can apply AI ranking algorithms at any level of your category tree from a single sub category to your entire site.

Third, you get a balance of manual control and AI automation. You can still manually boost or bury products if you’d like, but now you can also use Sensei powered rules to automatically optimize product rankings on those pages. And then lastly, intelligent category merchandising uses our powerful ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Sensei AI models that are self-sustaining, they tune automatically based on shopper behavioral data. And just like product recommendations, storefront pages are instantly tagged for tracking without any manual coding.

You can select from five different AI algorithms for product re-ranking on category pages. Those include recommended for you, which is based on each shoppers unique current and previous onsite behavior. We have most viewed, most purchased, most added to cart, as well as trending.

So how does the feature work? Well, first you click add a rule in the new category merchandising tab within Live Search. You can then see your full category tree and you can select any level from the top branch all the way down to individual subcategories.

Next, you select which AI ranking type you would like to use and immediately see a preview of the shopper experience within the preview pane.

Then you have a toggle where you can choose whether you would like to apply intelligent rankings to subcategories, in which case the re-ranking would propagate down to all of the subcategories and that will be shown as well in the UI.

And then finally, you can layer in any manual merchandising like boosts, buries, pins or hides right alongside the intelligent merchandising rules. So it makes it really easy to have a single workflow.

You can access intelligent category merchandising directly in the new category merchandising tab in Live Search. If you have extension version 3.0.0 and above, this feature will be fully functional in the new tab. If you have an earlier version, you will still see that category merchandising tab and if you click on it, you’ll see a message prompting an extension upgrade to use it. Additionally, for this feature to work, storefront event collection must be configured. If you use Live Search and product recs today, that is likely already done, but if not, there’s detailed documentation on experience league on a storefront event collection.

So in addition to intelligent category merchandising, we’ve got one other important announcement for Live Search, which is multi-language support.

So Live Search now has multi-language support, which means that it can process catalogs in 38 languages out of the box. We’ve changed the default English language text analyzer to new language specific processors to improve the relevancy of search results. You just need to select which language you want to use for your catalog and different languages can be set for each store view or site to support typical multi-region deployment models. So all Live Search customers on ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce 242 and above will receive the new feature without any extension upgrade needed. With the addition of multi-language support, now is a really great time for global companies, any of you who may be international, to explore Live Search.

Up next, let’s talk about a new addition to our data sharing capabilities, which is order history. As a reminder, when we first launched Data Connection, we talked about how shopper expectations are rapidly changing, right? They’re seeking out these compelling and relevant experiences that are personalized in real time. And companies who deliver on personalization are rewarded. Customers spend more, engagement goes up, average order value goes up. While we knew you all were feeling the need to deliver these types of experiences, these types of experiences and meet those rising expectations, it remained very difficult to create and deliver these types of dynamic one-to-one personalized shopping experiences at scale. And that’s why we’ve created Data Connection to help break down those silos and make it easier for you to share your high intent commerce data with the rest of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Cloud solutions to power personalization at scale. So as you can see from this diagram, with a single extension, you are able to automatically tag your site and share a wide range of out-of-the-box shopper behavioral events in real time, as well as back office order data directly with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience platform. This data can then be activated across ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Cloud solutions to enrich customer profiles, enable personalized customer journeys and experiences, enhance ad performance, and it can be used for new business insights.

So what’s new with Data Connection in the October release? Well, we can now share up to five years of order history data with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Cloud to power personalized experiences and business insights. Order history includes high value data for the order events you see here, like the product skews, price, quantity, and any discounts, product category, payment type, shipping method, email address, or return reason. So this is an amazingly rich set of prior transaction data that you have here.

So why is the ability to share order history so valuable? Well, first, it’s hard to share this data. Generally, businesses need to invest in custom development and transferring the data can be a really slow process. In contrast, our customers just need to install an extension and it handles collecting and sharing orders or sending up to five years worth of data. And then as I mentioned before, this is an incredibly valuable and comprehensive set of purchase data that businesses can use to power a number of use cases, such as building deeper customer profiles to enable new segmentation strategies and insights, or powering personalized campaigns, offers, and site experiences that increase sales and AOV, and uncovering trends and insights that can accelerate growth and smooth business operations. In terms of how this works, we have an entirely UI driven process that requires no coding. So once the data connection extension is installed, you just need to go to the commerce admin, enter a dataset ID, and select a date range of orders you wanna share. You select the start sync button to send your order history data to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ experience platform for use across other platforms. And then you can go to the customer experience cloud solutions.

And we have a number of great brands that we all know and love who are using our data sharing capabilities today, including our new historical purchase data type. So let’s check out just a few of their use cases. I wanna first look at a multi-brand clothing company. So they really have three key use cases here. One is to create personalized re-engagement and abandoned carts. So they can use ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce to understand the level of engagement, like has a customer interacted with a number of product pages. They then couple that with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ journey optimizer to re-engage the customer with personalized outreach.

Second, they’re using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ target to deliver personalized content on their site based on the most recent browser history including personalizing the homepage. And then finally, they’re using commerce events to segment customers into acquisition, retention and retargeting buckets, and then using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ journey optimizer to design journeys for each segment.

Second, let’s take a look at a global food and beverage company. So they’re using our data sharing capabilities to deploy personalized website content based on order history, which we just discussed was in our most recent release. They’re also using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ journey optimizer to create marketing campaigns based on audiences that are built and managed within real time CDP.

And then finally, they’re using our data sharing capabilities to determine the source of data flows from various warehouses. They’re using custom attributes within the events that they’re sharing. So some really cool use cases that elevate their customer experiences and also empower them to feel ready to sell in a more personalized way.

So with that, I’m gonna hand it over to Ed to talk about B2B. Ed, over to you.

Thanks, Rowan. And thanks to everyone who joined us live or catching the recording. It’s really great to be with you and share about these product updates both from Rowan’s side on live search and data connection. I’m gonna talk about B2B commerce and some of the capabilities we’ve released. Recently, that will support your B2B commerce endeavors. Just a level set about the various different ways our customers are using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce in B2B settings. The first is adding all the commerce data that’s captured on ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce and giving it to their marketing organization. That’s the data connector and audience activation that Rowan was just describing. The core use case that customers use ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce for is the 24 by seven customer portal. That’s probably what you’re familiar with. You’ve launched if you have a B2B use case with customer specific pricing, company accounts and a variety of other tools. The third is digital selling. Actually giving your sales reps a tool so that they can close deals faster, move orders through the funnel, turning your order takers into order makers. I’m gonna talk about some capabilities in all three of these areas.

So I wanna give you that 10,000th of you of recent B2B commerce releases. So as Rowan’s been describing our live search and SaaS services, product recommendations, which is one of the earlier solutions in that area supports B2B commerce customer catalog access and pricing. So you can use ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce as product recommendations in B2B use cases. We also support live search for B2B use case as well. So live search respects what customer group that your user belongs to, shared catalogs and pricing as well. We’ve also made some enhancements to B2B catalog size, reduction to improve performance. I’ll mention that a little bit in a moment. And all the events that are happening on ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce that you wanna send to other ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ products using data connection are also supported for B2B use cases, including requisition lists. So if you have customers that are adding products to requisition lists, that data can be sent into ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ experience platform and used by the marketing organization to drive your journey outside of just the e-commerce experience. And our most recent area of investment has been inside the digital selling tools, allowing your sales reps to initiate quotes and send them from the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce admin to their buyers that have an ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce login, and a variety of different negotiation tools like line item discounts and line item messaging. So that’s the 10,000 foot view of some of the features that we’ve released. Like Rowan, I’d like to also ask you to take this quick poll, and I’ll share the results here in just a moment. If you can answer A, B, C, D or E, what statement best fits the online revenue from your ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ commerce store or stores? Is it exclusively selling to consumers? You would select option A. If it’s exclusively for business customers, you’d select option E. And B, C and B are somewhere in between. So you should see this live poll now in front of you, and you can select one of the options. Is it A, B, C, D or E? I’m sure you can see what the results are here because every time we sample our customer base, we get a certain trend emerging about what customers are using our platform to do. So I’m curious if we revalidate that again here. I’ll give you another 30 seconds to select one of these options, and then I’ll share the results with the audience live. All right, I see a few more responses coming in. Thank you for providing this information. I think it’s good for us to see, but also for you to compare who’s on the line and what type of business model they’re running.

All right, I’m going to close the survey here in the next 10 seconds. So if you want to submit, now’s your chance.

Perfect. Thank you so much. Let’s see the results. So 17% exclusively B2C, 20% exclusively B2B.

Exactly, this is exactly what we see in our data is that while we build features for B2C use cases and build features for B2B use cases, most of our customers are somewhere in the middle with some revenue coming from B2B customers and most coming from B2C or vice versa. So a big cohort there in the middle with some mix of both, which is very common.

So I want to talk about that B2B customer portal that you’re probably using ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce for if you have a B2B use case. I want to set that in the context of what’s happening in the digital commerce space. So in 2024, B2C Commerce globally is forecasted to reach $6 trillion. That’s one in every $5 spent in the consumer space will be captured online. And B2B Commerce is estimated to reach $5 trillion in 2024. So if you add $6 trillion and $5 trillion together, it’s actually 10% of global GDP is forecasted to be captured through digital commerce channels. So that’s probably why you’re here is that either you’ve got the B2C use case or the B2B use case or both, and you’re trying to capture some of that growing need. There’s one or double down on what Rowan was sharing about live search. This now supports B2B Commerce use cases. And it really is an industry leading search solution that you can deploy within your commerce environment and it respects shared catalog, customer specific pricing and customer groups. So that is a new capability that we launched recently to support B2B use cases. And it really does enhance those customer portals. If you’ve set up customer specific pricing, customer groups, now you can deploy a rich AI powered search engine within your portal. And as we release new features to live search and other areas of that product, the updates are automatically uptake into your instance. So you don’t necessarily need to do a version upgrade of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce to get the latest features from live search. The intelligent category merchandising that Rowan was sharing is something that customers can see and use when they log into ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. And that’s really one of the key benefits of the SaaS based architecture that we’ve been building. Want to then transition to the tools that empower your sales reps. You may have noticed that post pandemic, your customers are shopping across different channels. And the studies and data shows that in B2B settings, customers are shopping evenly across these three channels. Digital self-service, like solutions powered by ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce, traditional human interactions we’re getting back to in person meetings, even I’m sure some of you still have fax orders coming in, or you’re doing remote human interactions. Your reps are chatting with customers, conference calls, phone calls, even teams, et cetera. The sales are coming through these channels equally. So we’ve got to merge digital self-service and remote human interactions and even bridge inter-traditional human interactions with our commerce tools. So if you imagine for a moment that you are a buyer, one of your customers at a trade show, and you’ve got your booth there, and you’ve been running around trying to place orders and negotiate terms and kind of set up your year of who you’re going to get supplies from, you might find yourself pretty exhausted having to manage that all yourself. The use case we’re seeing now, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce being used out in the field, is that our B2B buyers, the customers that shop on your B2B Commerce website, are being complimented by your sales team. They can use ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce as a digital catalog front end and use the admin function to negotiate with their customers and help them resolve issues. This is becoming a more and more common use of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce out in the field, giving sales reps digital catalogs, capturing the intent signals of what shoppers are doing on the site, sending that to the CRM, requesting quotes and responding to them, doing co-browsing by using assisted shopping, and even just directly placing an order within the B2B Commerce channel. And recently, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce released the ability for sales reps to initiate quotes directly from the commerce admin, rather than the buyer having to request a quote from the front end. So now your sales reps can log in, go to their customer account, and place an order or create a quote and send it to their buyer so the buyer can respond. They had a conversation with the customer on the phone or met them at a trade show or visited their office. This can be a next step that your rep does to get that additional sale to move forward. In addition to the rep being able to initiate quotes, we now support line item discounts within the B2B module. So this allows reps and buyers to communicate at the line item level and have different negotiation terms for each item in the quote that’s been created. So you can offer a percentage off, a mount off, or a flat rate proposed price. You can also add proposed prices down at the overall cart level, or quote level, excuse me. And all of this is headless, allowing you to deploy this into other experiences and apps. So we’re really excited to see customers add their sales reps as admins within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce and give them this B2B sales app that they’ve been asking for. Lastly, I’m going to touch on scaling large B2B catalogs. If you’re running a B2B site or even B2C, you might be looking to add many more products to your solution. And we recently surveyed a lot of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce customers. And what we’re finding is that customers are launching more sites. 70% of our customers are planning to launch more sites in more countries in the coming years and launch more products. 45% of e-commerce professionals that we surveyed said that expanding their product line helped them achieve their business objectives. So this is a common combination, more sites and larger catalogs over time. The good news is that ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce has very strong enterprise scale and performance. We have customers that are transacting billions of dollars through our platform with millions of SKUs, hundreds of storefronts, and over the Cyber 5 from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday, we’re capturing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue on our B2C use cases. So we’re continuing to tune and improve performance of the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce platform. That’s something you can always count on us to focus on. And what we’ve done in the B2B Commerce space is we’ve reduced the need to duplicate the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce catalog every time you create a new shared catalog for your customer. So we now support more complex, larger catalogs across more websites to give you more granular control over your customer-specific pricing. The way we do that is we remove the need to duplicate the SKU data from price indexing through the new B2B module component. Now, when you enable this feature, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce only stores products in the price index that are assigned directly to a shared catalog. Just to give you a fictitious example, if you had a customer or if you had a site that had 10,000 SKUs, no shared catalogs, this wouldn’t necessarily make a difference. But if you have a lot of customer groups or shared catalogs, and only 15% of your products are different prices in those shared catalogs, you could reduce that SKU count significantly, which helps with price indexing and performance. The example on the right is a customer example that I found where they have over 4,000 shared catalogs. So this adds up to 14 billion SKUs in the database, which can create a performance bottleneck now with this new feature, with only 30% of the catalog having direct unique prices in each shared catalog. This allows them to significantly improve their performance from the base catalog of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. Another area where we’ve significantly invested in catalog performance is catalog service. So there’s two core capabilities here that I strongly recommend you investigate if you’re looking to scale your catalog. You can render your catalog data to the front end buyer using catalog service. So it offloads the rendering of the catalog data into a SAS service so that your customers can access the catalog data quickly. So it’s a very low latency retrieval solution for that product data to the end customer. And then the second capability is the back end price indexing that typically is done within the core of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. You can offload that price indexing now into the SAS infrastructure so that both the rendering of the product data to the user and your indexing is done in a SAS environment. This improves performance across the solution. So that’s it for B2B Commerce and scaling your catalog. I’m pleased to now turn it over to Surya Lehmek to take us home through the event-driven integrations in App Builder. Surya, it’s all yours. Thanks, Ed. Thanks for that great segment. And with that, I’ll take over for our update on extensibility with a focus on event-driven integrations. And before I get into the updates themselves, I’d like to give you a quick recap of what we’ve been doing this year. If you’ve been following along with our release communications and our previous webinar, you may be familiar with some of these. But it might be valuable to go over them again. At the start of this year, we basically reimagined how developers extend our products and how they integrate our products with third-party solutions. We started with introducing API Mesh, which is our API orchestration layer. And using that, you can take ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce API and third party API, stitch them together, extend them, distribute them, et cetera, and build rich storefronts with not just and it’s not just about the richness of the storefronts, but the ease with which you can add new services, upgrade services, or even replace existing services that power your storefront much, much more easily than you could before. We also introduced ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Developer App Builder, which is our cloud native environment for building for extending our native capabilities of building integrations. We also added support for events. And we introduced over 700 events that can go through ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ IO Events, which is our event management platform. And those help you to build near real-time or asynchronous integrations with third-party applications. Mid-year, we introduced the Admin UI SDK. The Admin UI SDK allows you to build single-page apps in App Builder using components, UI components, that we provide so that they can match the look and feel of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ products and then securely inject those applications into the Admin Console so you can provide enhanced merchant experiences. And last month, we introduced Webbooks. Webbooks help you build real-time integrations and customize native processes within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce, things like updating maybe your customer creation process or checkout process, payment process, et cetera. Now, the most important part about our approach to extensibility is that none of these capabilities require you to customize any part of the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce product or any of our services. They give you complete power and control over all of the capabilities and the ability to build those rich integrations or customizations. But since you don’t have to customize any of the product, that means that your upgrades become much, much simpler than they were before. Now, at the heart of that is the developer App Builder for Commerce. App Builder is our unified extensibility platform. It works across different solutions, including Commerce, but also ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Manager, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Platform, and also some of our Creative Cloud and Document Cloud products. With App Builder, you can integrate services that I mentioned, integrate ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce with third-party services, extend our native commerce capabilities. We provide you with all the tools to build your applications, including runtime services, UI components, and developer tooling. And you can also run those on our serverless platform. And our serverless platform will automatically scale for you. It’s PCI compliant. It’s secure. And it provides you with all the services that you need to run those apps. That includes compute services, event pipeline, storage, CDN, and so on. The important part about App Builder is that you can now customize or extend every part of our product using a unified or a uniform set of developer tools. That means that you can use the same command line interfaces. You can use the common SDKs. You can use the same web consoles, as well as our logging and troubleshooting and CI CD across all of them. So regardless of whether you’re creating new events or extending our API or building single-page apps, your developers get a unified experience, which means greater developer efficiency. Now, before we go into what’s new, I would like to also bring up a poll for you. I’d like to know if you are currently using App Builder or at least have access to it. And maybe you don’t know. And that’s fine, too. There’s an option over there for you’re not sure if you’re using App Builder currently. So we’ll give it a few seconds for you to take a look at this poll and provide your responses on it.

Now, while we go through this kind of a request, if you have your phone handy around you, please keep it handy. I have a couple of QR codes that I’ll be pulling up through my segment. So it might be helpful for you to have your phone camera available to be able to scan those and be able to go to some of the resources that we’ll be pointing you to. Have about half of the responses in, so I’ll give it another 10 or 15 seconds before moving on to take a look at the results.

All right.

So with that, I’m going to move on. Let’s take a look at what your responses have been. So it looks like about 15% do have access. Close to 40% don’t. And almost half are not sure. So very quickly, App Builder, as I mentioned, is our unified extensibility platform. It supports all of our abilities to extend and integrate the product and make that really, really efficient for you. It’s also available to all ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce customers. And if you’re on cloud, it’s available to you at no extra charge. So if you would like to get your hands on App Builder, please do reach out to your account team and make sure that they provision for you and provide you with access to App Builder. As I mentioned, it’s included at no extra charge if you’re running on cloud. But it’s also available to customers who might be running on prem. If you’re not sure about it, potentially check with your admin. They may have received access to it already. So let’s get into what’s new. So as I mentioned, we introduced IO events early this year. So it was really somewhere around January. And what that does is it gives you access to over 700 events that for processes that happen within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce, things like updates to your product catalog, new product, updated product, et cetera, auto status updates, shipping updates, customer account updates. And all of those go into ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ’s unified IO events pipeline, where they can be used along with events from other ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ solutions like ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Experience Manager or say from the Document Cloud or Creative Cloud. Once they get in there, your developers can build apps that react to those. So those could be apps that will facilitate an integration or something like that with a third party system. Or you can send those events directly to a third party using Webhooks. So an event, you don’t have to actually build something on our end, you can just forward that event with its data and payload across to a third party system. You can also log those events into a journal so that third party applications can actually pull the events maybe periodically or as they need from our journal. Now with this latest update, we are introducing native integration between ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce events and Amazon EventBridge. So that means that now without writing any code or integration layer, you can push these events directly into Amazon and be able to leverage them with AWS services like Lambda or third party applications that are integrated in with AWS currently. So let’s take an example of what an event driven integration means. So an example would be sending an order to an ERP system. So a shopper goes to your storefront and completes the checkout process. Now that order gets created within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. When that order gets created, we push an event into the IO events pipeline and from there, you can build an app and app builder to do something with that order, for example, transform the payload of that order in a manner that is expected by the third party system like an ERP or maybe an auto management system. And then we can push that data out or that order out to the ERP system for fulfillment. Now the benefit of our approach is that you don’t need to customize anything within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. You have a unified pipeline where all these events go into, you can manage them and then extend those events or enhance the data that goes with this and send them out to your third party system without customizing anything in the commerce platform. And that means that your upgrades and maintenance, the cost of upgrades and maintenance go down. With the Amazon integration, now you don’t even need to write apps within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. EventBridge on Amazon acts as a router for those events. So when those events reach there, you can go in a local environment and route those events or extend those events or making changes to the data and send them across to any other system that is integrated or can be integrated into EventBridge. So even if you have, so if you already use EventBridge, now you have a unified way to manage events from ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce as well as other applications that you might have integrated into EventBridge. And of course you get, you know, the all access to all of those services running on AWS, which without writing any code or any customization because we natively integrate with EventBridge now. Now this is actually available in early access. We expect to make a GA at the end of the year, but if you are interested in, we are running an early access or beta program for our customers, and that will give you support from our product team to integrate or to leverage this feature. So if you’re interested, please scan this QR code over here. There’s an interest form that will pop up. You can fill details of your organization and potentially of the use case you’re trying to implement, and then we will reach out to you and provide you with support for product and engineering to take advantage of this new capability to integrate with Amazon services. I’ll give it a moment for you to scan this before moving on to the next slide.

All right, so as I mentioned, events, in the beginning of my session, events are essentially asynchronous. So they are near real-time integrations, but sometimes you might need to run real-time integrations for certain use cases. Examples of those would be validation of inventory or price just as the user is checking out or as the customer’s checking out, or maybe you need to get tax or promos, again, validated as the customer’s checking out, or maybe you need to check a gift card balance and validate it in real time. So in those cases, you can’t use asynchronous methods of integration. You have to use synchronous methods of integrations. And to solve for that, we have introduced webhooks for ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. What webhooks allow you to do is to tap into native processes running within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. And those are things like creating a new customer or going through the checkout process or payment processing and so on. So in this example, a shopper on your storefront would go ahead and start that checkout process after adding products to the cart. We can intercept that process. And let’s say the customer has entered their shipping address we can enter that process before going to the next step, make a call out to the shipping provider, get back the shipping calculation, inject it back into the process, and then display the total including shipping information to the customer within the next step. And all of this can be done without actually customizing or writing any custom code within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. You can configure the events you’re listening for, configure where those, where you want the third party service you want to call out to and what kind of data you’re expecting back. And then that will customize the process. And of course, you can use App Builder to do any additional validation or any other business logic that you want. You can build those as apps within App Builder. Again, using this approach, you reduce your cost of maintenance as well as cost of upgrades because you don’t have to customize anything within the ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce product.

So to wrap up about the highlights for extensibility, especially when it comes to events, we provide you with an event-driven architecture to support both asynchronous or near real-time needs, as well as synchronous or real-time integrations, depending on what your use case is. We give you a unified developer experience and a local environment to build apps that integrate or extend ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. All of this is done with no customization to our core product or services. And that means easier maintenance and upgrade over time.

So with that, let’s move on to our 2024 release schedule.

Now, earlier this year, we announced about how we were simplifying our release process as well as our support policy. And the goal of that was to minimize the frequency and the complexity of applying the upgrades or adopting upgrades delivered by ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ. Now, the plan for 24 remains, or our strategy for 2024 remains pretty much the same. We will have just one full batch release that will be 2.47, and it will be available to you in April, 2024 with the expanded three-year support window. Now, as before, our batch release will focus only on updates for security, performance, and quality. So we don’t release new features through those batch releases because they are essentially focused on platform quality, making those updates simpler for you to adopt, even though they are infrequent, even additionally, they are also easy for you to apply. However, we will be continuously releasing new features throughout the year, and all of those new features will be released as independent modules or services, which means they will not require you to perform any kind of upgrade to the platform. Instead, we roll them out through all of our SaaS services. No disruption to your operations, and you can adopt them as you need. We’ll also continue to enhance our developer tooling and the mechanisms that we provide you to be able to build rich, complex integrations with your third-party systems, or to extend our core product itself.

Now, what changes for next year? We will have five security-only batch releases, as opposed to the four that we had this year. So we’re adding one more security release that will be available for both ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce and for Magento open source. We are also replacing our pre-release process that we ran this year, and instead, we will focus on early access through our beta version releases.

So this is a snapshot of our release calendar for 24. You don’t have to go through everything over here. There is a QR code that you can scan to see this information. It’s available on Experience League, and as you can see, we’ve highlighted the 247 batch release that will be available in April of next year.

Now, I do want to call to your attention that this webinar is part of a series that we will be doing quarterly, and this will be ongoing through next year as well. It’s our way of being able to communicate with you directly and provide you with all the updates and all the innovations that we are working on within ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. A recording of this session will be available within the next couple of days on Experience League. If you missed our July webinar, that’s already available over there, and of course, all future webinars will be available on Experience League if you miss the actual live webinar. If you’re not familiar with Experience League, it’s basically our hub for all of our user guides, tutorials, videos, webinars, and a host of developer resources, so please make it a point to bookmark that and check there periodically for some great information on ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Commerce. Lastly, I’d like to highlight an upcoming webinar that is not part of our regular release updates, but this is focused on ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Sensei Gen AI. It will be on December 6th at 10 a.m. Pacific time. In this, you will learn how we are using Sensei Gen AI to transform how you create and build marketing content, campaigns, audiences, as well as orchestrate journeys. If you’re interested in registering, there’s a QR code over there. Please scan that again, and you will be able to register for this webinar. And with that, I’m going to hand it back to our producer, Emily.

Thank you.