Itâ€TMs here. Adobe Sensei-powered product recommendations is the first AI-powered product recommendations engine for Magento, and it looks awesome. Sensei uses artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms to perform a deep analysis of aggregated visitor data. It sharpens and targets the product recommendation experience so that they are incredibly relevant.

We believe this is going to be a huge booster for productivity and average order size for B2B merchants. Through our B2B e-commerce experience, designing and installing both the core B2B features and additional B2B modules that speed, we know that self-service and purchasing automation are critical to B2B merchants that want to provide their B2B company customers (and purchasing team members associated with each) with easy, fast, and efficient purchasing. Using Adobe Sensei with Magento Commerce now provides another solution for that.

Weâ€TMre excited about Adobe Sensei for Magento 2 B2B merchants for the following reasons:

1. Easy set up and the easiest way to get AI-powered product recommendations working in a B2B setting

2. We think B2B customers will be highly likely to benefit from the technology

3. With use of this AI-powered product recommendation engine we believe B2B average order values will increase significantly.

Easy to Set Up

Because Sensei is deployed as a SaaS service that is integrated with Magento, it’s relatively easy to set up and should not require any “coding” once the product recommendation modules are installed. Although, it does require knowledge of the Magento Admin panels and key configuration sequences.

On the Admin sidebar, go to Marketing > Promotions > Product Recommendations.

The Product Recommendations dashboard appears. From here, you can create a new recommendation or edit an existing recommendation.This dashboard displays a table of previously configured recommendations (if any) along with the metrics being tracked on those recommendations.

You can use the date filter to refine the recommendations by Last 24 hours, Last 7 days, and Last 30 days.

Now that youâ€TMre no longer scared by this process, we suggest reading the installation notes in the Magento User Guide.

Benefits for B2B Merchants

Obviously you still want to have a well-organized and intuitive catalog – especially for B2B buyers whose job is about finding and procuring the goods they need to conduct business. But having Sensei-powered product recommendations running will gradually over time help the B2B buyer move quickly through their experience and also help them select the items they need, even if they are not thinking about them.

The “Recommended for You” feature will initially use “most viewed” for the first time visitor but over time based upon behavior, the technology will learn to associate need products with the purchasing behavior. For a B2B purchaser this will feel like “assisted shopping” and reduce the need for manually searching. We’re already seeing that this will increase the average cart size.

It’s our belief that, if used correctly, all of the recommendation types provided by this module will benefit B2B shoppers and merchants just as much if not more than B2C.

Out of the box Sensei-powered product recommendations include:

Most viewed – Recommends items most viewed by shoppers within the last seven days

Most purchased – Recommends items most purchased by shoppers within the last seven days

Most added to cart – Recommends items most frequently added to carts by shoppers within the last seven days

Recommended for you – Recommends items based on each shopperâ€TMs current and previous on site behavior

Viewed this, viewed that – Recommends items most often viewed by shoppers who viewed the specified item

Viewed this, bought that – Recommends items most often purchased by shoppers who viewed the specified item

Bought this, bought that – Recommends items most often purchased by...

The Accorin team has been experts at e-commerce integration for some time and over the last few years has been developing products and customizations to help a variety of merchants. Leveraging this expertise and our recent experience helping clients executing e-commerce operations through SaaS platforms like Shopify and Big Commerce we’ve developed an enterprise application integration (EAI) tool which we believe will provide a ton of value to SaaS E-commerce merchants. We call it RocketFlowz.

What Does RocketFlowz Offer?

Simply put, Rocketflowz is a powerful new tool that will help Shopify merchants run their businesses more efficiently. Currently in BETA, RocketFlowz supports the following integrations:

Inventory

Orders

Shipments

Status Updates

Returns

Products

We’ve run across a number of organizations running both Magento and Shopify. Using our Integrator in Magento and Rocketflowz for Shopify, merchants will be able to use the same architecture to manage and monitor integrations into critical back end systems.

Bringing BigCommerce into the Mix

Accorin is dedicated to helping e-commerce merchants no matter what platform they select. We are truly expert at a few (don’t let any system integrator tell you they are “platform agnostic” because we don’t believe in that) but we also have run across many, many different integration scenarios. So, we are in the process of solidifying our knowledge of Big Commerce, adopting it as another SaaS option for our clients, and launching an interface between it and RocketFlowz.

Here’s our Thinking:

BigCommerce is a viable SaaS solution for mid-sized companies that need headless and or basic B2B functionality in a SaaS platform.

Chances are these types of merchants will also need (at a minimum) ERP Integrations. So we feel compelled to offer RocketFlowz to the tens of thousands of BigCommerce merchants that we believe could use it to make their integrations easier and improve their e-Commerce operations.

The Bottom Line

Our Product development team has completed initial API integrations between RocketFlowz and BigCommerce. We’re excited to be offering it to the BigCommerce community of merchants and if you are interested in signing up for our BETA program please send us an email at [email protected] and we’d be happy to chat about it.

As e-commerce merchants, it’s important to be tuned in to the shifts in markets to understand the sentiments of our customers and be ready for fluctuations in sales activity. If we do this well, we can use tactics to minimize the downside in bad economic times or even maximize sales when the economy is booming. With the Coronavirus crisis very much front of mind for many all over the world, we asked ourselves: what will the impact be on e-commerce?

So far, the biggest impact to us has been the cancellation of Adobe Summit / Magento Imagine – the latter traditionally being one of the largest e-commerce trade shows of the year. But with a growing sense all around that we’re just at the proverbial tip of the iceberg of this thing, and with global financial markets reeling from the uncertainty, we feel compelled to weigh in on what we believe we will see happening in the world of e-commerce this year.

So here are some key questions about the crisis and e-commerce and how we are currently answering them

Q: Is the Crisis Going to be Good or Bad for E-commerce?

A: It will be the same as it will be for the economy as a whole; e-commerce is such a pervasive part of the global economy... we’ll see the good (innovation) the bad (short term pullbacks, hesitations and postponements of business initiatives) and the ugly (increasing risk, and a lot of “out of stock” notices). As of the week of March 9, we’re in the “shock” phase where the virus is just spreading in the US. It’s hard not to push the pause button on initiatives but those who have the fortitude to keep going and to keep innovating are going to come out on the other side of this in great shape.

Q: Will B2C Retail E-commerce Sales Benefit from the Coronavirus Crisis?

A: There’s a theory that the growing fear of being in public retail settings and crowds might bolster e-commerce sales as people opt for the online alternative to high streets. This isn’t necessarily true. The problem is that e-commerce, which reduces time, distance and touches between the factories and consumers, may actually have the capability of exacerbating the supply chains that are interrupted by this crisis. There is less friction in the economy with e-commerce. So although it’s easy for consumers to sit home on their couch and order on their phones, the products might not be available because a lot of the resources in the supply chain that produce the items are not working and producing as they normally do.

Q: Is the E-commerce Industry Going to Change Based on this Crisis?

A: We think there are going to be a lot of opportunities for marketplaces, apps, extensions that help companies avoid supply chain disruption. This will essentially point to solving the need for supply chain diversification from a company’s vendors’ manufacturing floors right through to inventory on their (b2b) customers’ shelves.

Marketplaces

Affiliate programs

Make-to-order manufacturing

Customized manufacturing

Also more controls on inventory and shipping will be in demand in order to account for future economic events where scarcity comes into play.

Q: What E-commerce Verticals Will Benefit From the Crisis?

A: It’s pretty clear that the industries in e-commerce that will benefit from the crisis include entertainment software and just about anything that streams or is downloadable. We expect gaming and entertainment to see the most lift over the next six months. We also think there might be a bit of a run up in demand for other types of products that support entertainment at home. As long as they can be produced, speakers, home theater products will get a boost from people moving their money from vacations to STAYcations. It’s obvious that travel is getting killed short term but assuming this is a 6-12 month problem in an economy that is overall performing quite well get ready for travel to explode in 2021.

Q: With a Temporary Downturn in the Economy, How Will E-commerce Software Platform Companies Fa...

Over the last decade, Accorin teams have delivered world-class e-commerce projects on a variety of different platforms, from Magento 1 and Magento 2, to Shopify, BigCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware), BigCommerce, DotNetNuke (DNN) and Volusion. We have a lot of experience on different platforms, their strengths, their weaknesses, and functional capabilities. We also get a lot of questions (and functional requests) around multistore. It’s one of those terms that might mean different things to different e-commerce merchants and platform architects. I recently heard Andrew Youderian (@youderian) of eCommerce Fuel (a GREAT podcast by the way) mention on a recent News Cart e-commerce news podcast that Shopify had launched “multistore” functionality in its most recent release. Shopifys lack of multistore capabilities has been a constraint for the platform, so I was interested to learn more.

I asked a couple of our solution architects if they knew about the feature and what they thought it meant for merchants and other platforms like Magento (which leans on multistore heavily as a part of its value proposition for growing e). It turns out that multistore means very different things on Shopify and Magento. Both have value to merchants, but to merchants exploring both platforms for growth, it’s important to point out the current differences.

Shopify: What “Multistore” Means

First off, Multistore on Shopify is a feature that’s only available to Shopify Plus members. For regular Shopify merchants there are multistore plugins available that purport to offer multistore capability. But for the purposes of this comparison we are discussing the resident functionality within Shopify Plus. Based on what we have seen, Shopify’s multistore feature is essentially a handy Multistore Login feature that allows a Shopify merchant to use one set of credentials and login location to access and manage multiple Shopify storefronts. It is similar conceptually to a Single Sign On / SSO for Shopify. So we like to call Shopify’s current concept of Multistore. Multistore Login to different Shopify instances / storefronts.

The following diagram shows where product pricing updates (or updates to other content) would happen for a merchant with multiple Shopify storefronts.

Magento 2: What “Multistore” Means

Multistore on Magento 2 (including Community and Enterprise / Cloud) is a comprehensive and important aspect of its value proposition. It’s also very different than the Shopify concept. In Magento 2, multistore is really more than one feature, it is an approach that allows merchants to operate multiple storefronts from the same instance of Magento, using the same product and catalog database. Like Shopify a merchant can obviously login to multiple storefronts using the same credentials because they are logging into one instance of Magento. Basically, when you login to Magento, you can see all of your customers, orders, products and configuration information in one place for all your stores (with filtering to see just a single store’s info). No need to logout and then login to another store.The implications for the Magento version of Multstore are important for a merchant considering a multi-storefront expansion and or a global expansion.

There are obviously positive benefits from the perspective of efficiency managing one catalog database while still being able to control and manage different prices and product attributes for different storefronts. But in addition, the Magento multistore model allows a merchant to have multiple teams working on different storefronts and those team members can be restricted in terms of access to other storefronts. This model allows an expansion-minded merchant with complex catalog requirements to manage multiple complex e-commerce businesses from one interface.

The following diagram shows where product pricing updates (or updates to other content) would happen for a merchant with multiple Magento storefronts.Â

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