2sitecoreWith the rise of NFC, social media and the omnipresent digital devices accompanying our daily life, brands must think omnichannel. Especially since in today’s customer-centric world, being omniscient and involved in making the customer’s experience in a universally satisfying way, is the core. Therefore, marketers have to consider that the evolution of the customer relationship isn’t messaging and media anymore, but product research, selection and payment.

Sitecore Commerce 8, powered by Microsoft Dynamics, bridges in-store and digital customer experiences by marrying Sitecore’s experience management capabilities with the infrastructure of Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail. The combined solution enables companies with a retail presence to aggregate their content across all sales channels, paving the way for true omnichannel commerce.

Key features of the Sitecore/Microsoft Dynamics solution include:

Shared services between online and brick-and-mortar: All aspects of order capture—such as pricing, tax, and discounts—are shared between digital and brick-and-mortar channels, supporting a consistent experience regardless of channel.

Synchronization and publishing: A synchronization service aggregates catalog data from Dynamics and Sitecore’s Commerce Catalog to facilitate very high- traffic digital experiences.

Storefront solutions: The solution supports multiple storefronts, representing different countries and legal entities in the same deployment. A reference storefront is provided to accelerate customer deployments.

Additional omnichannel capabilities: Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail offers comprehensive features in the areas of loyalty programs; store location with real-time inventory; buy online, pick up in store; order management, including returns; customer service; and call center—all enabled in digital experiences built with Sitecore.

For customers not using Microsoft Dynamics AX for Retail, Sitecore Commerce 8 offers a comprehensive set of digital commerce capabilities that can easily integrate with all other enterprise retail platforms and the information systems that feed them, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and more. This is enabled by out-of-box support for the Microsoft BizTalk integration platform, which provides pre-packaged connectivity to 30 different ERP systems and additional enterprise applications.

Furthermore, the Sitecore Experience Database (xDB), a critical component of Sitecore Commerce Server, captures and connects all customer interactions to create a comprehensive, unified view of the individual client. It can handle hundreds of billions of visits or interactions per year and provide marketers with more data in real-time for automated interactions across all channels.

With personal preference data that can be used universally on devices, brands can either jump at the opportunities made real by omnichannel, or miss the boat. Fact is that the brands who can best interpret omnichannel data and understand all customers will be the winners.

By MediaBUZZ