This piece is found in Yahoo! Finance and discusses the latest from Optimizely, the 2009 New York-based fintech that provides customer experience optimization, allowing businesses to drive up the value of their digital products, commerce, and campaigns through its experimentation software platform. In this case, the release indicates that the company has integrated two of its products, the B2B Commerce Cloud and the Content Cloud.
‘The integration makes use of the B2B Commerce Cloud as a headless commerce API to make B2B data and capabilities available within the Content Cloud. Now, B2B customers choosing to select both the B2B Commerce Cloud and Content Cloud with the new integration can:
• Take advantage of B2B-specific features within the B2B Commerce Cloud
• Use the Content Cloud to manage all the pages, templates, content and assets of their site
• Benefit from an out-of-the-box, combined site search engine that searches products in the B2B Commerce catalog while searching content in the Content Cloud and combining the results
• Manage their product catalog in B2B Commerce, but have all the products available for use in the Content Cloud
• Build and manage multi-sites in the Content Cloud while leveraging the shared data for customers, products and orders in the B2B Commerce Cloud’
As we have pointed out in member research, the B2B portion of the e-commerce space potentially dwarfs that of the retail market. There has been rapid growth in the past several years, even prior to the pandemic, but certainly further supported by WFH scenarios, which have continued through 2022. As we pointed out in said research, the overall B2B market for goods and services is estimated at over $125 trillion. However, this number combines all B2B sales channels and does not reveal the interesting dynamics occurring in the B2B space. Growth trends differ substantially between electronic and physical sales channels, with the former growing and the latter constricting during the pandemic. So, companies that are utilizing solutions such as Optimizely’s offerings should be staying ahead of the pack in terms of having experiences that the younger demographic is expecting.
‘To help customers get the most from the combined products, Optimizely is also releasing a B2B-specific sample site that includes numerous Content Cloud templates and blocks that can be used to accelerate customers’ build time. Customers can leverage the provided assets or reference them as examples before customizing their own. The sample site will address the time-to-market metric that many B2B customers find critical when selecting their technology vendors…
“Optimizely Content Cloud has a long history of providing marketers with extensive tools for content publication and creation of exceptional digital experiences,” said Justin Anovick, Chief Product Officer of Optimizely. “With the integration of B2B Commerce Cloud, businesses can extend these tools to B2B customers, enabling the delivery of optimal digital experiences across audiences.”’
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
