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Jul 12, 2021 | 5 minute read
written by Shaneil Lafayette
eCommerce sales have continued to grow despite a challenging period between the years 2020 and 2021. And if we’ve learned anything from this time period, just setting up a simple website isn’t enough to drive revenue growth. In fact, in order to remain relevant and stay ahead of the curve, it’s essential to keep abreast of the newest eCommerce technological innovations.
At Elastic Path we understand the importance of launching engaging, new features and experiences for your customers so that you can increase brand loyalty. That is why one of our top priorities is on continuous product innovation to support your business in an ever evolving market. In fact, we release 2x more than other headless, microservices solutions.
This past spring our product and engineering teams have worked around the clock on multiple innovations within our Elastic Path Commerce Cloud product. These innovations were made to be immediately accessible upon release and many customers have already begun to leverage them throughout their digital strategy. These updates include:
With the release of these new innovations, Elastic Path is making it easy to support your complex eCommerce strategy across multiple business models such as B2C, B2B, B2B2C, and DTC. Learn more about all of our product innovations here.
Product Content Management
Traditionally, commerce platforms have had their catalogs, products, hierarchies, and pricebook functionality coupled into a single capability, creating painstaking rigidity. As such, brands have been forced to implement expensive and time-consuming work arounds to support their unique assortments and pricing per catalog. This has resulted in delayed time-to-market for new products, stifled innovation for new routes-to-market types, and painstaking catalog updates.
The new Product Content Management service in Elastic Path Commerce Cloud, provides branded manufacturers with a flexible and seamless way to launch and manage offerings across a range of business scenarios, including different geographies, touchpoints, brands, account types (e.g., tiered reseller pricing, reward pricing, etc.), and business models.
With three new fully decoupled microservices, users can expect to be able to:
Learn more about Product Content Management (Updated June 2022: now EP Product Experience Manger (PXM))
Composable Commerce XATM(Experience Assurance)
As the eCommerce industry continues to deviate from traditional “all-in-one” eCommerce platforms, towards MACH-based, Composable Commerce solutions, we have been forced to move away from single point contacts for issues. While creating multi-vendor solutions, composed with preferred technology partners can be highly attractive, it also introduces risk and uncertainty of who to call when an issue arises, how to identify the root cause of the issue, and how to resolve the issue across your solution.
Composable Commerce XATM was created to enable Elastic Path to monitor integration data flow, quickly and easily identify the source of an issue across a multi-vendor solution, and work with the customer and their other partners to resolve the issue. This simply means in the event of an identified issue, Elastic Path will serve as the primary point of contact throughout the process of managing issue resolution across a multi-vendor solution.
With Composable Commerce XATM your eCommerce teams can expect to:
Explore more about Composable Commerce XATM
Roles Based Access Controls (RBAC)
Running an enterprise-grade online business will often require multiple internal teams to support the business’ go-to-market and optimization strategies. As such, there will likely be a variety of teams with varying responsibilities that need access to your eCommerce solution to perform individual tasks.
The release of Roles Based Access Controls from Elastic Path allows organizations to quickly and easily assign roles so that each team can fulfill their responsibilities without disruption to the other team’s workflows. This has been game changing for B2C, B2B, and B2B2C companies in operationalizing their teams.
With Roles Based Access Control, users can now be assigned to the following roles and granted access to distinct functional and features on Elastic Path Commerce Cloud:
Explore more about Roles Based Access Control.
B2B Account Management
Businesses operating with a B2B use case are often selling to other businesses with multiple buyers in the buying cycle, within the same organization. To operate at optimal scale, businesses need to maintain complex account structures across varying roles and authoritative access.
Account Management for Elastic Path Commerce Cloud facilitates seamless buying experiences across multiple buyer accounts while maintaining a personalized sales touch.
With the release of B2B Account Management your teams will have the ability to:
Explore more about B2B Account Management
GraphQL Server
In the developer ecosystem, there’s usually some indecisiveness about whether to choose REST vs GraphQL for development. Though there are some technical differences, both can help you achieve your business goals and the choice will usually come down to preference. Traditionally, at Elastic Path, we prefer REST because it follows HTTP protocol standards. However, we recognize that many may prefer GraphQL, for the familiarity or the perceived ease of frontend development.
As such, we have released the GraphQL Server for Elastic Path Commerce Cloud to allow a wide range of developers to easily build and support shopping experiences. The Graph server provides:
To get started, you can clone the Github repo and follow the instructions in the readme.
We are thrilled to continue innovating here at Elastic Path. If you would like to keep up to date on our newest product innovations, explore our product innovation page for major updates and our product changelog for all major and minor updates.