- Videos
- Reviews
- Blog posts
- Use cases
- Ebooks
- And many more!
Deciding on the type of content is crucial to understand the needs of your customers.
Benefits of having Content in E-Commerce
Using content in E-Commerce can bring a lot of value so let’s take a closer look at some of the advantages:
- It helps educate your customers - if you want your customers to click the Buy Now button, there is nothing better than a list of features and benefits of your product.
- Create brand awareness - customers feel positive relationships with companies that create content.
- Bring SEO value - having tons of content helps your website be higher in Google Search rankings, which results in more chances of customers visiting the shop and actually buying your product.
- Improve conversions and revenue - a user reading an article about how your product resolves their problem can significantly increase the chance of buying the product.
- Build strategic relationships- Apart from targeting your customers and users, great content can also help in creating partnerships and relationships with other companies.
These, however, are mainly business-oriented benefits. Having a CMS in your e-commerce provides also several developer experience benefits such as:
- Composability - Organizations can integrate with the best tools available for each specific use case.
- Future-proof architecture - Thanks to API, it is easier to integrate CMS with current and future services.
- Improve developer flexibility and productivity - Without vendor lock-in, developers can choose the best-of-breed solutions they want to work with
- Integrates well with static site generators- Headless CMS such as Storyblok integrates perfectly with static/hybrid websites such as those used for e-commerce.
Considering all this, having a Content Management System in E-Commerce has proven to be quite useful.
Technical difficulties
As you know from the section above, having content in E-Commerce can have several advantages. However, it also comes with some difficulties that you will need to resolve to make it work correctly.
Content in Ecommerce Technology
Content Driven E-Commerce requires a proper sync between the E-Commerce platform and the Content Management System. In order to achieve this, both systems need to be deeply integrated.
You also need to have content creation knowledge in your company. Managing products and categories in an e-commerce platform requires a different set of skills than creating engaging content. To do that, you will need people who have knowledge about your product, current trends, content creation, and marketing.
Adding a Headless CMS to your e-commerce technology stack means another tool that you will need to work with. Some companies prefer to keep their stack simple and do not extend it with a content creation tool such as CMS. In some cases, having a content management system can be a bottleneck in the e-commerce application architecture. Let’s imagine that your system has a relationship between e-commerce and CMS: for example, you store product IDs and names in the CMS. Displaying the Product Page would look more or less like this:
- Fetch the ID of the product from the CMS.
- Fetch the product from E-Commerce platform based on the ID from CMS.
If at any point, your CMS would fail, your online store would not be able to correctly serve the data to your customers. To mitigate this kind of issue, you would need to implement a fallback functionality that is enabled when CMS is down and then uses the ID’s directly fetched from the E-commerce platform.
Implementation of the Composable Commerce application with Nuxt, Shopify, and Storyblok
I published an article for Storyblok about building a Composable Commerce with Nuxt, Shopify, and Storyblok that you can check out to learn more about the technical implementation of a CMS in a modern E-Commerce application.
https://dev.to/jacobandrewsky/building-composable-commerce-with-nuxt-shopify-and-storyblok-crash-course-part-one-3ffb
Here, Nuxt is used as the frontend framework (so-called storefront), Shopify is the e-commerce platform and Storyblok is the Headless CMS. Thanks to this approach, we can add dynamic content to our e-commerce application, but also get some custom data from e-commerce in Storyblok and display it in Storefront in the ways we want (i.e. with different orders).
Summary
Having a content management system in e-commerce provides a lot of value. However, it also comes with challenges that you will need to solve or protect against. By using a CMS in e-commerce, you will be able to leverage content to engage with your customers, improve SEO, increase conversions, and much more!
Storyblok: The perfect CMS for e-commerce
Storyblok provides all the functionalities of a CMS that you may need for your e-commerce system. It offers great value for both developers and content creators, enabling you to take control of your content no matter what channel you want to publish it on. Apart from the CMS itself, Storyblok has several APIs that help create exceptional user experience, fast content delivery, and a content management API with a simple interface.
Storyblok also comes with several integration plugins with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Commercetools, and many more!
Storyblok integrations
You can use them to easily fetch e-commerce data directly into the CMS and to your frontend. With Storyblok’s eCommerce integrations you can easily build performant storefronts with your favorite technology, be it a website or a mobile app, without being constrained by the limitations of more traditional eCommerce systems.