According to estimates by Statista, 13.1 billion pairs of shoes were sold worldwide in 2019. In the US alone, the estimate is about 2.6 billion pairs, which translates to about 82 pairs per second. Clearly, we love shoes.

Chances are you or someone you know has bought a pair of shoes manufactured or sold by Caleres. While you may not know of Caleres, you probably know some of their brands: Famous Footwear, Allen Edmonds, Franco Sarto, Naturalizer, Dr. Scholls, BZees, or Circus by Sam Edelman. Caleres uses Sitecore Experience Commerce™, along with the help of Sitecore Platinum Partner RBA Consulting, to engage with their customers and sell more shoes, augmenting and strengthening their offline channels.

Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) 9.3 is designed for customers like Caleres.

Sitecore XC 9.3 advances the work we began in 9.1 and 9.2. We’ve tuned up the platform again to support super-high throughput, scalability, and performance. But engaging and converting visitors is about more than just the performance of your digital storefront. It’s also about the experience your digital storefront delivers — for both employees and customers.

An enhanced platform for improved CX

Sitecore XC 9.3 includes features and capabilities that help brands engage customers, drive conversion, and accelerate time-to-value:

  • Increased performance and scalability: Preliminary internal testing revealed that the platform’s new approach to caching, indexing, and other optimization techniques increased critical KPIs by 4x - 10x compared to XC 9.1. As these results will vary in actual deployments depending on many factors, we recommend you conduct your own testing for your specific deployment.
  • Driving customer engagement and revenue: Sitecore XC 9.3 adds several new promotion capabilities including:
    • Category level promotion – create promotions for a whole category of products and simplify promotion planning and management
    • Extend active promotions – extend impactful promotions that are about to expire, rather than creating new ones
  • 9.3 also introduces additional marketing automation features:
    • Cross sell and upsell – automate the recommendation of complementary products and services based on recent purchases
    • Schedule and auto-enroll customers in a marketing plan – add contacts into a marketing plan based on a defined schedule; for example, add a defined set of customers into a “Holidays Plan” between Black Friday and Cyber Monday
    • Support for non-registered or guest shoppers in marketing automation plans – include non-registered or guest shoppers in any marketing automation plan as long as you have their contact information and permission to use it
  • Accelerating time-to-value: Agility is key to success for commerce teams. Sitecore XC 9.3 added several new capabilities to empower commerce teams, including new components for display search results based on Scriban, facet search, facet-search summary, search box with type ahead and predictive suggestions, as well as updated storefront templates with new components.
  • Improving productivity and usability: Enhancements include adding the search function to many business tool views that tend to have a high volume of entries, the ability to associate sellable products to a new parent category, and page support for long list view such as promotions, coupons, inventory sets, and orders.

(Looking for a deeper dive into the Sitecore XC 9.3 release? Check out the Release Notes.)

Connectors

In collaboration with our partner XCentium, we have delivered several connectors to help simplify a customer’s commerce deployment. These are available on GitHub.

Connectors developed by Sitecore:

  • Braintree – integrate with Braintree payment processing
  • ShipEngine – integrate with ShipEngine shipping logistics

Connectors developed by XCentium:

  • Avalara – integrate with Avalara’s US tax calculation solution
  • United States Postal Services – integrate with USPS shipping service
  • FedEx – integrate with FedEx shipping services
  • UPS – integrate with UPS shipping services

Connector developed by Softbank Payment:

  • SB Payment Services – integrate with Softbank Payment Services payment gateway

If you’re looking for an extra push to support your business growth, it’s time for an upgrade to Sitecore XC 9.3. Your digital storefront will benefit from the scalability improvements, lower infrastructural cost, and new ways to engage and nurture your customers. When you’re ready to learn more about everything an upgrade can do for you, contact us.

 

Hansen Lieu is the Product Marketing Director for Commerce at Sitecore. With over 10 years of experience helping organizations gain competitive advantage with digital commerce and CRM technologies, Hansen is responsible for positioning, messaging, thought leadership, and go-to-market strategy. Follow him on Twitter @HansenTweets or on LinkedIn.