Preview in a Composable Commerce Ecosystem
For any organisation being able to preview content changes to their commerce platform is vital. It allows businesses to innovate with ease, create content that resonates with their customers and conveys their brand message, all without impacting the smooth running of their commerce site. Preview facilitates:
Content Validation and Quality Assurance: Preview allows content authors, editors, and administrators to validate and review content changes before they are published live. This enables thorough quality assurance and reduces the risk of publishing incorrect or incomplete content, ensuring that only polished and accurate content reaches the customers.
Enhanced Collaboration: Preview functionality facilitates collaboration among team members involved in content creation and management. It enables content authors and editors to share preview links, gather feedback, and iterate on content revisions in a controlled environment. This streamlined collaboration process improves efficiency, reduces miscommunication, and fosters a more cohesive content workflow.
Improved User Experience: Previewing content in its intended context helps businesses ensure a seamless and optimised user experience. By viewing how content will appear and function in the front-end presentation layer, organisations can fine-tune the layout, design, and interactive elements to create engaging and user-friendly experiences. Preview allows for iterative improvements and testing before content is made publicly accessible.
The term preview can often have many meanings, but in this context, it is the ability to see how new content and data would look when it is published onto the live site. An example would be to see how the commerce site would look on Black Friday. There are many elements that will make up the customer experience:
Content - Pages, layout, images, copy, offers, links
Products - Availability, price, copy
Promotions - Which offers are currently active
Search - Rules and algorithms.
Changes to these elements will create a very different shopping experience to the customer. This new shopping experience must not only be tested to make sure it functionally works but must also be reviewed to ensure the experience conveys the correct brand message. It would be a bad user experience if the home page references a promotion or products that were not currently available.
The question then is how does preview work in a composable landscape? Often the data needed for preview is held in different best-of-breed systems. First check that the SaaS systems that you want to compose your system from support preview, most do, but it is worth checking out how this functionality works and if it meets your business needs. Then work out what can be previewed in isolation and what requires a fully integrated commerce system. Let's take CMS as an example.
Most modern CMS systems provide preview functionality. This allows instant feedback so a designer can visually see how content changes will be seen on the site. These content changes can be reviewed in isolation or can be pushed to a dedicated preview system. This will then combine the CMS content changes, with preview products (ones not yet live) from the commerce system with the preview promotions. This then allows the business to view the full campaign from a customer perspective at some point in the future.
Implementing preview functionality can come with certain challenges:
Data Consistency: Ensuring data consistency between the preview environment and the live production environment.
Performance and Scalability: Preview functionality can put additional load on the system, especially if there is a significant amount of preview traffic or if the preview environment needs to handle real-time data updates.
Content Synchronisation: In a Composable Commerce architecture, content may be distributed across multiple systems or services. Ensuring that all content updates are synchronised correctly and consistently across these systems to provide an accurate preview experience.
Security and Access Control: Implementing robust security measures and access control mechanisms to protect the preview environment and ensure that only authorised users have access.
User Experience and Feedback: Providing a user-friendly and intuitive preview experience for content authors, editors, and administrators is crucial. Designing a clear and accessible interface, implementing collaboration features, and gathering user feedback to improve the preview process can be challenging but essential for user adoption and satisfaction.
Versioning and Rollback: Managing content versions, tracking changes, and allowing rollback functionality in the preview environment.
Testing and Quality Assurance: Implementing preview functionality requires thorough testing and quality assurance processes to identify and resolve any issues or bugs. Testing different content types, scenarios, and user workflows in the preview environment is essential to ensure a reliable and consistent preview experience.
Addressing these challenges requires a well-planned implementation strategy, technical expertise, and thorough testing. By carefully considering and addressing these challenges, businesses can successfully implement preview functionality in their composable commerce setup and provide users with a reliable and effective preview experience.
It is often stated that it is simpler to provide preview functionality in a monolithic platform. It is important to note that monolithic architectures can also have limitations in terms of flexibility, scalability, and customization. As businesses grow and their requirements evolve, they may face challenges in adapting and expanding their monolithic platforms to meet changing needs.
Composable commerce, on the other hand, provides the flexibility to integrate specialised best-of-breed components from different vendors, allowing businesses to create customised ecosystems. While enabling preview functionality in a composable commerce setup may involve additional complexities due to the distributed nature of the architecture, the benefits of flexibility, scalability, and customization offered by composable commerce can outweigh the implementation challenges in the long run.
If you are interested in how Cabiri and our composable accelerator Ashiba handle preview then please get in touch.