Optimizely Commerce

Optimizely Commerce lets you create and deploy a flexible e-commerce website, combining powerful content management and display with advanced back-end web shop management.

Catalogs and products

Manage catalogs Commerce: a top-level container for catalog entries such as categories, products, and variants (SKUs)., product categories and products Commerce: various forms of merchandise that you can display and purchase from the public site, including products, variations/SKUs, bundles, and packages. Also known as a catalog entry.. Catalogs are independent from each another. See Catalog features.

• Structure and organize catalogs into categories, products, SKUs Commerce: Stock keeping unit; corresponds to a purchasable product with specific characteristics. For example, a product line of shirts has individual variations/SKUs for sleeve size, color, and collar size., bundles Commerce: a collection of packages, products, and variants (SKUs) that let customers purchase two or more items at once. Each item in a bundle is a separate line item in a shopping cart., and packages Commerce: a sellable unit that contains variants and/or other packages, with a single price; similar to an SKU because it must be purchased as a whole (such as a computer system)..
• Add new products and change a catalog's structure.
• If you add or modify a product in one location, all e-commerce websites and channels are automatically updated.
• Run multiple catalogs in parallel on the same platform.
• Associate and recommend related products to increase up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

Orders

Use the Orders subsystem to monitor, track, change or create new orders, ship out items, ship to multiple addresses, and create returns or exchanges.

• Create purchase orders with split payments Commerce: Remittance that is divided by either time (such as a subscription) or by different receivers (if you check out a cart with products from more than one seller)., split shipment Commerce: A shipment that comes from more than one warehouse, or cannot be fulfilled at the same time., split shipping addresses, and other options.
• Create recurring payments Commerce: Payments initiated by Commerce Manager on a regular cycle, used in a subscription-based scenario. and process them automatically.
• Create a one-page checkout Commerce: Completing a purchase on a website, involving the collection of shipping and billing address, shipping method, payment, and so on. or let customers make a purchase without registering on your site.
• Optimizely Commerce supports multiple payment Commerce: the verification of a money transaction in a website shopping situation. The e-commerce system most often needs a verification for a payment to create the actual purchase order and complete the shopping workflow. types, currencies, and shipping options—including tax and shipping calculations that automatically show your customers their costs, including duty and taxes—so you can expand your business into new markets.

Merchandising

Optimizely Commerce automates your merchandising, so you can bring more targeted visitors to your website and turn them into customers.

• Get detailed information about your visitors and their buying patterns. Monitor your e-commerce website to see how much a customer has spent over time and how often they return to your site.
• Learn what visitors are looking for and which products are most popular.
• Create targeted content through personalization. Optimizely Commerce lets you define personalization Adapt content to customized target groups for a more personalized website experience, such as displaying different content to first time and returning visitors. (See visitor groups.) criteria such as the number of orders and amount spent within a defined period, along with customer buying intention for a product type or category CMS: A built-in Optimizely property. You apply a category to content, but you need to build the functionality to display the filtered results. Commerce: A grouping of purchasable products. (Same as node.).
• Create product landing pages by uploading content and dropping it into place. Shared blocks automatically update content throughout your site.

Customers

Store customer records and track orders placed across multiple websites. See Customer management.

• Access shopping carts Commerce: A collection of products selected by a website customer, with the intention of completing a purchase. Also known as a shopping cart or basket. and wish lists to see what your customers want.
• Manage internal users, customers, partners and organizations Commerce: groups or sub-groups of registered users and customers. You can structure an organization into a tree structure with sub-units. For example, set up your company as a parent level organization and Sales and Marketing, IT/Development, and Operations as organization units. through the same interface. Generally, only your team of internal users have access to the administrative parts, and have varying access to the subsystems and menu items within each system.

Pricing and promotions

You have control over promotions, from developing custom discounts to deciding when the campaign should go live.

• Manage promotions from the Marketing subsystem.
• Choose a preset promotion or create a custom campaign Commerce: a set of related components and activities used for promotions. A campaign organizes marketing activity and is associated with discounts (promotions), customer segments, and markets., managed without the need of web development.
• Create your own promotions Commerce: A way to apply a discount to products, order totals, or shipping; a marketing tool used to increase sales of certain products or product lines. A promotion is associated with a campaign. In recent Commerce versions, this term is replaced by "discount." or use built-in ones such as Buy N of product X and get a discount or Buy N of product X and get one free.
• Create a promotion that is visible prior to checkout Commerce: Completing a purchase on a website, involving the collection of shipping and billing address, shipping method, payment, and so on. or configure a promotion that displays during checkout.
• Apply a shipping cost discount Commerce: A deduction applied to an online purchase, typically implemented as part of a marketing campaign. The discount might apply to items, shipping costs, total order amount and so on..
• Develop custom campaigns and pricing based on sales seasons or regions. Optimizely Commerce automatically shows customers targeted promotions based on their industry, interests, demographics, or other data. The built-in pricing and information rules include volume pricing, tiered pricing, and pricing for specific customer groups Customer groups are created in Commerce Manager then applied to contacts and organizations. Customer groups are common to both contacts and organizations, and you can apply them to customer segments that are targeted for marketing campaigns and customer group-specific pricing, including variants..

Multi-site and language features

Create and deploy two or more localized e-commerce websites on a single Optimizely Commerce platform.

• Control your product catalogs, customer data and local market data in a unified web interface.
• Manage your content, products and regional settings for multiple markets with globalization support.
• Service international customers with multiple language, payment, shipping, tax and currency options. For example, you can create custom promotions for specific markets to further drive sales, or enable regional origin or drop shipping to better support international operations.

Multi-channel e-commerce

Create content in one place and share and distribute it to multiple channels, such as mobile, social, email, and on the e-commerce website.

• Create targeted campaigns by offering a special promotion code to anyone who likes your Facebook page or scans a QR code in a mobile campaign.
• Add new channels for future use.

Security

Optimizely Commerce gives you total control over who can access your e-commerce website back-end so that only authorized users can modify your website or view customer data.

• Configure access rights for users, user groups and functions. Optimizely Commerce has roles for managing store procedures and website content and files.
• Create access based on personalization and visitor groups using virtual roles.
• Set up your own roles.

Content

Marketers and merchandisers work from the editorial interface to create and update content.

• Create a campaign Commerce: a set of related components and activities used for promotions. A campaign organizes marketing activity and is associated with discounts (promotions), customer segments, and markets. or a landing page A landing page is the target page on which a visitor "lands" after clicking a banner or link. Usually, a landing page is a web page that is separate from the main page, with the goal that the visitor performs a certain action (conversion). and edit product content in the product catalog.
• Create news or an article with content related to the products in your web shop.
• Drag and drop content blocks Shared, reusable content, such as an image banner, a page listing, or a video, that you can insert into one or more pages. If you edit a block's content, it updates every page on which it was inserted. (See Assets.) or pages into the content area of another web page to create dynamic websites putting important content in focus.

Administration and configuration

You can manage e-commerce administrative and configuration tasks.

• Set up shipping and payment gateways, default language, currency, units, tax configuration, and search.
• Manage common website administrative tasks such as setting access rights for web pages in the page tree and block folder structure, management of scheduled jobs, and language settings.