This is the second in a three-part blog series about the use of Magento.
Magento Commerce has some of the world’s best tools for creating best-in-class customer experiences that can give enterprises a digital edge over their competitors. But there’s no easy button for getting the best performance out of Magento, which Adobe acquired in 2018 to beef up its Experience Cloud platform.
You need an experienced system integrator to find the most painless and efficient ways to deal with implementation issues and ongoing operational headaches that are bound to crop in when you tap into popular Magento features like these:
Next-generation development tools. Adobe’s acquisition of Magento converges two powerful software suites: Magento Commerce and Adobe Experience Manager. The merger enables developers to couple Adobe’s design tools with relevant content and Magento e-commerce software to craft world-class customer experiences that mine the full potential of APIs, PWAs and headless commerce. Today’s most innovative shopping experiences use PWAs (progressive web applications) on the front end to pull mobile-app functionality into web pages. APIs link the PWA-empowered frontend to whichever backend provides the best performance.
Unbundling the front (the “head”) from the back is the core appeal of headless commerce, which gives retailers unprecedented flexibility. On paper it sounds wonderful. In reality it takes people with years of experience in digital commerce and system design to fine-tune headless commerce and ensure that it delivers the rich shopping experience customers have come to expect.
Application integrations. Magento’s modern API framework connects your e-commerce system to your CRM and ERP platforms, payment gateways and other crucial business systems. Because these platforms have hundreds of moving parts that all need to move in the same direction to serve your company’s goals, the complexities can seem almost endless.
Indeed, for all the challenges of headless commerce, application integrations often are the most difficult component of designing, implementing and managing a Magento digital commerce operation. Getting all these integrations to work well together requires people who have seen pretty much everything and know how to anticipate difficulties specific to your business and respond effectively to new ones that crop up.
Global developer community. Thousands of developers around the world are building plug-ins and enhancements to Magento’s core code. That lets you choose a tool for, say, payment gateways, that integrates most efficiently with your existing systems.
But what if there are five promising payment gateway solutions available? How do you pick the right one and ignore all the wrong ones? The essentially endless customization options from the Magento developer community are awe-inspiring but also paralyzing. Choosing badly can stall your progress and aggravate your customers.
The DMI Edge with Magento
Think about what happens when you miss a left turn in your car. You can take three right turns to get moving in the right direction again, but it’s not the most direct route. Digital commerce system developers often face a similar quandary — choosing between one and three turns when resolving system challenges.
Experience is the best teacher for making the most productive turns. At DMI, we have experts with years of experience inside retail companies in addition to our decades of core technology expertise. We’ve leveraged the power of APIs and PWAs to build headless systems for multiple clients. We’ve done the application integrations and chosen the best plug-ins from the Magento developer community.
That’s how we sharpen our clients’ competitive edge.
–Jon Wovchko, vice president operations & strategic consulting, digital commerce
