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As integration announcements go, the news from Adobe is quite significant. The software giant announced an integrated platform for e-commerce that combines Magento Commerce with Adobe Experience Cloud, a combination the company said will help make “every experience shoppable” by giving enterprises the ability to create engaging, personalized shopping experiences.
The integration combines the content management, personalization and analytics capabilities of Experience Cloud with Magento Commerce Cloud. The single platform brings together Adobe Experience Cloud, which manages over 233 trillion customer transactions a year, with Magento Commerce Cloud, which handles $155 billion in online sales transactions annually.
Adobe completed its acquisition of Magento Commerce in June for $1.68 billion.
“We are the industry’s only end-to-end solution from content creation to marketing and analysis through to commerce,” Matt Asay, head of Developer Ecosystem at Adobe, told eWEEK.
The latest release of the Magento platform, which underpins the Magento Commerce Cloud, includes several new features designed for both merchants and developers. One new feature, the Page Builder drag-and-drop editing tool, lets marketing teams create rich, contextual content without writing a single line of code or waiting for IT, according to Adobe.
Also new, Progressive Web Applications (PWA) Studio gives merchants and developers the ability to create fast and engaging mobile experiences that can also boost conversion rates and increase user engagement. Adobe specifically points to PWA helping with mobile apps that see relatively low conversion rates compared with the desktop experience.
Using PWA Studio, merchants will be able to use rich visuals in their marketing that are tailored to the small mobile screens and displays, even in cases of limited network connectivity, while also offering native push notifications.
Jason Woosley, Adobe’s vice president of product and technology at Adobe and Magento, said there are additional integrations with Amazon Marketplace and Google Merchant Center coming in early 2019 that will be of interest to SMBs.
“We also have a mobile optimization initiative that’s going live and a relationship with PayPal and 15 system integrators. We can streamline payments with a new product from Magento that addresses fraud and risk and takes away a lot of the burden of reporting requirements,” he said.
Woosley said the issue of shopping cart abandonment is worse on mobile where there are greater user interface challenges because of the smaller screens. “For example, I won’t type my credit card info on my phone,” he said. “We’re doing more to make shopping on mobile a more seamless experience, and from the merchant side there’s a treasure trove of insights you can get from Adobe Analytics.”
Magento has also been enhanced by Adobe Target, Adobe’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning technology that lets companies optimize and deliver contextually relevant experiences to help drive customer loyalty. Predictive Analytics, powered by Adobe Sensei, can help companies proactively monitor and analyze customer data to find patterns and predict future customer behaviors to detect potential challenges like special shipping or inventory shortages as well as identify better conversion opportunities.
Open Source Powers Magento
Pre-acquisition, Magento was notable for being a very popular open-source commerce platform that benefited from many contributors—a system Adobe said it has no intent to mess with.
“I’ve been involved with open source for 19 years, and I’ve never seen another project on the planet where a company gets as much value from the community as Magento does,” said Asay. “Fifty percent of the core comes from third-party developers, where with other companies it’s more typically 5 percent. We want more of that DNA to come to Adobe.”
Jordan Jewell, a senior research analyst at IDC, said the combined platform figures to benefit both Adobe and Magento customers.
“The combined capability of Magento and Adobe allows businesses to differentiate themselves with highly personalized, customer-centric commerce experiences and leverage deeper insights to deliver timely, contextual, engaging, and shoppable experiences across the entire customer journey,” Jewell said in a release.