Key trends and strategies commerce leaders are focusing on right now

Commerce leaders don’t have it easy. Whether your role is business-focused or tech-driven, the fast pace of change in our world means you’re constantly striving to stay ahead of the curve to maintain a competitive edge. How do leaders do it? By keeping a pulse on emerging trends, shifts in the economy, industry dynamics, consumer behavior and technology advancements while continually refining strategic priorities and making astute investment decisions. Of course, that’s in addition to all the daily operational responsibilities — managing people, answering to stakeholders, attending meetings, reviewing reports and tackling a myriad of other tasks. Did I mention that being a commerce leader isn’t easy? 

Thankfully, over 30 commerce leaders from across multiple verticals and business models spoke at Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit™, sharing everything on their minds from AI and A/B testing to data and distribution. Here, we’ve gathered their thoughts to give you a glimpse into what your peers are thinking about now.

“When we deploy something that's visual or changing the user experience, we deploy it into our A/B testing — and we love A/B testing. If you're not doing A/B testing, you should do A/B testing. It proves to you beyond a shadow of a doubt with data, whether a feature works or not works. So we'll deploy things in a 1% mode or a 5% mode or a 10% mode, and then we can roll it out to the mass audience. It's no different than what we do in stores where we deploy things in a single store to see if it works — and when all is great — then we deploy it to the rest of the stores.” — John Mutter, VP, Customer Applications, Express

“The main benefit of this composable strategy is related to the people and the culture. Now everybody's thinking about capabilities. We are enabling tech capabilities, which enable business capabilities. And starting from there, how these capabilities enable new customer experiences or new features that we were not thinking about before.”

— Claudio Uribe, CTO, Cencosud

“We've released a number of  generative AI features into the search and product discovery. For example, we've summarized product reviews into common topics based on the dozens, hundreds, even thousands of reviews against that one product. We've also released a fit review, which is a sizing guidance capability. Building on these capabilities, we released Amazon Rufus, an AI conversational shopping assistant to guide users along the discovery process. 

A typical journey may look like this: Let's say, I  want to buy a new coffee machine. I start by asking Rufus, ‘Tell me the difference between a drip coffee maker and a pour-over coffee maker.’ Rufus will give me a detailed side-by-side comparison of these two categories — like a high-level SWOT analysis. Once I’ve chosen a drip coffee machine, I may then ask, ’What are the key features I should look for?’ Rufus will give me several different features. I may further refine the recommendations by asking, ‘Show me ones that are easy to clean.” Rufus will filter down to the ones that are easy to clean. When I’m down to a specific product, I can ask specific questions about that product: ‘Does this product come with free filters?’ So, you can see how this is a really powerful way of engaging the shopper in their product discovery journey.  — Miguel Elias, Strategy Director, Cencosud

“We’re always looking through the lens of what makes sense for the customer. What metrics are we trying to drive, and how is that related to the customer experience? How does this, in general, make the customer experience better? Because if you’re not thinking that way, you generally tend to make short-term decisions that don’t necessarily play out across multiple years. You always want to understand what your 5- to 10-year goal is in order to understand how that breaks down and informs what it is that you're doing in the now.” — Suchema Oyetey, VP of Engineering, Moonpig

“We need personalization and we need to be able to drive that. So we had to have a data strategy, and I can't emphasize more that being data-first and data strategy is really helping us drive our roadmap. Then we can understand where the data goes. Where does it need to go? What system will hold it? Where are the records? Because we had problems in other systems: They were constantly being synced up from one system to another. And then you'd lost them. Where is that golden record? We had serious problems with that.” — Richard Shandelman, VP of Technology, ISC2

Both PetSmart and Ulta Beauty have tapped into the potential of merging products with services and physical with digital experiences. Leaders from both brands sat down with Jen Jones, Chief Marketing Officer at commercetools for a fireside chat to share the strategies they’re using to bring all the pieces together, making the journey from digital to in-store seamless, engaging and efficient for customers. 

Below are video excerpts from the interviews that offer more details about how they are making it happen.

“We’ve relaunched our loyalty program. As a part of that, we're able to fuse the activity that people have in the salon with their activity in the store in a single cohesive loyalty program that allows us to interact with our customers on a very regular basis. This allows us to leverage that stickiness with that trusted groomer, the person who’s taking care of the customer’s pet for an hour or two while they're getting bathed and groomed. Now, that we've enabled online booking for our [pet] hotel as well, it gives us just one more connection point to bring that entire experience together.” — Greg Fancher, EVP and CTO, PetSmart

“The engineers wanted to build everything. I'm an engineer myself. I love building things as well but, pragmatically, we're not going to build the best promotion engine. Let's just compare what we have against a vendor out there. We’re never going to be able to keep up and why would we want to? We're never going to do things in that space. Let's invest our engineering resources and the stuff that matters to us. It took a while to get the team's mentality there. Now, as they're starting to see it kind of come together and how fast they can move and how fast they can change stuff, they're embracing it more and more.” — Bryan Ziegler. Senior Director, Spoonflower

“We're realizing that we've got to be more than just a telco. Historically, if you're a BT Group customer, you might interact with us once a year to get a new bill, product or broadband upgrade. So, our challenge is shifting the narrative from being known as the largest UK telco to being the largest UK customer brand. One that people say, 'I love that brand. They helped me in my  life.'  There's nothing in our new branding about being a fast broadband provider or having the best mobile network. It's actually, 'We're here to solve your technology problems.'” — Johnny Woolridge, Director of Digital Engineering, EE

“When it comes to a solution like this [commercetools Composable Commerce], obviously, there’s the revenue that's passing through, but fundamentally, it is the speed to market. One of the biggest things when you think about success is: ‘How fast can the engineers pull something together that can go into market and begin creating a revenue stream?’ That's huge. We went live in markets where we had no eCommerce platform at all. And we did it in around five or six markets in a very short time span. That has a big impact overall. In respect to composable commerce, we’re seeing a low total cost of ownership and the time to market is fast. At the end of the day, it's checking all the boxes.” —  Abhinav Verma, Backend Lead, Alcon

Jen Jones sat down with Jawed Yusufi, Vice President of Upsells & Payments at Ticketmaster, to understand the big-picture vision for the company and how composable commerce will help them get there. 

In this video excerpt from the conversation, Jawed explains what customers want from Ticketmaster today.

“For me, it again goes back to that customer journey. Is the customer looking to get a product in a matter of 2, 3 or 4 hours? If that’s what they’re looking for, you have to have a partner who has scale and availability across a multitude of regions. If you pick a partner who's good at talking about your product but doesn't have scale, they will fail. Many times those kinds of decisions are made when selecting a partner because you're looking for someone who can make a good case for your product. You forget about what your customers are buying and how they're buying. So, I always emphasize that the scale piece is key; how quickly can they get products to your customers?”— Khalid Saleem, Vice President of IT Digital Platforms, Beacon Building Products

At Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit it became abundantly clear that commerce leaders today must be agile, data-driven and customer-centric. The speakers' knowledge and expertise is invaluable for any business executive currently navigating the complexities of digital transformation to get their organization to a point where it can consistently deliver customer experiences that will drive sustained growth.

To learn more about what commerce leaders are thinking about and how they’re using commercetools to modernize their tech stacks and future-proof business, check out the keynote video replays and blog links featured on the Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit landing page.