Being trapped in the traditional retail e-commerce paradigm of catalogs, categories, shopping carts and check-out severely limits the nature of the relationship you can have with your digital customer, and that greatly limits your revenue opportunity as well as customer satisfaction.
Today’s consumers use a multitude of devices to access digital content, including laptops, tablets, smartphones, and smart TVs. With digital content, the sale is not over when the transaction is complete. The customer’s entitlements live on and must be managed: upgrades sold or authorized, subscriptions terminated or renewed, device or user assignments changed.
This management of the digital relationship between seller and customer is not only necessary; it also opens doors to continued revenue and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Technology options for digital customers
Selling digital content, goods, and services has the objective to maximize reach and revenue and to drive a rich, ongoing relationship with your customers and high satisfaction. This new approach to customer relationships, enabled only by the unique nature of digital offerings, brings a profound change in the commerce process and requirements for your commerce platform.
Most importantly, you should choose a technical strategy that anticipates these changes and supports limitless innovation – or you risk losing out on the vital opportunity to create a perpetual, and profitable, digital customer relationship.
So when choosing a commerce technology vendor to help you get there, you should look for five things:
- Comprehensive offer management: cross-selling, up-selling, promotions, rules, personalization and more.
- An underlying product and customer information data structure that maximizes flexibility and extensibility. You can’t imagine all the ways you will want to define entitlements, so you need a data structure capable of taking you wherever you want to go.
- A robust set of native omni-channel, multi-device capabilities and an integration structure, including modern, flexible application program interfaces (APIs), that will enable headless commerce and devices of the future.
- A platform that is modern, scalable, flexible and extensible to enable the limitless innovation you will surely want. And one based on open standards, so developers are easier to source and less expensive.
- A vendor that is focused on and committed to helping companies sell digital goods and content, so you can take advantage of their past and future experience and investments.
