Category: Retail

Are you a retailer struggling to find the best solution for your IT integration? You need something that is agile enough to scale during peak periods and retract during slower cycles–a workable system that will integrate legacy on-premises architecture with cloud-based applications. 

Most importantly, you need IT infrastructure that delivers the best omni-channel customer experience (CX) while managing massive levels of big data across multiple locations. That’s a tall order. No wonder it’s keeping you up at night. Your decision will have lasting effects on your company. The wrong move could hit the bottom line hard.

It’s time to ease the pressure. These days, IT integration solutions are flexible enough to make it easy on you and your entire IT team. Enterprise integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) solutions allow retailers to integrate all types of IT infrastructure, whether on-premises solutions, cloud-based applications, or hybrid systems.

The past shortcomings of legacy point-to-point (P2P) solutions and on-premises enterprise service bus (ESB) integration models don’t have to limit your IT architecture anymore.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

IT Integration Shortcomings of the Past

You may be working with legacy P2P solutions that only connect two applications directly, so you’re dealing with so-called ‘spaghetti code’ with complex intertwined systems that don’t have a central way to communicate with each other.  
 
Maybe you have a more recent system, if by recent you mean the 1990s, when ESBs came onto the scene as the newest integration tool. Sure, ESBs offer more functionality than P2P models, because the bus-like hub structure of an ESB enables connections with multiple applications. However, technology has come a long way since the ‘90s. ESBs were originally developed before cloud-based applications existed and are usually limited to on-premises architecture since they don’t work well with cloud-centric or hybrid systems.
 
ESBs are also expensive and take a lot of time to establish because IT experts often need specialized training or certification to develop and maintain ESB integration systems.
 
Lastly, the limited capabilities of P2P and ESB methods reduce a retailer’s access to and use of big data, or ad-hoc queries based on that data, which are critical to retailers who want to provide a high-level omni-channel customer experience (CX).

Propel Your Retail or Ecommerce Business into the Future with Enterprise iPaaS

An enterprise integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) is more agile than traditional P2P or ESB integration models. An iPaaS solution has the capability to connect on-premises, cloud-based, and hybrid application systems, providing much more flexibility, functionality, and scalability than a P2P or ESB model.
 
An iPaaS solution is also intuitive, so rather than needing high-level IT experts writing professional code (pro-code) for P2P or ESB models; all levels of IT staff can manage a low-code iPaaS platform with very little training required. You can make a direct comparison of pro-code versus low-code models to discover the best solution for your integration strategy.
 
A subscription-based iPaaS model is less expensive, more flexible, and much more scalable than legacy P2P or ESB methods. Plus, implementation is significantly faster with a cloud-centric iPaaS versus other integration methods, helping retailers gain faster time to value with IT integrations.

Discover Digibee’s Enterprise iPaaS in Action

Digibee provides a fast and streamlined IT integration experience. Digibee’s easy-to-use enterprise iPaaS is a cloud-native, enterprise-ready integration platform that accelerates time-to-value, mitigates risks, and helps reduce IT costs. Discover how the efficiency and agility of Digibee’s iPaaS delivered immediate results for international retailers.

Digibee effectively integrated more than 14 legacy systems for the largest manufacturer of baked goods in Brazil. Bauducco Foods has five manufacturing units, 12 branches, and seven distribution centers. Its retail division, Casa Bauducco, has more than 80 stores, with more than 180,000 points of sale in Brazil.

Digibee also integrated a secure iPaaS e-commerce platform for global shoe retailer Payless Shoes across more than 200 stores in 15 countries. The implementation took less than 30 days, despite each country having different fiscal and legal requirements. The iPaaS system easily handles seasonal spikes for the busy retailer, and provides better efficiency, transparency and security across the retail enterprise.

What Digibee Can Do For Your Enterprise Retail or Ecommerce Business

Digibee’s subscription-based iPaaS will connect all of your legacy P2P and ESB systems as well as any cloud-based applications. It also streamlines your operation, supporting an omni-channel CX, unlocking big data capabilities, easing pressure on your IT team, reducing integration costs, and improving your return on investment (ROI). What are you waiting for?

Discover the Digibee difference. Learn how to integrate and modernize your enterprise with Digibee’s integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS). Book your choice of a discovery call (15 minutes), custom demo (30 minutes), or a deep dive (60 minutes) to learn more.

Composable commerce is a concept that has gained substantial popularity in the last several years, and is poised to be one of the critical business differentiators in the year ahead for retailers. While the concept of composability fundamentally resonates with IT professionals, the devil is in the details (as it always is).

How do you define composability when specifically applied to ecommerce and retail tech? How do you define the benefits of composable commerce – and the risks of not moving towards composability?

And most importantly, what can you actually do today that will start the transformation from monolithic to composable?

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

What is Composable Commerce?

In contrast to the more traditional monolithic commerce platforms that package every part of a digital commerce solution into one large computing network, composable commerce runs on many microservices, each handling a distinct system function.

It usually incorporates headless commerce, which separates the front-end presentation layer from the back-end ecommerce functionality, and then further subdivides the back-end into separate microservices that each perform a discrete task such as inventory management or a payment gateway. 

That’s the what, here’s the why: breaking a system down into these separate microservices gives businesses freedom to select the best individual components for their specific business needs, and the flexibility to easily modify or swap them out in the future without serious rework needed to the rest of the system. 

This has never been more critical than it is today. No industry has withstood the challenges of change more than retail has over the past few years. And we all know that rapid change is now a constant. The retail organizations that are “winning” are the ones who can adapt quickly, as are the ones that are farther along the path to Digital Transformation.

Let’s dig into the role composability can play in 2023.

Why is Integration Critical to Composable Commerce?

To be successful, not only must each individual microservice be well-thought-out, but also how it communicates with every other microservice within the system.

Without intelligent ecommerce integration, this communication between components has to be managed at an incredibly granular level, exposing a business to several serious complications in the following ways:

1. Not-so-seamless Customer Experience

In composable commerce, a typical customer journey will touch upon many different microservices, often even crossing different online channels. Without integration, your customer’s journey can become disjointed and lead to frustration and disappointment for them, and missed opportunities for you. 

For example, if your CRM and email marketing components aren’t aligned, prospects may receive an email that alerts them of a sale that their region is ineligible for. If inventory management isn’t updating your ecommerce platform in real time they could purchase an item that is out of stock and the order then has to be canceled. 

2. Low Visibility

A composable system has a lot of little things going on at once, and without strong integration a company can quickly find themselves in a data situation where they “can’t see the forest for the trees”. This leaves them at a severe disadvantage when trying to make business decisions that provide true customer value.

Essentially this is the business-facing version of the “Not-so-seamless customer experience,” where the business has limited insight into their customer’s overall journey, and can only see these interactions at a component level. 

3. Reduced Adaptability & Increased Cost

The ability to quickly assemble (and reassemble) the best components for your business needs is one of the primary reasons to choose a composable commerce architecture. As you add or remove technologies to compete where your customers are, speed and flexibility are key. This is also true of partners. As you integrate with suppliers, marketplaces and other platforms and software to advance your digital strategy, your integration ducks need to be in a row. 

This required adaptability is easily eroded without ecommerce data integration. Managing a network of custom built integrations built on legacy technologies is time consuming, complicated, and prone to unforeseen errors. 

What to Look for When Integrating Composable Commerce

The platform you choose for integration needs to prevent the above scenarios through simultaneously addressing the volume of discrete microservices to manage, and maintaining the flexibility and adaptability so integral to the composable commerce approach. 

Look for an integration platform that is:

• Data-Agnostic – A good ecommerce integration platform is data-agnostic and brings disparate data sources together into one cohesive and accessible space. This maintains your freedom to use whichever services you need now. 
• Reusable & Customizable – To truly be composable, the system has to be modular and easy to reconfigure. Having reusable components as part of your ecommerce integration means developers don’t have to start from scratch with each new microservice you add, keeping speed high and costs low.
• Reliable – In composable commerce there’s a long list of different components to monitor to ensure their reliability to meet business needs, but that doesn’t happen if your ecommerce integration tool isn’t up for the job! Choose an ecommerce integration platform that is capable of flagging issues with pipelines in real-time to minimize risk and disruption to your customers. 
• Secure – More connections can mean more security vulnerabilities, so ensure that your ecommerce integration tool has strong security protocols that prevent unauthorized access to your platform. 

Get the Most from your Composable System with Digibee 

The core philosophy of composable architecture is one that Digibee has truly taken to heart. Our modular iPaaS is purpose-built to increase freedom and adaptability to support a composable commerce system, or even to support your transition to one. 

If you’re interested in how Digibee can help your organization evolve to a modular IT environment, we’d be happy to show you how. Book your choice of a 15-minute discovery call, 30-minute custom demo, or a 60-minute deep dive to learn more.

Business and IT leaders struggle with complex – and often pricey – IT decisions that have significant and lasting effects on their companies. The IT landscape is constantly changing, so it can be difficult to know what’s best for right now and for the future. The wrong decision could hit a company’s bottom line hard and cause ongoing headaches that are entirely avoidable.

This article compares Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) models with integration-as-a-service (iPaaS) solutions for today’s integration needs. For a fair comparison, first, you should understand the difference between ESB and iPaaS.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

An Enterprise Service Bus, otherwise known as an ESB, is a type of IT architecture that allows multiple applications to communicate through a hub or bus-like infrastructure. What is Enterprise Service Bus and what does ESB mean for your IT integration?

An ESB integration basically establishes principles and rules that guide the communication capabilities of different applications.

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

Read more…

Delivering an exceptional, personalized customer experience (CX) requires more than a whizz-bang website and an intelligent chatbot (as engaging as these may be). The reality is that the customer experience is ongoing and forever.

Yes, the biggest hurdle is converting an initial website or store visit into a sale, but the CX doesn’t end there. It’s really just beginning.

Read more…

Customer experience is the key to unlocking profit in the retail industry. While keeping shoppers happy with your brand has always been a high priority for retail organizations, its importance has reached unprecedented levels.

And as economic uncertainties persist across the US and around the globe, the ability to deliver the optimum experience consumers expect in exchange for their business has become a matter of life or death for many businesses. So how do you optimize your customer’s experience – and what is the role of IT in retailing?

>> Book a personalized demo with our team of experts and see how Digibee’s iPaaS will bring efficiency to your business. 

Examining the Retail Tech Landscape

Technology is simultaneously retailers’ most powerful asset and greatest foe. Established brands face new competition from digital natives that disrupt traditional business models with direct-to-consumer options. Technological developments in every other aspect of their lives have led shoppers to demand personalized service, rapid responses, and experiences customized to their individual needs and interests.

2022 was a year of digital transformation for many retail brands, and 2023 promises more of the same as companies embrace:

• Click and collect shopping options
• Data-based personalization
• Omnichannel commerce
• Artificial intelligence and virtual reality
• Links to external marketplaces
• Emerging tech like NFTs and the Metaverse

Digital technology and retail have become inseparable. Brands must embrace tools that increase efficiency and personalization to meet customers where they are – or resign themselves to obsolescence.

3 Steps to Improve Customer Shopping Experience

That list of trends and advances in retail tech may seem daunting. If your brand is still struggling to balance in-person service with ecommerce and social shopping, how will you possibly leverage virtual reality or the metaverse?

One step at a time, that’s how. Regardless of where your brand currently lives on the spectrum between legacy brick-and-mortar and fully virtual, here are three key steps to help you deliver the retail customer experience your shoppers demand.

1. Modernize Your Architecture

Identify where and how your IT architecture is holding you back from leveraging new tools and trends. Is your data still locked up in silos that prevent brick-and-mortar teams from seeing how shoppers engage online? This is a major roadblock that must be moved. Ensuring all your systems are connected and communicating – a shift to cloud-based tools and applications will support this – has a significant impact on the customer experience you deliver.

 2. Empower Your Team

Maybe you’ve already started to access new retail IT solutions. But new tools often come with added deployment and maintenance requirements. Are you dependent on an external vendor to help you keep pace with digital natives? Or is the race to combine digital technology and retail putting increased load on your already overworked development team?

The IT skills shortage that developed post-pandemic is likely to persist, so a crucial part of optimizing CX is ensuring your organization can keep pace with new trends and market changes.

• Empower your developers with tools that let them deploy and maintain integrations and data knowledge in-house
• Adopt an IT infrastructure that delivers the agility and flexibility to leverage new opportunities
• Rethink strategies and solutions that leave you dependent on hard-to-find talent you might not always have

3. Simplify Your Systems

There’s a reason the K.I.S.S. principle is so ubiquitous. The shift to a fully integrated commerce solution doesn’t need to be complex or costly. Low- or no-code tools and platforms make it easy to build and deploy the applications and integrations your business needs to keep systems connected and customers happy.

Let Digibee Boost Your Retail IT Solutions

Digibee’s enterprise iPaaS is a full life-cycle, low-code integration solution that empowers brands to embrace the retail IT solutions they need to compete. Regardless of your organization’s current IT maturity level, we can help you modernize legacy solutions and integrate systems to leverage all the latest digital tools.

Download a complimentary copy of Fully Integrated Commerce for the Modern Retailer for details on how Digibee’s enterprise iPaaS can help improve your retail customer experience online and in-person, or book a custom demo to see our solution in action.