Flexibility, innovation, and a seamless experience for customers and internal teams are no longer luxuries; they are indispensable. That’s where composable commerce comes into play: a modular, mix-and-match approach that lets companies choose only the services they need. Adobe Commerce offers a powerful set of tools, including Edge Delivery Services, as part of its composable offering.

In this article, we’ll explore how Edge Delivery Services empowers businesses, focusing on how it can streamline content publication, create page variations, and facilitate A/B testing through practical, real-world applications.

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What is composable commerce?

As the name suggests, composable commerce involves combining different components, such as a headless frontend, search functionality, checkout, and order management. Unlike monolithic architecture, which is delivered by a single platform, composable commerce allows companies to select specific services that suit their unique needs.

This modular approach has many advantages:

  • Scalability: Easily add or expand services as your company grows
  • Innovation: Experiment by integrating new technologies or services
  • Flexibility: Customize modular components so they meet your unique business needs

Read more about composable commerce »

Composable with Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce’s composable approach consists of four major elements:

  • App Builder: A cloud platform that you can use to move customizations away from the core application and that enables integrations with third-party systems in a less invasive way.
  • Commerce SaaS Services: Catalog Service, Live Search, Payments for Adobe Commerce, and more are designed to remove performance bottlenecks and improve the out-of-the-box functionality of your Adobe Commerce website.
  • Experience Platform Connector: Connect Adobe Commerce and the Adobe Experience Platform ecosystem for unified data across all Adobe Experience Cloud products.
  • Edge Delivery Services: A next-gen frontend that improves page performance and enables commerce functionality and document-based content authoring.

Let’s have a closer look at this last one and its benefits.

Edge Delivery Services: 3 practical scenarios

Edge Delivery Services offers many advantages for marketing and development teams. From increased authoring efficiency to built-in experimentation tools, all features come together to create a truly engaging and personalized customer experience and simplify the ways in which you build this experience.

Here’s how Edge Delivery Services can boost your content, design and analysis processes, illustrated by different scenarios.

Publishing content with document-based authoring

While traditional CMS capabilities are available for Edge Delivery Services, the Adobe Experience Manager authoring process allows you to publish content via a document-based authoring method. With document-based authoring, you publish directly from a Google Docs, Google Sheets, Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel document.

Let’s illustrate this with a scenario that probably sounds familiar. Let’s say your marketing team has created copy for a new landing page in Google Docs. Multiple people work together to tweak and finetune the text.

With a traditional CMS, they would potentially spend hours transferring content to WordPress or another CMS: checking that the layout is the same, adding meta titles and descriptions, and ensuring that headings match those in the source document.

With Edge Delivery Services, these extra steps are no longer needed. In essence, your existing documents become pages on your website. You can use Google Docs or Microsoft Word for marketing pages, blog posts and much more. Using the Sidekick browser extension, the content is then seamlessly published to your website.

This document-based authoring approach means that your marketing and/or content teams don’t need to learn the ins and outs of a new platform, but can create content and collaborate in real time in source documents that are familiar to them. This results in a more efficient workflow for publishing content that not only saves your team more time, but also gives them more control over the processes.

Besides document-based authoring, Edge Delivery Services also offers the Universal Editor, a more “traditional” way of updating page content via CMS.

Learn more about document-based authoring during the webinar

Page variations with Generative AI

Testing copy and image variations undoubtedly leads to better results, and gives you confidence that you are showing your audience the most relevant, well-performing content. With Adobe Commerce’s built-in GenAI integration, this process is more straightforward than ever before. GenAI allows you to automatically generate new content versions at scale.

Without page variations with GenAI, it could take weeks or even months to create content or image variations and get the necessary approvals. Written briefs only provide so much context and often many iterations are needed before the A/B test is finalized. As testing different versions of pages is time-consuming and requires a lot of effort, the team is limited in the amount of variations they can create and the amount of testing they can do.

With page variations with GenAI, the process would look something like this. Your marketing or content team starts by creating a control page. With the assistance of GenAI, they can then create more versions of this page, for instance by generating:

  • New copy: Headlines, banner texts, product descriptions and much more, which can be finetuned by your content team as needed
  • New images: Using Adobe Firefly or the assets you already have in your Adobe asset management system

There are many prompt templates available, but it’s also possible to input your own. You achieve the best results by adding important information in the prompt, such as how you expect users to behave, what you expect them to do and the page intent.

The main benefit of creating page variations with GenAI is that it’s easy to scale and create potentially tens or hundreds of page variations, without needing to rely on time-consuming manual updates.

These features are not only beneficial for new landing pages, but can also prove useful for continuous optimization of existing landing pages. The variations are easy to set up, with no development knowledge or additional tools needed, and ensure privacy and a high performance.

Learn more about page variations during the webinar

A/B testing different versions of a page

Once you have multiple versions of a landing page prepared, measure the engagement with these page variations; for instance, by analyzing the click-through or conversion rate. Edge Delivery Services makes it easy to set up A/B testing with built-in features that allow you to test variations in real time. As you can implement an A/B test directly from your browser, you can effortlessly deploy it across an entire organization.

Let’s think of a scenario where your team wants to perform a straightforward 50/50-split A/B test for two page variations.

Without Instant Experimentation, you probably need to deploy an additional tool to set up the A/B test. This takes time and forces you to move out of the tool you use to publish your content.

With Instant Experimentation, you simply choose two or more variations, use the Adobe Experience Manager’s interface to set up an A/B test, and define which segment of your audience sees each version. If you want to do more in-depth testing, Adobe offers Full Experimentation, which targets very specific elements at different segments when Adobe Target is being used.

Edge Delivery Services’ A/B testing measures key metrics, such as bounce rate, time on page and conversion rate for both versions. The experimentation set-up comes with a general dashboard as well as an automated Analytics Chatbot, which delivers the insights in natural language.

Learn more about testing during the webinar

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Take your content to the next level with Edge Delivery Services

Edge Delivery Services allows your business to test ideas and gain valuable insights faster than ever. Intrigued by the possibilities of Edge Delivery Services? Talk to our experienced team to learn more about Adobe Commerce and how we can tailor a solution to fit your unique business needs.

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