Use the Customer Management System You Want
Keep Your CMS
When you take a look at most SaaS-based offerings for eCommerce, as well as a lot of off-the-shelf eCommerce offerings, you'll notice that they require you to switch over to their content management system. This can be a major problem for the sales and marketing teams. Limiting which CMS can be used is that it can dramatically inhibit the momentum and kind of the the knowledge of an existing marketing team. This can make it difficult for employees to do basic things with their web application because they're just not used to or comfortable dealing with a different content management system. This turns into a major problem over time.
Clarity eCommerce offerings can easily embed into any content management system that's available, and we do this with our headless eCommerce capability. We include a library of hundreds and hundreds of controls that are prebuilt with standard — yet very robust — functionality. With this, each of our client implementations has a UI layer that enables client-specific overrides. It uses the default, but it takes configuration settings, branding, and styling settings so that the presentation layer is all controlled through settings, branding, and styling constraints that can be changed in a single location and apply throughout the entire user interface layer. This is a very important aspect for marketing and branding team members, so they understand that we adhere to some of the standard principles of design and branding where we want consistency for the user interface to be self explanatory. End-users need to be able to understand things at a subconscious level when they go to an eCommerce site, so we've done a lot of work to study what's common in the industry, what the standards are with icons, layout, and flow.
Clarity's software allows for client specific overrides and extensibility of those standards. We have the ability to embed this platform into any CMS. In the event that the client team doesn't already have a content management system or doesn't have a strong need to go with a certain content management system, we can provide one. In addition to the ability to override and extend the user interface layer, we also have the ability to leverage business logic that can be embedded into it. This is beneficial because, depending on the level of functionality required, a client's team can extend or add on to. It makes it a little bit easier to be able to do that by having business logic in the simpler aspects of the user interface layer.
Making the most of the Architecture of eCommerce
Take Advantage of Embeddable Components
Finally, let's talk about the embeddable components that are extendable and overridable. They can be embedded anywhere on these sites and they can be styled. It's very powerful to be able to have it connected with a content management system and marketing platform. We can embed this set of components into multiple locations as well, so a lot of times clients will think, "Oh, I can only have it on this one site." We're happy to report that you can have the components on 20 different sites or 1000 different platforms. They might use a marketing automation system, or may be using other systems that are SaaA-based. Almost all of those systems have the ability to embed types of snippets that we would enable our eCommerce within those platforms, so it is really, really powerful. They're not just building blocks; they're very adaptable blocks they can live inside, outside, in cold temperatures, hot temperatures, and in the freezer. After all of that they just keep running smoothly. That's very powerful for an organization that's looking to scale and grow and keep adapting as they grow.