Why we care. D2C brands are only a click away from their competitors making it easy for online shoppers to compare prices and products. To connect with customers, brands must identify and address the very different motivations that drive sales. Messages that land with one cohort will be wasted on other groups.

Seeking lower prices. The majority of online beauty shoppers are looking for bargains, the study found. This applied to younger consumers as well as older generations.

Sixty-seven percent of Gen Z and millennial digital shoppers said that they preferred to wait in order to pay a lower price on beauty products. And they accepted the risk that items would become unavailable.

Power shoppers. The study also identified a segment of “power shoppers” — those who spent at least $2,500 on beauty products annually.

Among “power shoppers,” 40% are bargain hunters. They spend more overall, but they resist paying full price on individual items.

Super fans. Against these trends, there is a cohort of “super fans” who are, indeed, willing to pay full price for exclusive or rare items.

Twenty-one percent of shoppers said they’d pay full price if they were one of the first customers to purchase the product. And 25% said they would pay full price if it was a limited-edition product.

These shoppers are receptive to brand events that emphasize the scarcity of a product. However, price-conscious customers would likely be discouraged by such an event.

Dig deeper: What is ecommerce and which trends are shaping its future?

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SAP is also highlighting its partnership program for Commerce Cloud, including Contentful for content creation, Coveo for AI-driven product recommendations and Akeneo for PIM and product experience management.

Why we care. This is a new stage on the SAP commerce journey, which began essentially with the acquisition of ecommerce vendor Hybris ten years ago. Hybris became SAP Hybris and then evolved into SAP Commerce Cloud, part of a broader CX suite.

The new initiative reflects a growing trend towards composability in the digital experience and commerce space as businesses with different levels of digital maturity, different products and services, and an ever-diversifying range of channels in which to meet customers, are seeing the limitations of being locked into traditional, all-in-one solutions.

A federated approach to offering services, combined with large partner networks, is bringing much greater flexibility to commerce offerings.

Dig deeper: Sitecore adds new products to its composable DXP

All-in-one versus composable. Comprehensive buy-in to Commerce Cloud secures a wide range of services including order management, PIM, content management, personalization and engagement tools. Not every business needs all of these services from their commerce provider of choice — or not all of them at the same time.

By choosing among SAP and partner applications served on the Commerce Cloud platform, SAP customers can create their own agile, highly customized commerce solutions.

SAP is also flagging these announcements as reaffirming its commitment to the digital commerce and CX categories.

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Using this new integration, merchants using Commerce Cloud will be able to turn local inventory data into local product listings on Google Search and Google Maps and in the Shopping tab.

Why we care. The distinction between digital and real-world commerce continues to collapse. Those online shopping behaviors that exploded during the pandemic will be with us for the foreseeable future, but it doesn’t mean store visits are a thing of the past.

Rather, consumers are looking for seamless connections between an online product discovery experience and in-person purchases. This integration seeks to support that aim at a granular local level.

The Salesforce data that supports the move can be found here.

Embedding commerce in discovery. The integration also braids together online discovery and the commerce experience. Just as many merchants now seek to provide a frictionless transition from finding a product online to making a digital purchase, this sees the opportunity to link discovery with in-person shopping.

This move pairs with the recent announcement of Salesforce’s Einstein GPT for Commerce that combines proprietary and generative AI models with real-time data such as customer demographic data and shopping history, to automate and tailor shopper recommendations in Commerce Cloud.

Dig deeper: A roundup of the latest AI-powered marketing technology releases

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BNPL up, revenues down. Despite this rise, revenue decreased 19% for that period. This suggests inflation is making shoppers use the payment plans to purchase lower-priced items. Last year, BNPL purchases were up 14% over 2021, and revenue from them grew 27%.

Dig deeper: What you need to know to grow your ecommerce business

Used most for groceries. BNPL use for groceries was up 40% YoY in the first two months. This is the biggest increase of all the categories tracked by Adobe.

“The rise of buy-now-pay-later usage for groceries tells us that consumers are likely making bigger purchases online to take advantage of special promotions and stock up on staples, thus managing living expenses in more flexible ways,” Adobe Digital Insights lead analyst Vivek Pandya said, in a press release.

Popular for furniture. Furniture saw the second biggest increase in BNPL usage, with payment plan purchases up 38% in the first two months of the year.

Why we care. Total U.S. credit card debt reached a record $930.6 billion at the end of last year, an 18.5% increase over 2022, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The average household’s credit card balance is $9,990, according to a WalletHub report. Rising interest rates mean that debt is costing consumers more than ever.

Given all this, it is clear offering BNPL is essential for ecommerce businesses. It gives consumers a way to manage their budget and make purchases without having to pay interest on what they bought. Marketers should be sure to highlight this service and its benefits to shoppers.

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The all-cash agreement reflects a $12.5 billion valuation of Qualtrics.

SAP and Qualtrics. Since SAP bought Qualtrics in late 2018, it has moved to integrate its AI-driven experience management capabilities across SAP’s customer experience solutions, including SAP Service Cloud and SAP Sales Cloud. SAP says that Qualtrics has more than tripled its revenue since the acquisition. SAP floated the platform in 2020 but retained a majority share.

Qualtrics describes itself as an online survey tool. It uses AI to measure both customer satisfaction and employee engagement in real time. It claims to improve customer experience, team performance and product design.

“SAP intends to remain a close go-to-market and technology partner, servicing joint customers and continuing to contribute to Qualtrics’ success,” said SAP CEO Christian Klein in a release.

Why we care. What to make of the SAP Qualtrics story? Towards the end of the 2010s, SAP — under then CEO Bill McDermott — was plainly looking to put its CX offerings on a footing to rival Adobe, Oracle and, above all, Salesforce. Building on its 2013 acquisition of successful, Swiss-based commerce solution Hybris, by 2018 SAP had added Gigya and Callidus Cloud to its portfolio and launched C/4 HANA.

C/4 HANA was the umbrella term for SAP’s CX offerings — and the name was aimed at positioning it alongside SAP’s leading enterprise ERP suite S/4 HANA. Although Qualtrics joined the party, SAP never seemed to completely absorb it, as it had Hybris, for instance, which became SAP Commerce Cloud.

Qualtrics is the clear leader in its category and now begins another chapter in its story under long-time CEO Zig Serafin.

Dig deeper: Why did SAP buy Qualtrics?

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Given all of that promise, marketers are certainly evaluating these technologies and one crucial part of that process is the demo.

It’s important to set up demos within a relatively short timeframe of each other to help make relevant comparisons. Make sure that all potential internal users are on the demo call and pay attention to the following:

• How easy is the platform to use for the day-to-day tasks handled by each department that will be using it?
• Does the vendor seem to understand our business and marketing needs?
• Are they showing us our “must-have” features?

Explore platform capabilities from vendors like Sitecore, Optimizely, Pantheon, WordPressVIP and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on digital experience platforms.

Click here to download!

Here are 13 questions to ask each vendor that will help you narrow the field:

• What kind of content delivery speed improvements do you typically see with your clients?
• Why have you adopted the approach you recommend (fully headless or hybrid content delivery) and what does that specifically mean in terms of how the whole system comes together?
• How is the DXP hosted? PaaS? SaaS? Private cloud? On-premise software installation? Or some combination of these?
• How does the platform integrate with other martech platforms (i.e., CDPs, marketing automation platforms, CRMs, DSPs, DAMs)? What capabilities are native to the new platform and how is it modularized?
• Do you have pre-built connections to solutions we already use or sources of content or functionality that we need?
• What reporting do you provide that will document the ROI from our efforts?
• What kind of customer support is included? Can we pick up the phone to report problems?
• Will we have a dedicated Account Manager and technical support, especially with the initial migration?
• Do you have other clients in our vertical?
• What kind of professional services are available? And how much do they cost?
• How does the company handle requests for product modifications?
• What new features are the vendor considering?
• What’s the long-term roadmap and launch dates?

Good luck!

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The core capability of the digital experience platform is managing and delivering the digital user experience — primarily web pages, but also mobile apps and other types of content — a need that has long been served by content management systems.

While the growth of content management systems (CMSs) has allowed marketers to wrest control of websites from the IT department, which was largely in charge of the early web, marketers’ needs have grown beyond CMSs’ abilities to meet them in recent years. 

Digital transformation drives tool adoption

Over time, businesses have undergone digital transformations to drive efficiencies, remain competitive in the marketplace and respond to changes in customer behavior. To perform everything expected of a modern marketing operation, marketers adopted adjacent technologies to enhance what their CMS was able to do.

• Web analytics helped marketers gather data about user behavior and the conversion funnel, with more sophisticated optimization systems allowing for A/B and multivariate testing. 
• Customer journey analytics (CJA) gave marketers a more sophisticated sense of the path users take on the route to purchase. 
• For many businesses, ecommerce capabilities became essential to their digital operations.
• Connecting all the data in these systems to the right customer or prospect and keeping track of it all required a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or even a customer data platform (CDP).

Though each of these technologies provides a way to improve the user experience and helps modern marketers meet the demands now placed on them, this hodgepodge of systems has increasingly become a liability. In some cases, marketers are weighed down by the costs of licensing all of these disparate systems. 

Enter the DXP

These challenges, along with developments like the increased digitization of business brought about by the COVID pandemic and ever-heightened customer expectations, are some of the factors that have led to the rise of the digital experience platform (DXP).

Customers increasingly expect marketers to deliver consistent, personalized experiences to all of their devices, and they often use multiple devices to interact with brands and complete transactions.

Just delivering appropriate content to all of these channels and devices is a challenge in itself, because each of them requires its own interface and mix of content to perform ideally. More importantly, though, both consumers and business buyers expect to be known and understood in digital contexts, and delivering that personalization requires data and a means to act on those insights. 

Speed and modularity

Another significant aspect of the modern user experience is that it is fast. Besides the desire to please users, marketers focus on speeding content delivery because Google penalizes websites with poor landing page experiences — which includes slow loading — by ranking them lower in its search results.

At the same time, many front-end web developers have been chafing at the limitations of programming in PHP, seeking to take advantage of more modern methods and craft the slicker and more flexible user experiences they’re able to deliver with those technologies. 

Both of these developments have led businesses to seek alternatives to traditional content management approaches. Examples include headless or hybrid CMSs, often within DXPs. In these types of deployments, the CMS disconnects the underlying content from the means and manner of displaying it. Because of this, developers can employ modern frameworks to create the user experience, and it’s easier to leverage the same database of content assets across multiple platforms, devices and formats. 

Also, the pandemic and recent worldwide volatility have taught marketers an important lesson about being responsive and agile. Businesses that were quickly able to identify and adjust to shifting societal conditions and consumer sentiments have been the most successful at riding out the storm. One approach that’s gaining currency in this environment is the “composable DXP.”

A composable or modular DXP approach lets marketers pick and choose the modules that meet their business needs — or even connect modules from other providers — rather than being stuck with an all-in-one solution.

Core capabilities

A DXP enables the creation, management, delivery and optimization of digital experiences in a variety of channels and contexts. It serves as the hub that brings together capabilities from multiple applications or modules to deliver a seamless digital experience. Marketers considering the adoption of a DXP should understand that the way these platforms have come together — through acquisitions and integrations, for the most part — means that native capabilities differ from one offering to another. 

Additionally, the modularity of these offerings is a point of differentiation — some vendors offer more composable configurations than others. However, all should feature either native functionality or connections that enable the full range of capabilities explored here. The core capabilities of DXPs, provided either natively within the platform or via an integration include:

• Content management, which may include digital asset management and/or product information management (PIM).
• Support for multiple platforms and types of experiences.
• Delivery, presentation and orchestration of content and experiences.
• Personalization.
• Analytics and optimization.
• Search and navigation.
• Customer data management. 
• Strong functionality for integration and extensibility.

A number of additional capabilities may be included in some specific DXP offerings.

Today, strong functionality for integration and extensibility is probably the most important capability offered by DXPs, because it is fundamental to their role of bringing together all of the technologies that contribute to a customer-centric experience.

Is your marketing team ready for the future of content and experience management? Explore top digital experience management platforms in the first edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

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“Having inserted itself into all aspects of the digital advertising marketplace, Google has used anticompetitive, exclusionary, and unlawful means to eliminate or severely diminish any threat to its dominance over digital advertising technologies,” the lawsuit says.

Why we care. Google simultaneously acting as broker, supplier and auctioneer of online ads has always been problematic at best. As Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) put it, “The conflicts of interest are so glaring that one Google employee described Google’s ad business as being like ‘if Goldman or Citibank owned the NYSE.’” Cracking down on monopolistic business practices does great things for the consumer and the economy. The breakup of AT&T in the 1980s is why communication is so inexpensive and widespread today.

In the past, Google has rebutted monopoly claims by pointing to the large number of other companies which facilitate online advertising. The company did not respond to a request for comment today. 

Dig deeper: Google offers adtech unit changes to fend off antitrust lawsuit

This is the fifth antitrust lawsuit filed by state and federal officials against Google since 2020. That year a group of states led by Texas filed an antitrust lawsuit over the company’s advertising technology, while the DOJ and another group of states sued Google over claims that it abused its dominance over online search. In 2021, several states also sued over Google’s app store practices.

Dig deeper: Antitrust bill could force Google, Facebook and Amazon to shutter parts of their ad businesses

Google and other tech giants are currently under pressure from governments around the world trying to restrain their power over online information and commerce. In the European Union, Amazon, Google, Apple and others have faced antitrust investigations and charges, as well as new laws limiting the use and collection of consumer data.

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Based on new research, disconnected experiences are the top frustration for retail customers, while 65% of those surveyed said they would remain loyal to retailers who provide personalized experiences (data from a double-blind study of over 5,000 consumers across the U.S., UK, Australia, Canada and Singapore).

Why we care. The retail media network innovations are very broadly described by Salesforce in today’s release, but they amount to an acknowledgement that this is a rapidly developing and valuable space. With the looming deprecation of third-party cookies, advertisers will be looking to buy or target audiences based on first-party data.

Who has vast troves of such data? Big retailers. Retailers are suddenly in the advertising business and Salesforce wants to be their partner.

Dig deeper: 2023 Predictions: Retail media networks

The innovations. Salesforce for Retail Media announced initiatives aimed at helping retailers grow their advertising business:

• Use first-party data to allow ad buyers direct access to target audiences.
• Use automation and workflows to enhance speed and efficiency for advertisers.
• Use actionable insights to optimize campaign performance.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud announced measures to decrease friction in the retail customer experience:

• Salesforce Payments can now be used as payment provider in physical stores, creating a single view of digital and physical customer transactions.
• Implementation accelerators, and out-of-the-box analytics and dashboards, to improve digital experience for Composable Storefronts (highly flexible and scalable website properties available to retailers using a headless CMS).
• The addition of more commerce partners to Salesforce AppExchange.

In addition, the recently announced Genie Data Cloud will provide connectors allowing retailers to securely ingest customer data from Azure Data Lake into Salesforce Marketing Cloud CDP.

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The first advertiser on board is grocery chain Albertsons. The retailer will use the new Pinterest clean room to support its retail media network (RMN), called Albertsons Media Collective.

Why we care. Our recent RMN predictions indicated that more advertisers will be looking beyond on-site retailer channels for their RMN campaigns. 

Using the Pinterest clean room in collaboration with Albertsons Media Collective, other brand advertisers will be able to find existing Albertsons customers on Pinterest before they’re in a store or engaging with Albertson’s owned digital channels.

Dig deeper: Why we care about data clean rooms

Expanded reach and measurement. Albertsons will pilot the clean room technology with a winter healthy eating campaign, and will leverage key reporting metrics like return on ad spend (ROAS).

“As the industry evolves, we will remain proactive with solutions that add value for marketers while maintaining trust with consumers,” said Bill Watkins, CRO at Pinterest. “Together with LiveRamp, Pinterest is invested in expanding the possibilities for brands like Albertsons to help them better understand and measure the impact of their campaigns.”

“We believe using clean rooms can provide our clients with the data they expect to make informed decisions about their advertising in a privacy-preserving manner,” said Kristi Argyilan, SVP retail media, Albertsons Media Collective. “While our initial test pilot focuses on enabling closed-loop measurement, this partnership will ultimately provide our team a more holistic view of our customers’ digital footprint to unlock more advanced measurement capabilities, like incrementality and MTA (multi-touch attribution), down the road.”

Clean rooms expanding across RMNs. As more RMNs appear on the scene, they’re leaning on the data capabilities of clean rooms to securely activate data in a privacy-compliant way.

“Data clean rooms enable brands to cross-match anonymized, aggregated data without actually revealing any personally identifiable information or allowing access to the data outside of the clean room,” said Hugo Loriot, partner at technology consultancy 55.

Clean room availability will take a leap forward when Amazon’s recently announced AWS Clean Rooms roll out in the coming months. This service will allow media partners and advertisers to cross-match data in a clean room they can set up in minutes.

“Amazon is the new (and improved) Google,” said Eliza Nevers, Chief Product Officer for data management and identity company Lotame. “While the latter holds its death grip firmly on the ad products side of the business, Amazon not so quietly builds up an ever-growing tech stack to cover every and all marketing needs. Talk at its Unboxed conference celebrated its clean room capabilities. As the leading retail media network, there’s ample cause to celebrate.”

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