Is Your Integration Layer the Missing Link in Your Commerce Experience?

Brands know that creating an optimal commerce experience is critical for generating revenue, building customer loyalty, and staying competitive against the experiences provided by leading retailers. However, customer experience (CX) quality has declined in 2022, reversing the progress made in 2021, according to Forrester’s latest U.S. Customer Experience Index™. And while marketers often look to site design and personalization to address CX issues, there’s another, often-invisible factor that can make or break a commerce experience: the quality of the middleware layer that integrates all the front-end and back-end functions driving the online shopping experience.

A powerful and well-designed integration layer makes it easy to show consumers real-time stock levels, automatically surface nearby store locations, handle self-service tasks, and so much more. These capabilities drive revenue generation and strengthen customer loyalty. You can get a sense of how effective your site’s integration layer is even without delving into the technical details by looking for these performance indicators.

Difficult Access to Location Data

Consider the case of a customer who’s shopping online for a luxury item like a high-end watch. She might prefer to browse online, but it’s unlikely that she’ll spend several thousand dollars on a watch without first seeing it and trying it on in person. Ideally, the website she’s browsing will display the real-time stock levels of each product at the stores nearest to her so she can use that information to shape her decision-making process if she decides to see it in person.

Unfortunately, even many luxury retail websites lack this capability. Instead, they ask shoppers to take the extra step of entering their location into the website to request a map or list of the closest stores. Why are so many commerce sites designed this way?

Usually, it’s because the site’s integration layer is poorly configured and underpowered. Therefore, location inquiries must call the company’s ERP and then wait for the data to come back. This is a slow process for one request; multiply it by a few hundred or thousand shoppers and it will dramatically slow down the site. To overcome this integration shortcoming, the retailer hides the location data behind a click box. When only a few shoppers at a time are requesting location and inventory data, it “only” takes 20 seconds or so to gather the data and present it. The result of this slow and inconvenient presentation of the information the shopper needs to make their decision could be that they simply click away and find a retailer that offers an easier browsing experience.

Inaccurate Inventory Data

Another indicator of integration layer problems is delayed store inventory data. For example, a shoe retailer that offers a pickup today option in its filter list can show customers exactly which local store has the shoes they want in stock right now. However, this feature is only effective if it displays real-time data from each location. Otherwise, a customer may buy a pair of shoes online for store pickup, get to the store, and discover that the shoes have been sold to someone else. That’s a recipe for lost revenue, poor CX, customer churn, and negative word-of-mouth.

So why does it happen? When the commerce site’s integration layer is weak, it can’t handle the volume of real-time data (thousands of products across dozens or hundreds of locations). Instead, the retailer loads local store inventory into the commerce engine every night. That means consumers may be looking at data that’s almost 24 hours old when they’re browsing. And when there’s an in-demand item that’s selling fast, their order may end up getting canceled due to lack of stock. One retailer cancels an average of 30,000 orders per month due to this lag in stock data. That’s a huge drag on revenue and CX.

Poor Product Indexing and Search Results

Searching is typically the slowest customer-facing process on a retail site. If it’s too slow, consumers will give up and go somewhere else. Some retailers work around this by caching the default version of each product in the commerce engine because a live call to the integration layer would take too long to load. However, this time-saving workaround creates another CX issue: search results that don’t align with the consumer's request.

For example, a furniture retailer with hundreds of sofas — many available in multiple colors or patterns — might return results for a “black sofa” search that include white, brown and gray sofas. Those products may have a black upholstery option, but that’s not what the consumer sees in their search results. Those nonblack sofas frustrate the shopper, erode their trust in the website, and can drive them to leave for another website.

Self-Service, Personalization, and Community Content Struggles

Weak integration layers have other return on investment and CX consequences as well. If the middleware can’t call up data or content for personalization fast, that aspect of the experience will suffer. If the retailer's community content and product listings are separated, that content won’t drive sales as well as if those two functions were integrated. And if the integration layer isn’t powerful enough to connect to warehouse, ERP, bank, and commerce systems, fully online self-service returns won’t be possible.

Solving the Seamless Integration Problem

Retailers facing any of these problems should take a closer look at the middleware that’s bringing together all their different systems: commerce, inventory, location, and more. It may be that the integrations are misconfigured, or it may be that the middleware itself lacks the power to keep up with the real-time data needs of today’s commerce. Identifying the issues can help decide whether it’s time to invest in a stronger solution that can improve CX and omnichannel ROI.

Aaron Eversoll is a market development vice president within the Consumer Products, Retail and Distribution (CPRD) practice at Capgemini Americas. Aaron is responsible for driving Capgemini’s Digital Customer Experience initiatives within CPRD, focusing on helping clients solve their digital and commerce challenges and enabling clients to deliver an overall enhanced experience to their customers.