Commerce & Coffee: Preparing for Peak Season

Transcript

Welcome to Commerce and Coffee. Today we’re gonna be talking about preparing your site for peak season.

So we’ve designed our webinars to be interactive and we do encourage you to ask questions in the questions box throughout the presentation. You type them in there and we’ve set aside the last 10 minutes or so for Q&A. So we’re gonna do our best to answer as many of those as we can for you. I’d like to quickly mention a couple of housekeeping items. We are presenting in Adobe Connect today and we are live. But not to worry, the session is being recorded and can be viewed on demand and shared with other members of your team at a later time. So you will get a recording of this event in an email tomorrow afternoon. I’m gonna go ahead and say that a couple more times because I’m sure people will continue to ask.

I would also like to point out that at the top of your screen, there’s a black bar with an icon of a smiley face on it. There you can find different actions that you can utilize throughout the presentation. So if you like what you see, feel free to applaud, laugh, like, heart, all of those things. But we would love to see your engagement throughout the event. So definitely encourage you to utilize that picture. And then as we’re closing out the webinar, we have a few survey questions that are gonna be at the bottom of your screen. If you could take an extra couple of seconds to answer those, we would greatly appreciate it. So with that, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Alana Cohen, and I’m the Senior Digital Events Manager for our Customer Success Strategy team here at Adobe. I’ve been with Adobe for a little bit over six years now and spent a majority of those years organizing and hosting these events for you, our customers. And then prior to my time on this team, I spent about two years working with Adobe’s Advertising Cloud customers. Then before coming to Adobe, I spent many years at different advertising and media agencies around New York, but I’m excited to be here now hosting these events for you. So if you have any questions or comments about today’s event or any of our customer exclusive events, please don’t hesitate to reach out. So with that, I’d like to hand it over to Corey and Ogby to introduce themselves. Who’d like to go first? I can kick it off. My name’s Ogby Borushi. I’m a commerce business advisor, a strategy consultant here at Adobe. I’ve been working in e-commerce for about 20 years now, started on the merchant side and then moved into the SI side of the world for about 15 or 16 years before joining Adobe here a little over a year and a half ago. So excited to be here, share some strategy with you all and yeah, looking forward to the session.

Awesome, thanks Ogby. And my name’s Corey Gelato. I’m a senior commerce strategy consultant or a senior business advisor for commerce here at Adobe.

Been here for a little over seven years now, but been in the commerce landscape for a little over 20 years and kind of in this type of same role as a strategies consultant. I’ve worked with a lot of different merchants throughout my career. Within Adobe, what us, Ogby and I do as business advisors, we essentially strategize with customers around various KPIs, goals or objectives that might have. So usually they fall into a few different areas. We talk about anything from UX, CXUI, anything with the platform itself, SEO, SEM, conversion re-optimization, we kind of talk about anything across the board. So, and we’ve worked with a lot of third-party softwares as well. And although Ogby and I both have worked with other commerce platforms, we are incredibly biased now in working with Adobe Commerce, formerly Magento. So we’re happy to be here today. I’m looking forward to today’s session. Peak season’s always a really good one and we’ll kind of kick off the agenda just in a bit, but I think I’m gonna pass this back to Alana. Alana, I think we’re getting started with a poll, I believe. Yes, so bear with me here. We are going to walk through the agenda and then get to the poll. So we’re gonna welcome, we already have welcomed everyone. We’re gonna go through knowing the stakes, core drivers for peak season success. Then we’re gonna go to aligning strategy and execution and then execution in action. That’s gonna be your demo of the platforms. Then we’ll conclude with Q&A as mentioned. So let’s get started with that poll that Corey mentioned. So let us know, what do you think was your biggest challenge for 2024 peak season? So did your site keep crashing? Could you not keep the products on the shelf? That’s a good problem to have. We had much higher than normal cart abandonment.

What was your biggest challenge in 2024? So that was last year. And maybe your peak season was in 2025, but whenever your peak season was, let us know what the biggest challenge was.

Okay. It seems a majority here had some higher than normal cart abandonment.

And a couple of responses for the site kept crashing. All right, that is good to know. I’m going to go ahead and jump back over to the slides and hand it to, I believe Corey to kick us off.

Yeah, absolutely. And the good thing about seeing that poll is you guys all had products still on the shelf. And that’s a really good thing, especially considering a lot of things have been inventory depletion and things with inventory and various types of things that have been implemented across the globe. It’s definitely something to be mindful of as you’re going into, if you do have your peak season coming up too, it’s a really good thing to just kind of be always stagnant on it and just thinking about. So let’s kind of get started here. So we want to talk about knowing the stakes, what has happened. So this session today, just to kind of level set, take one step back, I really want you to think about your peak season as we’re going through this. So even though we’re going to do a lot of reference points to the holiday season this year, that’s coming up in the US. So we’re talking about early November, actually really late October, thinking about the fall aspect and going all the way through to the end of the year. So a lot of it’s going to be focused on that, but this was really collectively, when we started looking at the data, especially from the economy index aspect too, what we really started seeing is kind of the holistic sense of what everyone was seeing as their peak season. Again, you’re going to see a lot of stats that are towards that. And even the demo that I go through today, just be mindful as I’m walking through it, it’s going to be very holiday-esque, it’s going to be very peak season-esque, it’s going to feel very retail, but I’m going to kind of keep pivoting and saying, this is what you can do as a B2B customer too. So B2B, B2C, B2E, this is kind of across the board. So, knowing the stakes, when it comes down to what your business is doing, these are all important. But like I said, I want to talk a little bit about the peak season aspect from last year, thinking about commerce specifically or e-comm. What we really saw was there’s a huge opportunity this year. So looking at last year, what we saw for that 8.7% year over year kind of increase for commerce, it’s extremely critical. That’s important to know, it’s to know what’s going on. At least in the US, they call Black Friday, because if you are in the red, the idea of it is you’re going to get into the black. You’re going to get into a positive swing based on the holiday season. I’ve worked with merchants that 60, 70% of their revenue comes in between these next few months, so it’s extremely critical. And again, think about this from any peak season that you have. So if I’m thinking about this in the US side, so I know I’m saying the opportunity, I’m saying what has happened last year is thinking about mobile commerce driving over 54% sales and Christmas Day shopping, peaking and so forth, so on. If we really think about the US, right? US has different peak season, quote unquote, time periods and events, right? It has the July, so early to mid, that’s kind of that mid promotional event aspects. Then you have the back to school or end of summer, that could be late July into September. You have the fall sales, which is October, early November, and you kind of have that main holiday side of it, which is that main holiday shopping period. And again, same idea as if you are B2B. So I wrote a really great blog and I focused towards this, talking about inventory and ensuring that your customers that you potentially have from a B2B side are basically stocked and they have that inventory. And this is where that stat really starts coming into play, thinking about what that increase is going to look like. Now, where timing is everything, and I kind of alluded to it already, thinking about those different areas of where it’s like July, it’s July to September, October, early November, that fall sales buildup and pre-holiday push is really October, right? So we are now what, three, four, five weeks away from that holiday push, that beginning holiday push for anybody that isn’t that more, again, peak season, thinking about it from a holiday perspective. But the really important thing here is thinking about what Black Friday through Cyber Monday through Cyber Week really accounted for. It accounted for 22% of all of Cyber Week. That’s incredible. Those types of stats are super important for you to be mindful of as you’re going through this. Again, even from that B2B side too. And that last five days, so it’s funny, we make the joke, Avi will probably reference it too, Avi’s a late shopper. I used to be, and then I decided that I would start going early too because I started seeing the sales and really kind of doing my own research, right? Doing what I do as a business, as a profession, seeing what I noticed from most consumers, what they’re starting to shop for. So again, B2B, B2C side, that’s what we’re starting to see. So those discounts, the promotions, they followed a similar trend to that too. Those discounts started tapering off in those last few days of December. They actually started rising again. So it’s not noted here, but they did start rising again in January, mostly because people get what? They’re getting gift cards. They’re getting different types of things where they can shop on them or by themselves. So it’s kind of a really good opportunity from that side of it too. Now, customer or consumer expectations. This is something that’s extremely important. You know, we know we live in an AI world now, right? So what we saw from last year was that AI chatbots to online stores increased by over 13,000%. That’s significant. So we know AI is a huge point, but the thing with AI too is, again, I say it all the time whenever I talk about AI, there still needs to be human touch. And it’s not going to encompass every single thing that you see inside of these bubbles, right? There’s a reason why we kind of separated these out as to the chats and chatbots and so forth, so on, because you still need to have personalization. You still need to have relevant search results. You still need to have mobile first shopping, right? Before we looked at the last few slides, that 54% of sales coming through mobile, I know mobile traffic, you know mobile traffic is significant. So ensuring that that customer experience and what those expectations, looking back, look back at what you’ve seen before, but these are the types of things that are extremely important. So there’s AI driven sales or deals, those chatbot aspects, personalization, the buy now pay later, can’t stress that enough. And that’s super critical as you start kind of getting into the weeds of things. With that, I want to pass it over to Agb. I’m going to come back on in just a few minutes, but I’m going to let Agb take these next few slides talking about those core drivers for peak season success. So Ags, let me hand this to you. Thank you, sir. Thanks, Corey, for the setup and the context. And it’s really great to see this opportunity that continues to grow for merchants and something that we want to help everyone sort of capitalize on. So like Corey said, you know, I’m going to go here through the core drivers for peak season success. And for this section, I really want to focus on three main areas. We want to keep customers on our site and keep it up. We want to help them find what they’re looking for. And ultimately we want to make the sale, right? That’s what we’re here for is to make business, right? So it’s really great that these are the topics that really align well with, you know, what we were seeing from you all in the first poll. Talking about performance and scalability, we all know that speed and reliability are keys to online success. And that is true year round, but it is especially important during peak season. So customers have such limited time and patience. There’s a lot, you know, vying for their attention and any slowness or interruption to the customer experience can really increase your bounce rate and lose you sales. There’s a 2006 study where Amazon found that for every 100 milliseconds, every one 10th of a second in added page time, it costs them about 1% in sales. And, you know, our mileage may vary depending on your business, those numbers may be different, but the principle really still holds true. If your site is slow, customers will likely buy less or worse, they’re going to find another place to shop. So it’s really important, you know, as we’re getting into that season, like Corey said, that this sort of pre-holiday, late, late October, sales period, you know, it’s really important to take this time, make sure your site is running smoothly and put your best foot forward.

So take this opportunity, perform code reviews and load tests to identify areas for improvement and failure points in your site code. Typically you want to prioritize the biggest impact items, but once you get the list of sort of these opportunities, you know, work with your team to find out what’s going to have the best impact based on your bandwidth and your availability, right? You may tackle three smaller items versus one bigger item, right? So it’s hard to be prescriptive here, but, you know, work with your team and make the best decisions you can. One of the other things that we really like to call out, we see this a lot generally, but especially during holiday season or peak season is being mindful of, you know, the media and content that you’re uploading. We’re refreshing content constantly during a sales period, right? And it’s important that that content is optimized for the web. So, you know, just adding simple validation steps to make sure that, you know, your export settings are appropriate and looking at the final image file sizes so you’re not requiring a user to load too much data to load your site, right? And lastly, maybe most importantly, use historical data, use your current sales trends and traffic trends to forecast what it’s gonna look like for your peak season. Is your server capable of handling an increase in traffic and checkouts? If you’re a commerce cloud customer, you can submit requests for temporary upsize for this peak season. If you’re a self-hosted or on-prem, reach out to your host or your system admin, depending on who’s managing this and see what options are available to you. You may also be able to scale up, but you might have to think about a server migration, right? And so we wanna make sure that we have enough runway to get that in place before the season kicks off.

Now, with increased online competition, you know, the market is growing, but there are more people trying to tap into that growth, right? So it’s important to find ways that you as a business can differentiate yourselves and create more value for your customers, and to have that experience for them. Not only have we seen in studies that personalization increases revenue by up to 40%, we know that customers are saying that not only do they want personalization, but they’re expecting sites to do this, right? So leveraging features, you know, that come out of the box for you, like customer segmentation, dynamic blocks in content, advanced personalization and merchandising capabilities like live search and product recommendations. We can use these tools to prevent customers with an experience tailored to their interests and behaviors. This can help customers filter out the quote unquote noise and quickly find what they’re looking for, even if they weren’t sure that’s what they wanted when they started shopping.

So thinking about, you know, your recommendation logic and ranking models, you will really wanna think about what your catalog, you know, what you’re selling and how customers may approach shopping this season. So are they shopping for themselves? Are you, you know, a site that is probably used for gifting? You know, you may be a mix, right? So depending on your industry, it may change your approach. But for example, if you sell cosmetics, you may want to lean more towards the active user’s behavior and drive recommendations based on that. Whereas maybe if you’re selling outdoor gear or fashion, you know, trends across all users may be more appropriate. So considering mixing and matching options and presenting users with a variety of options here, it’s also important to monitor your data, monitor your stats. And I’m sure Corey’s gonna touch on this as well, but you know, this is an iterative process. We don’t just set it and forget it at the beginning of the season. We have to be active throughout the entire process. And that’s really where, you know, that timing is important. You know, timing is everything and we always wanna be present throughout the entire season.

So lastly, we’ve gotten people to the site and kept them there with a quick and stable site. We’ve helped them build their cart through assisted product discovery and recommendations. Now we gotta bring it home and make the sale. So just like with personalization, customers have different needs and expectations when it comes to checkout and fulfillment. Many customers, all of us, have been trained to expect speedy delivery times. Think, you know, prime shipping with two day shipping and delivery and things like that. Some customers, if you’re more proactive like Corey, you might be willing to wait longer for shipping. Maybe there’s a savings to free shipping option that’s gonna take a few days longer. So offer a wide variety of options for customers. They can choose what works for them and their timing. And it also gives you some flexibility to offer different promotions, right? You can potentially promote free shipping for ground and offer, you know, a premium overnight shipping option.

It’s important also to be clear about fulfillment and lead times where possible include estimated delivery dates, the actual arrival dates, and set clear expectations with customers. This helps to reduce unnecessary customer service requests. Hey, where’s my package and things like that.

You can see from the chart here, as we get later into the season, we do see slight upticks in some of the expedited features. You know, that’s me stopping two days before Christmas and hoping that, you know, my package is gonna arrive on time or selecting, you know, buy online pickup in store or in store delivery so that I can go pick it up, you know, on my way to my in-laws house. So I don’t show up empty handed.

Similarly on the payment side, it’s really, it’s critical, maybe even more so to offer a variety of payment options during checkout. Everyone has different comfort levels, you know, depending on age and demographics with what methods they prefer to use. We also saw, you know, the high amount of mobile traffic last year, right? Over 50% of holiday sales generated by mobile devices. So we wanna think about including mobile wallets during checkout, you know, include credit card, PayPal. We saw an increase in buy now pay later, and I think we’ll see the same this year.

So make sure you’re offering, you know, an entry point for every customer and their comfort level. If you’re taking advantage of Adobe payment services, mobile wallets and a lot of these features are easily implemented, but there’s a broad range of options available in the ecosystem.

Again, easily integrated and made available to customers to improve the experience and really close the deal. So now that we’ve covered my three key areas of core drivers for success, I’ll pass it off back to Corey, tie in on how Adobe commerce can be that central tool to achieving success.

Yeah, I appreciate that, Agb. Wow, I mean, I don’t know about anyone else, but I feel like I learned, and I know that the content that’s in here obviously working with Agb, but, you know, again, I think the reiteration of these things is critical even for what I do on a constant basis, working with customers, working with various merchants, whether it’s that B2C, B2B, hearing these things over and over again just become more organic to me and more natural to me as I’m thinking through what is a business seed? What are they starting to do? You know, and I know we’re covering things in only a few slides, right? So it’s not encompassing everything. And I want to just kind of set one kind of bar here for this. So I’m gonna go to the next slide because we just talk about the keys to execution, obviously thinking about all these different types of things and what I’m gonna kind of walk through today too are some of these areas. You know, I’m not gonna be going too much into high availability and performance. Again, I think that everybody understands that that is critical, right? You could have the best looking site, the most merchandise site, everything could be personalized to no end, but if you’re operating and to the point of what we mentioned with Amazon and what they did and that type of a timeframe, you’re gonna lose a sale if somebody’s sitting there for 10, 15, you know, 20 seconds waiting for something to happen on the site. It has to be fast paced for them. You know, they’re fine. Not everybody’s looking for shipping the next day or needing it today or anything like that. Again, those late shoppers, specifically in a peak season aspect, typically they’re gonna start shopping earlier, right? They want it, their budgets, they want to extend them out. They don’t want it to all be at once. So I do want to kind of set one stage here. So one of the data points that I really started looking at was what’s gonna happen this year. So this is obviously not the keys to execution, but I didn’t note this before and I want to note it now. So the past few years, what we’ve seen during this specific peak season, so if this is your peak season coming up right now, what we did see from the past few years was that 8% growth and so forth, so on. This year, they are expecting, so when I say they, most of everybody that’s out there looking at the data, looking at the stats, looking at what’s going on throughout the entire year, there is a deceleration possible that’s compared to other years for peak season. Again, this specific peak season, but it’s still outperforming in-store growth for e-comm. So e-comm is still looking at a huge swing. So if you do have brick and mortar or if you have physical locations, I know we said to do BOPAS because it still is important, but remember, your actual sales channel is online. So online is that sales channel, even if they’re picking up in store, what the expectation is roughly between seven to 9% year-over-year growth for this year. So for 2025 peak season, that’s roughly the area that we’re looking at. So again, we saw 8% and I know it kind of sounds like a safe bet, based on data that we’ve seen throughout the year, based on different things that are happening in the economic industry or economic aspects, we were really kind of thinking that that’s gonna be the area for e-comm. Obviously that changes by industries and by different types of consumer good products and so forth, so on, but it is something to kind of think about. When you’re talking about conversion rates, I get the question very often. It’s very difficult to say a blended rate of average, kind of what you should see as a conversion rate, but I’ll say it this way. Anything between that two to 3%, that is a good area. That is an average if you blend it across every single industry, as well as those target audiences. So why this is all important is because this is where you start thinking about how do we make sure we’re executing on things. So the main point of today’s webinar is to prepare for it. It’s not to just be like, all right, well, we’re out of the box now, that’s it, we’re done. You are not late yet. This is not it being late if this is your peak season. So start looking at your performance aspects. Start doing the things that I was mentioning. Do those load tests. Look at what you did last year. Understand what you’ve done this year so far too, right? Has your traffic trends changed throughout the year? If they have, start looking at that. So as we’re talking about high availability performance, that high availability, in my opinion, besides just your infrastructure, that also is what your organic growth looks like. That’s what your traffic channels are. Then it is obviously, again, onsite, thinking about the whole and holistic customer experience from that, the merchandising side, from your search optimization on the site, from your marketing aspects, from the content side, and then obviously your checkout flexibility too. And with checkout flexibility, we are talking about buy now, pay later, different payment options, right? But also think about it, again, if you are doing gifting, and that’s what a lot of your business starts doing, think about doing things like multiple shipping. Think about doing things like gift wrapping and gift notes and so forth, so on, and being able to ship to people directly. So those types of things is part of that checkout flexibility. And obviously, yes, I will say it as guest checkout as well, it’s making sure that that’s also included in there. Ultimately, end of the day, stay flexible. Monitor your analytics, right? Just be prepared to pivot. As much as you prepared to be proactive, be prepared to be reactive, right? You have to be flexible and nimble as the customer to change, right? We’ve seen it over the past decade plus how quickly things change. So it’s important as you’re going through your peak season too, to adapt, to adapt to what’s happening, not one off cases, but adaptability for things that you see as more trending in a specific timeframe and time period.

And with that, before we get into the execution and action, which again is the demo portion of this, Alana, I am going to pass this back to you for our second poll just before we get kicked in here. Yeah.

All right, so we have one more poll as Corey mentioned. What Adobe Commerce features have you not taken advantage of? Personalization, like customer segmentation, content staging, shipping and payments integrations, or Adobe Commerce Cloud upsizing.

So let us know what you might not have taken advantage of yet.

All right, we’ve got kind of an even split across the board here, content staging, shipping and payments integrations, and then Adobe Commerce Cloud upsizing. So it’s a little bit split here, Corey. So I’m gonna close this. Perfect. And we will go right into the demo here.

Perfect, thank you so much.

Alana, just confirm when you can see it, just so I’m not talking into the wind here. No, I see you. All good, I see your Luma page. All right, perfect, awesome. All right, set the stage for this business. So this is my fictitious business, Luma. I’m gonna talk about it from that side. You’re gonna hear me say my business, this and this and that. So just remember that this is my fictitious business. What we focus on is our peak season is coming up right now. And we focus also into January. We’re a wellness, we’re a fitness company. So we supply products from weightlifting to yoga to different running, just fitness enthusiasts in general. So that’s kind of my stage set for you guys as I’m going through this. We are preparing a lot of different things. So we’ve already done our benchmarking and performance. So we’ve already scaled our infrastructure. We’ve ensured that our CDN is in place and that we are ready to go. And that our cash at ratio is over 90% for everything that is cash for content and anybody that’s coming into the site. So we know our infrastructure is fine tuned for this. So where we’re starting to really kind of shift here is we’re looking at different things from marketing and merchandising. So today, what I’m gonna walk you through is I’m gonna walk you through basically my holiday season. I’m going into a holiday sale promotion aspect here. So right now, as my site is today, everything you guys are going to see today is also native functionality. There’s nothing hard coded. I have no extensions in here. Everything is native Adobe Commerce. So I’m gonna walk through kind of everything that I’ve set up. And right now, the reason why I wanted to first show the site as it stands today is because I think it’s important for you to kind of get a good idea of what’s going to change here. The biggest things that I’m changing is I’m gonna obviously add a promotion here. So I’m gonna have different types of CTAs here. My homepage is gonna be completely revamped. I’m also gonna going to have a few different things with my navigation that’s going to change. So right now, I am logged in as a customer. I’m a customer that has purchased weightlifting in the past. The reason why that’s important is because again, what I do is I personalize my shopper experience. The top of my site, I get that thank you for being a Loyola Luma customer, receiving two extra reward points, et cetera. And if I’m a guest customer, that dialogue basically changes. The other thing that I have as part of businesses, I told you before, but I actually change my navigation. So mine here, weightlifting VIP sale, just to kind of a few different things that I do, my featured products, this main banner area, these are all things that I change in my business. Again, why this is important is because I’m gonna showcase this to you as my business starts going into my full holiday season too. And I have two different periods. So I have cyber week, cyber Monday. Then I go into kind of my full holiday swing where the rest of my promotions are basically focused up until the end of December for my US site here at least. So I’ll show you kind of this way. So this is this flavor, again, me registered here. Let me give you one other flavor, but this one is going to be of a customer that is a not logged in customer. I have no information on them. You can actually see, I have this change up here where it says registered for an account today and receive reward points. You could see even our CTA is different here. Our banner here is now nothing happens until you move instead of the one that was there before. I also don’t have that weightlifting VIP sale category. Now I’ll show you just my third flavor of this, which is going to be Veronica. Veronica has purchased yoga equipment in the past. So essentially we change out content for her as she’s in here and she basically sees what’s focused towards her, which is that live that yoga life. She gets mats, bags, apparel, so forth, so on. She does get that same rotator at the top that you saw when I was registrar logged in. So it says, thank you for being that loyal Luma customer. Kind of goes through that same process that’s there. So again, more or less setting the stage for you to just kind of get a good idea of what we’re doing and how my business is operating. So that’s as it is today. Now for content staging, I’m going to start there. So I’m going to go into the admin side. And again, I’m explicitly going to go directly into my content staging. So every one of your platforms has this. The content staging, while nomenclature might get a little bit confusing, content staging is focused on staging your content, your merchandising, your promotions, et cetera, for a scheduled date. So mine, for instance, here is going to, you’re going to see it, I’ll actually click into it. But mine that I have available right now is my holiday one. And I have my Cyber Monday sale that’s going on. You can see when the start dates are and when the end dates are. There are different views of this page right here. So you could do this as a grid. You could do this as a list, as a timeline. Me personally, I love the grid view. I love to see what’s upcoming, what’s active. Anything that is no longer active and that is expired won’t be on this list. It’ll be something that’s not there anymore. Why I like this view too is because it gives me my breakdown of things, right? So I know what is going on in my holiday one by clicking on this and saying, okay, I have a CMS page going to CMS block category and I have catalog price rules. So I’ve covered basically all of my merchandising aspect of this one. For the one that I have for Cyber Monday or my Cyber sale, I have one category going live. So that’s perfect. I know what it is. It’s my Cyber sale Monday. It’s basically gonna be a new navigational element that’s gonna start at the beginning of my nav bar. So I know what that is by just kind of looking at this. I also see where my end dates are on these too. So remember what I was saying before, the dates that are specific around this. Now, if I wanted to go into this and I wanted to see what’s going on, I wanna see kind of totality of everything. Few different things, I can go into view and edit and I can see everything that’s being changed here. I also can go into a preview. Now in my window right now, I wanna highlight something. In this window, what you do see is you’re seeing this experience as if I am going to the site as Corey Gelato. You see that I’m logged in here. You could see what’s going on. You could see anything that’s happening through this. So a few different things that I like to call out. One of the things first and foremost is my navigation changes, right? So I have holiday sale now. I have the weightlifting VIP sale, so forth, so on. Few other things that I’m doing here is I also do things like I have a promotion in here. This is not something, if I go back to the actual live, say, as it stands today, you could see that promotion is not in there. There’s nothing to do with that free shipping, with the holiday hat or anything like that. My staging preview though, you could see, I do have that in there. I have that in my mini card, so that is part of my promotional aspect. The other things that I’m doing too is I have things like the new banners, the new blocks that are here for shop running and shop yoga. So even though I know this customer typically shops for weightlifting, I still want to kind of keep them in a few different things. So I get the question often about segmentation. Hey, somebody gets into segmentation, does that pigeonhole them into specific content? No, actually my case is a really good example of that. Me being a logged in customer, registered customer, I’ve purchased both yoga equipment as well as weightlifting equipment before. So my content could change depending on each one of the loads. So if I’m on say a PLP and then I come back and I go from PLP, PDP back to here, my content could change, could stay the same. I have this in a series where basically is randomized. So content that I do have that stay stagnant is what you see here, is kind of those blocks that are there. The holiday sale aspect, again, that block that’s within here too, those types of things I kind of keep through, keep it all as, again, what I’m kind of doing in through that experience itself. The other things that I kind of do from my promotion side is, and I said it before, but it’s different promotions, catalog promotions that are happening throughout my experience. So if I go into say the view cart, in edit cart aspect, a few different things that I do here, I do things with like gift options. So I have different things with gift options right now where you could pick your paper, you get gift receipts, you can do printed cards. I also do checkout with multiple addresses. So again, this is that experience in a very kind of a different way of where, again, this is that preview aspect. One cool thing about this content staging is you can change this. You could say, hey, I want to look at this as of let’s say December 1st. I want to know what this is going to look like at that point. I also could share this out. So let’s say Advi and I are working on something together collectively. He’s doing the marketing aspect. I’m doing the merchandising. I might go to him and be like, hey, I made these changes. Take a look, see what’s going on here. He could do the same. We can kind of go through that experience. Because again, this is showcasing totality of that experience. As of December 1st, I can walk through my entire customer experience with that staging content. So it’s a really good way to kind of see what your site is going to look like as of that day.

Now, other things that I kind of like about this too is the different promotions that I have that are going on or different things that I have that are staged. So if I wanted to look at, say, the Cyber Monday aspect, see what’s going on as of that day, this also could showcase something specific. So my content is overriding this still, but you can actually see between this specific date, what you’re going to see is that Cyber Monday sale. So that element was not there before, but because I went in and I changed that to something specific, right, I’m looking at this as Cyber Monday, specifically on December 1st, I want to see what that looks like. That’s why you’re seeing that in this case. So if I wanted to go back here, simple enough, go back into this, we could see those objects that are here that are essentially associated with it. Now, I did want to bring up one other experience here. So I’m actually going to just hop open Safari. Again, I’m logged in as Veronica here. I just wanted to show this as a preview for her as well. Obviously, Cookie Sessions, it’s going to show it a little bit differently. So I wanted to show you it as if Veronica was in here. Veronica is going to get different content pieces. The other thing with Veronica too, is she doesn’t have that weightlifting VIP sale aspect here. So that is another element that is no longer in this place right now. So again, I’m calling it out just so you can kind of see a little bit of a different motion that’s through this.

So here’s one thing I didn’t do yet. Now, one of the things that I have is I’ve set up two out of three of my personas for my holiday sale, right? So I don’t know if you noticed before, but the one thing that wasn’t being triggered here is basically when I got into the promotion side here, when I was looking at this from my side, and I did this preview, the one piece of content, the banner itself, never shows weightlifting right now. So I said it before myself as we’re logged in here, I see two different segments because I’ve done both yoga and as well as weightlifting. So I’ve purchased both of those before. But different from what you see here, right? This is raise the bar. If I do a refresh right now, just so you can get a good experience of what my life site is. Do a refresh, do it again, do it again. You can see there’s different content elements that are there. It’s live the yoga life, refresh again, raise the bar. So for it’s on because I fit two different segments. Remember what I said before, I can randomize that series. So that’s what’s happening there. So what I wanna do in real time right now is I wanna go back here. I wanna add a new dynamic block. So I wanna add a new dynamic block to the homepage itself. So how I’m gonna do that. So here’s my few that I have. So on my current homepage, these are my three that I have, which is the visitor, weightlifter, as well as the yoga one. But you could see my peak season one that I have that are set up right now. So I have yoga, I have visitor. So I’m gonna go into here, create a new dynamic block. And with this one, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna create this based off of a weightlifter, essentially. So I’m gonna do weightlifting here. Gonna use and choose my specific segment. So my segment is weightlifters.

I’m going to then go into edit with page builder.

I am a huge advocate of this. I don’t know if you don’t use it. If you don’t use it, I think it’s a miss. I love using templates. Templates are everything to me. They speed me up. They get everything done very quickly. I’m a huge advocate of this. So I’m gonna go and I’m gonna apply a template. I already know that I have one, which is my homepage here with dynamic block. I’m gonna actually choose this. I’m gonna apply this. Here’s my raise the bar one. So on the homepage, what we saw before, here’s that raise the bar one. Now I need to change this for, again, what I’m doing in this case is I wanna change this to peak season. So I might wanna change a few things here. First, I just wanna change this background image. So I’ll go in here. I’m gonna select from my gallery. I already have my peak season assets all in here. I know currently the one that I’m using for specifically if you’re not a registered customer, I believe it’s this one up here because it has the yoga mat. So I’m gonna use this one instead. So I’m gonna select this one. I’m gonna insert this one in. The other thing that I wanna do too is I actually wanna use the bottom center of this photo just because it’s a little bit more bottom heavy than it is towards like mainly the top there. Gonna save this. Now we can see image looks awesome. Maybe I just wanna change these products too. Maybe instead of the fitness category, maybe I would wanna change it to the holiday sale or the weightlifting VIP. I’m gonna keep this as is, but just I could change this to any which one that I want to. Gonna keep that as that featured product that I did like that. Gonna go in here. I’m gonna save this. So now our dynamic block is created. So how do I bring it into the page, right? Because right now all I did was just create one. There’s nothing else happening just yet. So I’m gonna go into the content. I’m gonna go into my pages. There’s two ways that I could have gotten to this. I’m taking you through how to get to it from the page side, looking at scheduled content there. You could also go to the content staging dashboard and change it there instead. But in my case, I’m gonna go to my homepage right here. So I’ll go in here. I’m gonna edit this. We could see the schedule changes. So here is that schedule change specifically or explicitly now for the homepage changes, right? So I’ll go in here. I’m gonna view and edit this, right? Because if I edit this one, so let me just go back for one second here. If I edit the page here, this is not really helpful. This is showcasing a dynamic block rotator, but it’s not showing my actual sale promotion content right now. My sale promotion content is staged content. So that’s what you see here. So basically after January 1st and before November 13th, this is the content that’s going to show. So that’s the really cool thing about the content staging. You don’t have to wake up to launch something. You basically let it launch by that content staging. So in this case, what I wanna do is part of adding this. So here’s that content that you saw.

What I wanna do is in this dynamic block rotator, I actually want to add a new one. So here’s the two we have, right? So I said, I wanna add a third one, which is that weightlifter. We have the yoga one, we have the visitor one. So I’m gonna show any of these. So any of them that I have available and bam, there’s our peak season homepage hero banner. So I’m gonna select that one. I’m gonna save.

I’m gonna go back here. And I’m gonna save this update. So again, we’re not changing the update at all. The only thing we’ve changed is that content piece. We’re adding a new element. Gonna save this. And then now what I’m gonna do is I’ll actually do a preview here. Let’s see if it kicks right away. So I’ll do this preview. Gonna wait a few seconds here. And if it doesn’t kick right away and we see yoga first, what I’ll do is I’m just gonna do a hard refresh. Even if it shows me the other one, because again, I’m using this all in cookie session. So this is gonna get a little bit confusing in this side of it. But if I do a few refreshes here, what you’ll start seeing based on, for that save to actually happen, that content piece should now be in there at some point as that load happens. And there we go. So here’s the raise the bar one. This is the one we just created now. So now we see that third flavor of what our holiday promotion is going to look like. So if I do another refresh here, remember what I said, every so often I got a random series here, we should see a different content block, for me specifically, for Corey, as being registered here, because I am somebody that has purchased yoga and as well as weightlifting. So here you go. Here’s that yoga one. I’m gonna go back to Veronica here. So you probably didn’t see that, but I am on a different tab now. I’m on a different window entirely. You can see I’m logged in as Veronica. I’m still inside of that preview window. So I’m just gonna do a refresh here. This should have not altered Veronica’s at all. Veronica should still see exactly what I was showing before, based on the fact that she is just somebody that has purchased yoga before. And sure enough, that’s exactly what she’s seeing. So again, just kind of coming to life, what we’re doing here. The one thing that Veronica’s gonna have, she’s gonna have some things that are standard. She’s gonna have some of the things that I have, which is like the holiday sale, so forth, so on. Okay, let’s kind of keep going around here. So the next thing I kind of want to walk through, what I’d like to do is more kind of thinking about outside the homepage now, right? So different things that I’ve done with widgets, I showed you before, I have this widget in here, right? I have that cart side. That’s a really kind of straightforward aspect of what I’m doing. Again, within the objects, I can see what I’m doing, what CMS blocks are going live. That CMS block is basically what you saw there, is that specifically shipping widget. Now, maybe there’s something else I want to do though. Maybe I want to create a new cart promotion banner, right? So one of the really cool things that you can do, and I’m gonna show this in real time, how I set up this specific one that you saw within that mini cart. So let’s do, let me start it first and foremost. Let’s create the block first. So the block, what I want to do is I’m gonna create a new one here. Same idea as before. What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna do cart, let’s do peak season. So peak season cart promo bar. And we’re gonna call it the same thing, peak season, perfect cart promo. And then I’m gonna edit with page builder. Remember what I said before, huge fan of templates. So I’m gonna apply a template. I already have one created. I know it’s a little cheating, but I have one created here. Gonna apply this.

This one is just basically saying I’m tying this to a promotion. My promotion is if you spend $59 or more, you are going to get a free shipping option within checkout, right? You can do expedited, but in my case, I’m gonna give you free shipping for standard. So I have this bar that’s here. I’m gonna save this. I’m gonna keep this enabled for now. You’re gonna see some of the nifty that I’m gonna do. What I’m gonna go back into is now widgets. So widgets. Widgets basically give you that ability to inject content pieces into specific areas of your site. So example, quick example of it. The top bar up here, this is done and by way of a widget. If you wanted to add something to the PDP auxiliary info section, where the price is, maybe you wanted to add like shipping expectations, you use a widget for that. If you wanna add something as I did before within the mini cart, that was towards here in that promo, that’s done through a widget as well. So these are native functionalities based on the theme itself. And again, all themes are typically based off of the Luma theme or a blank theme, which again is all gonna use this functionality. So these widgets should work for you. So in my case, what I wanna do is a simple enough, I wanna create that cart promotion, that shipping widget that was in there. So we could see I have one currently open right here. What I’m doing in this case is I’m adding this to a specific page. The specific page is the shopping cart here, and I wanna move it as the page after header. So basically what it means is after you are here on the cart, what I wanna do is before that shopping cart side, which is this exactly right here, you saw that I just activated that, I created it in real time. So now we could see that it actually is showing there. Here’s the problem. I don’t want this to show yet, right? This is my live site currently right now. I don’t want this to show yet. Even though they’ve applied for this promo and it’s actually hitting, I wanna go back into this. Now, this is what I was saying before. This is how I’m gonna kinda create that. Here you could see this is the peak season cart promo block. That’s why that’s selected right now. This is where I wanna select any promotion. This is where those static blocks essentially are. These also could be dynamic blocks as well. So what I wanna do is maybe in this case, same exact idea as what I did before. In the block side, and here’s this peak season one, we just created it now. I’m gonna go into this. I’m going to disable it, save this. But what I’m gonna do instead is I’m gonna do the same thing. Here’s the really cool thing about the content staging and what you could do. You do not have to create an update every time. So in my case here, I’m gonna assign this to an existing update. That existing update is gonna be the holiday 2025 sale, go live and end.

I’m gonna select this. And all I wanna do is I wanna enable that block. So basically saying that for now, keep it disabled until November 13th. So if I go here, click save, go back to my live site, I’m gonna just do a quick refresh here. Now you can see that’s no longer showcasing there. However, if we go back into this, we do a preview change again. What we should see after we go in and we go to the cart itself.

Now you can see great news. Your order qualifies for free shipping. So that was us creating that full experience again, throughout that customer side of it too. All right, I know we’re getting close to time. So I’m gonna go through something pretty quick here. Now I wanna do a little bit of AI, right? So I want some aspects of my AI to come into place here. So one of the things that I like to do is within live search is do different search criteria. So maybe on mine in this case, and granted I don’t have that many options for gifts, with my business, there’s not a lot of things that are termed gift. But with search merchandising through live search, what I can do is I can create a rule around this. That way I’m not augmenting and moving products around myself. I’d rather let AI take over and I’d rather focus on something with trending aspect. So I’m gonna go in here, create a new rule. I’m gonna do a query. This query I’m gonna say contains and I’m gonna say gift, right? So anytime that somebody searched for gift again, I don’t know, I only have two products, but let’s just say for instance here, I had 50, 100 different products that showcase here. What I wanna do for this is even though this is gonna show 50 products, I wanna change this to trending. So what trending is actually gonna do is based on the momentum across the site, it’s going to augment the ranking of these products. It will still showcase the same products, right? But the ranking of these products is going to change. I’m gonna say within the last three days, just rank these. So I want you to change the ranking here. However, what I do want is that virtual gift card. I’m gonna pin that, yeah. And I want that to be position one every single time that somebody searches for this. So no matter what gift, so again, in your mind envision that I have 50 products here. We’re gonna say no matter what the trending is, no matter all these other products, the one product I want there every single time is in the number one position, the Luma virtual gift card. So now what I’ll do is I’ll do the same thing that you just saw before. What I’m gonna say in this case is I wanna do from the 13th, I wanna do this all the way until December 31st. And we are going to say gift search peak season, right? 2025. Once we do this, we have everything in here. We can save this at this point in time. We can also describe what the rule is doing, but I’ll go ahead and I’ll save and publish this. This is now queued up. You can see that it is scheduled. It’s beyond the other ones that I have here, but it is scheduled to go live based on what this criteria shows. We can see what this looks like. We can look at the details of it. We can say, okay, when’s this happening? Got it, perfect. November 13th to December 31st, it’s following exactly one. We also can enable this at any point in time that we want to as well.

All right, all that.

There are a few other things that I would love to kind of call out. So obviously anything with inventory, doing display, only X threshold, things that are kind of simple, easy to think about. Again, I’m gonna go through very fast here. I have a few different things. So the Strive shoulder pack, you can actually see I have only three left. This is a native functionality within Adobe Commerce. If you go into your store and configuration or catalog in your inventory, you can actually showcase it below if they’re in a certain threshold. The other thing you can do too, just to call it out, is if you are ever say with products, you are going to allow back orders on products. You can also do that too. So I have this currently set up. Let me just make sure. I think I have this on my Crown Summit bag, I do. So within my bags, basically, I have that ability to also do the same thing. If you are doing a registration or a product alert, you can also do something like that too. Where you’re basically saying like, hey, if you are looking for this product and it goes back in stock, we can notify you. So again, same thing that is a native functionality.

And obviously everything else kind of that I showcase there. So with that, let me stop screen sharing.

I’m gonna turn this back over.

Okay, I think we had one more slide to hit before Q&A. Okay, yeah, we do. Go ahead, I’ll take that. Yep, nope, I got that. So just to kind of talk about it. So key takeaways wise, as you’re going through this, like I said, doesn’t matter that we were focusing the demo portion on, again, a holiday peak season. The biggest things that are part of your sale periods and part of your peak seasons, anticipate your consumer expectations, focus on your core drivers. So we showcased a few core drivers that are through this, but you may have something slightly different. Focusing on those pillars, focusing on those areas are extremely important. And then I think, again, thinking about the execution side, I know we’re known as Adobe Commerce Execution, but your execution in general too, fulfilling the needs of your customers are extremely important. So that might be doing things like with CSRs, it could be a lot of different things that you are incorporating throughout this. So we didn’t touch too much on customer service aspects, but that’s another point that’s extremely important with like live chat, doing AI chat, those types of things as well.

All right. Awesome. All right, we have reached the Q&A portion. Give us a moment. We only have a couple of minutes, so we’re gonna go fast.

Okay.

Cool. All right, first question that we got, what can Adobe Commerce do to support our business in delivering tailored experiences at scale? Yeah, I’ll kick off with that one. So, I mean, I think we, for the most part, we looked at that already with the segmentation, that’s what we kind of focused on today. We didn’t focus heavily on AI and going through live search and going through product recommendations because we have in the past before. So we have other webinar recordings that are out there that you could take a look at. But I would say, execution at scale, it’s definitely with customer segmentation, doing that dynamic content. We did one in real time and it was super simple to add one into there. So I think, again, it’s understanding your customers, but also utilizing the AI tools that are native. So the native tools are live search and product recommendations powered through Adobe Sensei, which is that proprietary AI software. All of that is native and it’s in a functionality that you have available to you. So I would say, scale-wise, that’s a really good opportunity, especially like we were talking about adaptability.

Great, thank you. Next question, what, if any, fraud should we be looking out for? So this is always, I’ll take this one. I think this is always like an ever-changing thing. Fraudsters keep changing tactics. I think we see a lot of carding happening where people will test credit cards and hammer your gateway. So look into implementing rate limiting on your cards or additional security settings for your cards. We do see a lot of fraud on the backend where like return fraud, maybe shipping like a pretend item back or shipping something back to the wrong address. So if you do like automation in your returns process where you’re issuing a return before you get a product, you might wanna rethink that. But those are probably the two big ones that I see. I don’t know, Core, if you have anything else that you would wanna mention here. No, I think for, those are obvious points. And I think, again, hackers are just getting smarter. And here’s the other thing with it too, is we’re all excited about the AI world, but the AI world is also part of that fraud aspect. So there’s a lot of synthetic type of identity fraud aspects or different types of fraud capabilities that are out there. So utilizing a WAF, utilizing things like that, making sure you have a firewall that’s there, making sure you can block traffic at any given moment. And if you do have some sort of a fraud protection software that you’re looking for too, those are things that I would highly recommend because those things are, again, they’re just ever changing. There’s a reason why security patches are always happening. It’s because of things like that. As hackers and so forth so on get smarter, the platform has to be agnostic to that. You have to be agnostic to that.

Yes, yes, we do.

And on that note, I’m gonna go ahead and start wrapping us up. Thank you, Corey and Ogby, for a really great presentation as always. On this screen, we have a bunch of resources.

In the web links section, there’s a bunch of links there for you to grab. You’ll also see the form on the screen. Please don’t forget to fill that out if you’d like more information on payment services or Adobe Commerce Cloud.

And then of course, those couple of survey questions at the bottom of the screen. If you have a question specific to your account that we weren’t able to address today, please reach out to your Success Account Manager. And as a reminder, you will receive a recording of today’s presentation in an email from us in about 24 hours. So that’s all we have. Thank you everyone for attending. We hope everybody has a great day. We look forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming events.