Content vs commerce
Content is often mistaken for commerce. However, content is not the same as commerce and, as such, should be managed independently with great care by content experts on a headless CMS. Commerce must also be handled autonomously by experienced engineers. In this guide, you will learn about the differences between content and commerce and how Commerce Layer fits into the two.
There is no successful ecommerce business without content. Amidst all the business and transactional logic, there is a need to communicate to customers visiting a sales channel. This communication directly affects customer conversions, retention, and revenue of businesses.
Content needs to be customer-focused, more informational than commercial. This is a crucial part of ecommerce that aids customers' evaluation and the decision to purchase an item. Hence, there is a need to decouple the activities involved in content and commerce. This will ensure more flexibility, creativity, and positive revenue results.
What is content?
Content is information produced through some editorial process, intended to be distributed to presentation layers and consumed by users. It is created to pass information down to users and for these users to interact with the content. Content usually consists of some components, including the information to be shared, the purpose of the information, intended audience, form, and channel.
In ecommerce, content can include product descriptions, images, videos, customer reviews, guides, FAQs, marketing messages, and more. This content needs to be managed in various forms, using a robust and sufficient system.
Content management is the set of tools and processes that support the collection, structuring, managing, preserving, and publishing of content. Some processes in content management include: editing existing content, creating new content, sorting, content structuring, categorizing, tagging, publishing, and more. Content creators and editors can create content, modify the content, and deliver them to end-users using a content management system.
What is commerce?
Commerce is the activity of buying and selling products, especially on a large scale. This concept involves storing goods, advertising, communication, exchanging money for goods and services, transportation, insurance, banking, customer relationships management, and more. Commerce covers all the activities that occur to transport a good/service from production to consumption.
After several years of evolution, ecommerce was introduced to digitalize commerce when the internet was opened to the public in 1991. This became a game-changer and has brought evolution to the modern commerce industry. There are different types of commerce. Merchants can utilize any business model, including Business-to-business (B2B), Business-to-consumer (B2C), Business-to-administration (B2A), Consumer-to-business (C2B), Consumer-to-consumer (C2C), or Consumer-to-administration (C2A) to structure their business.
Content is not equal to commerce
Content is not the same as commerce and, as such, should be treated differently. It is one delicate component of ecommerce that must be handled independently with great care by content experts on a headless CMS. Content is information in different formats, while commerce is the logic that handles other buying/selling aspects of commerce (prices, orders, inventory, shipping, promotions, etc.)
Commerce must be handled autonomously, secured, and made flexible by experienced engineers. Decoupling content and commerce makes it easier for both teams of experts to work independently and more efficiently. This will result in more flexibility and a better developer experience.
Commerce Layer is not a "content" layer
Commerce Layer does not provide a collaborative environment to create and modify digital content. It manages the transactional part of a sales channel and allows users to integrate with any CMS of their choice. This will enable businesses to utilize any content model, produce a better customer experience, outstand competition, and unleash creativity.
Commerce Layer is CMS agnostic. Users can integrate with best-of-breed CMS easily. Content managers can now work in their preferred choice of headless CMS. Developers can also build with any stack in their most preferred programming language and utilize Commerce Layer commerce APIs. This way, businesses can create raw content, reuse it on any channel, and transform any boring catalog into rich content that results in more conversions and revenue.