Setting up an online store is relatively easy – there are plenty of ecommerce platforms that make it possible to launch an online retail business in a short time. Marketers have unlimited options to choose from – they can either select a cloud-based solution by paying a monthly or annual fee or they can choose from a wide range of open-source platforms that provide the capability to set up a store initially and use additional capabilities by paying for plugins.

However, when it comes to managing content, most ecommerce systems have their limitations. When authoring a content-based section of an ecommerce platform, either the content authoring is not easy or there is no availability of the right content authoring tools.

How has digital marketing changed the landscape?

Traditional marketing was limited to hoardings, pamphlets, brochures, and ads on television and radio. Digital marketing enables business to go global and reach a wider audience by removing the barriers of traditional media. Social media is one of the strongest contenders in this list due to its reach and ease of use. While audiences earlier had no option but to go to the physical stores for their shopping needs, today they can make a purchase from the comfort of their homes.

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Why content has become important?

Every customer begins his purchase journey by searching about the product and looking for favorable reviews. By placing the right content at the right place, brands can enable customers to choose their product and make their purchase decisions with confidence. Price is the first thing a customer looks for when making a purchase. However, it keeps low precedence in comparison to product details. Customers look for reviews, ratings, and descriptions before buying a product. Most of us would buy a product only after we are satisfied with the information available about it. Big retail online stores like Amazon, Ebay are good examples of commerce stores emphasizing content to bring more and more customers.

Content authoring for ecommerce platforms

When it comes to ease of content authoring, every ecommerce platform has its strengths and limitations. Some systems are good with UI for content authoring while others are good at authoring options. For any content author, the key consideration is the ease of writing content in the best possible way. Unfortunately, this problem still has not been resolved by such platforms. On the flip side, content management systems are managing content easily with the help of good WYSIWYG editors. However, the CMS is not good for managing the product information data. In a way, both are opposed to each other.

Why Drupal?

Drupal is one of the most famous content management system to date. It has a wide community of contributors who are actively working on improving it and creating different extensions and modules to extend its core functionality. With the launch of Drupal 8 in 2015, it has given the following advantages over its prior version:

• In-context editing with previews at the same time of authoring.
• Improved and comprehensive content modelling.
• Enhanced administrative interface.
• Out of the box multilingual support.
• Introduction of configuration management for straightforward movement of modification amongst environments.
• Mobile-first, responsive, HTML5 output.
• REST-first native web services.

It's not that the above mentioned points were not there in earlier versions, however, they were already there and most of the things were doing pretty good. Drupal released its improved REST API layer as an out of the box solution to make Drupal a system which is ready to be decoupled in several ways.

We know that Drupal's content authoring system may not be as brilliant as WordPress. However, it has some more advantages over its competitors. The main objective of demonstrating content in Drupal is working out the structure that will end up being the system for content authoring and present content in the best possible way. We additionally need to make a model that backings the usefulness required in the site. While achieving this, we need to diminish the intricacy of a content model.

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Enrich ecommerce by Drupal's authoring

There could be multiple ways to make ecommerce content more effective. One of the most effective ways is to combine a CMS with an ecommerce platform and let each of these systems manage their responsibilities separately.

CMS would be taking care of content management and ecommerce would be taking care of product information management and commerce-related operations.

Most of the current generation ecommerce systems expose the information via webhooks, REST APIs or SOAP operations and such solution is only possible when in use ecommerce platform does support with WebAPIs.

Drupal 8 has good inbuilt support for the REST APIs and can either consume ecommerce information being exposed to a content model locally and let content authors manage it effectively via Drupal's authoring interface. In the same way, the Drupal can expose its content via REST APIs and in turn, a commerce platform can use it for the rendering in their eco-system.

There is an interesting use-case we have delivered using the integration of one well-known E-commerce Platform Elastic Path & Drupal 8, to know more about it please refer to the following link, E-commerce Platform Elastic Path & Drupal 8.

Conclusion

It's all about one major concern related to ecommerce platforms that is their struggle managing content-rich pages. However, Drupal 8's great authoring capabilities and intuitive interface, it seems to be mitigating to some extent. Drupal's integral support of content creation and content expose/consumption via REST services can definitely help multiple ecommerce platforms to improve their presence over the web.

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Over the past 20 years, we have completed thousands of digital projects globally. We have one of the largest and deepest multi-solutions digital consulting teams in the world. Our Commerce Martech services can help you deliver effective multichannel commerce campaigns that increase sales. We can help you deploy chatbots to serve as a concierge for your customers, providing them with a high touch personalized shopping experience and seamless low-cost customer journey. Talk to our team of Digital Commerce Experts today.

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