The world of Adobe retail just got a lot bigger: The tech giant unleashed a slew of announcements on Tuesday, including Magento support for Amazon sales in the United Kingdom, Microsoft’s Azure cloud service and new AI-fueled personalized product recommendations.
Magento, which already supported Amazon sales in the U.S., recently decided to take this integration across the pond. The company unveiled the feature at MagentoLive Europe 2019, its e-commerce and retail-focused conference in Amsterdam, on Tuesday.
With the new channel in the U.K., brands and other sellers can manage their Amazon sales from their Magento Admin dashboard. The integration means that the system can automatically synchronize product catalogs, inventories and orders, and track information across Amazon and Magento. Clients can also see Amazon orders and customer accounts in one sales order table.
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Generally speaking, Magento’s ramp up has become a key ingredient in Adobe’s Commerce Cloud overall offering, and the evolution has been swift. Once owned by eBay, the start-up made a name for itself by targeting small to mid-sized businesses. It officially became part of Adobe last year and has since been fashioned into one of the tech giant’s major offerings for retailers.
Already Magento has gained traction across a range of industries, including fashion and luxury goods, among others, Peter Sheldon, Adobe’s senior director of commerce strategy, told WWD.
“More than a third of our install base is that luxury goods, fashion apparel, CPG [consumer packaged goods] sectors, so, it is a very significant part of our install base,” he said.
Magento Commerce will also go beyond Amazon Web Services for cloud support, extending it to Microsoft Azure, to give clients some choices in cloud services. The early access program kicks off in 2020.
And naturally, Adobe has been deepening Magento’s integration with Adobe Stock — it is, after all, not just a retail tech player, but also a dominant provider of software and cloud services for photographers, illustrators, video editors and other creative professionals.
Adobe is proud of the fact that the work tying Magento and Adobe Stock together was built exclusively by Magento’s developer community, a group of more than 300,000 enthusiastic users and fans. They effectively act as a volunteer brigade, fleshing out the company’s research and development on their own time.
Another intriguing update is the company’s new AI-powered product recommendations feature.
Recommendations aren’t new to Adobe’s Commerce Cloud, but previous versions have been more of a manual affair, with the client setting up the rules.
“The problem is that there’s a lot of manual overhead to make those wheels work effectively and to continue to stay on top of optimizing. And so what we’ve done here is rewritten this entire feature to be powered by Adobe’s artificial intelligence engine, Sensei,” Sheldon explained. “So now we tag the customer’s site with the same tagging technology that we use for Adobe Target and Adobe analytics, [which] gathers a huge amount of data, in terms of the behavioral patterns of what the end shopper is doing on our merchant sites.
“Then that feeds into Sensei, and what we get is highly personalized product recommendations that can be applied across the site — on the product detail pages, on the category landing pages, on the home pages,” he said, adding that it can be highly configured, instantaneous and contextual, based on inventory and pricing levels.
According to Sheldon, personalized recommendations drive much higher conversion rates or sales — by as much as 30 to 35 percent.
This new version of personalized recommendations will be available starting in January. And it’s just the start of Adobe’s AI and machine learning offensive, he teased, calling the company’s AI roadmap “aggressive.”