Introduction to Contentful: Everything You Need to Know
eCommerce platforms are tasked with automating and managing a lot of services, from front-end presentation and order processing to product management and payment processing. All of it needs to be managed seamlessly for the kind of customer service that brings consumers back, over and over again. While eCommerce managers are focusing on these – albeit critical tasks – requirements like content management often take a back seat.
That’s why some of the biggest players in the game, from Magento to Salesforce Commerce Cloud, are configured to help with the product management and processing, but not necessarily the creation of content pages, product content, and custom page templates. To access this kind of content support, typically, an unreliable third-party extension would need to be accessed, which fails to live up to the functionality of a tool like SAP CX.
Say Hello to Headless eCommerce
Naturally, these retailers need better options, which is why headless eCommerce has arrived as a serious option for those looking to improve content management. What does headless CMS do for retailers? It allows for more flexible and powerful content management systems that are leveraged to build content made available via API. With headless CMS, the retailer can create pages or manage different kinds of content that are made available and requested through another system.
Contentful
One example of a headless CMS available today includes Contentful. Contentful is used to do everything from create templates and build landing pages, to connecting to something like Netlify to deploy the code. The feature-rich, headless CMS solution comes with a cloud-based, API-first CMS solution that helps retailers manage their content in dynamic ways. Designed to be easy to use and navigate, Contentful is straightforward for end-users, while being intuitive for back-end development.
Just to outline how popular Contentful has become, big-name users now include: Nike, WeWork, and Spotify.
Plus, as part of the headless eCommerce stack, Contentful is the embodiment of the presentation layer, acting as a cloud-based, centralized hub for all content management and production. This can include everything from product descriptions and navigation blocks to assets and PLP content blocks. Data would be pulled into Contentful, allowing admin users to build pages and manage content across different pages. It’s the all-in-one solution.
So, with all of these features, which platforms integrate with Contentful?
- Shopify/Shopify Plus
- Elastic Path
- Commerce Tools
- Commerce Layer
- Magento
- BigCommerce
Why Should Retailers Use Contentful?
Contentful comes with a slew of benefits for retailers, but some of the biggest advantages of this system include:
- Development savings
- Reduced launch times
- Boutique-level, smaller projects can be prototyped
- Reduced testing time
- Development teams can use whatever tools and frameworks they want
- Ease of creating flexible and consistent brand experiences
- All content is contained, updated, and distributed through a central hub
- Only authorized personnel can access the data
- Allows for commerce functionality and management of recommendations and overlays
Contentful will surely revolutionize the eCommerce industry moving forward. With benefits like reduced launch times and development savings, Contentful will become a hot topic on our platform moving forward. Stay tuned for updates.
