The pandemic is also a significant factor for the sudden growth of this industry. According to industry experts, the pandemic has accelerated online shopping by as much as five years. This has led retailers worldwide to sell online – scaling and expanding their businesses to reach new markets and serve customers from across the globe.

But, as the industry is exploding, there are specific challenges retailers must contend with, such as:  

• Building customer loyalty and improving user experience     
• Handling data and security breaches  
• Dealing with fierce competition, price hikes, and economic uncertainty  
• Inefficient policies for returns, refunds, and order fulfillment  
• Lack of SEO knowledge for drawing relevant traffic to the online store  
• Converting shoppers into paying customers   

While many eCommerce platforms are available in the market, there are a handful of reasons why Magento has been the most popular and how adopting it can help solve the above challenges. But before we dive deep into the unique features and values of Magento, let us have a quick understanding of the platform itself.  

What is Magento?  

Magento is one of the most widely used eCommerce platforms for building customized websites and shopping portals. It helps enterprise store owners manage high sales and customer volume and handle heavy website traffic while offering a high conversion rate. 

The platform offers a high degree of customization and exceptional flexibility with advanced features such as various tools for managing an XML website, CMS for static pages, rewriting URLs, integrated image optimization, the grouping of products, multi-store facilities, email list, and SEO related modules. Moreover, it has a user-friendly interface with responsive design, multiple deployment choices, and seamless integration with third-party modules, which aid in creating an enjoyable shopping experience for users.

Headless Commerce- The digital differentiator  

Modern shoppers are empowered by technology and look for seamless digital shopping experiences tailored to their specific needs and interests. In addition, they expect loyalty rewards, same-day delivery, free shipping, social engagement, and more. This shift in consumer behavior has created a demand for novel approaches in Magento.  

Headless commerce decouples the front-end of the eCommerce store from its backend. This means the content presentation layer is separated from the functional and business logic layer, allowing eCommerce companies to deploy new customer experiences across various channels. Headless commerce is agile, flexible, and customizable and helps in creating unique and engaging shopping experiences.

Adobe Commerce & Adobe Commerce Cloud   

Adobe Commerce is an eCommerce product developed and maintained by Adobe and powered by Magento. It allows businesses to create engaging and unique shopping experiences with striking features for store fulfillment, page builder, marketplace, user experience, product recommendations, customer segmentation, personalization, etc. It offers an easy-to-use interface to create and launch content and provide a personalized shopping experience without the support of a developer. It can serve both B2B and B2C customers within a single platform and easily integrates with existing backend systems. It also offers numerous extensions and themes to customize your eCommerce storefront. Additionally, its business intelligence feature allows you to track and monitor your data and turn the insights into striking visualizations for better decision-making.  

Adobe Commerce Cloud is an automated Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) built on a redundant AWS-based cloud hosting platform. It is a highly scalable and customizable solution including all the Magento Commerce on-premise features. 

Top Reasons for Choosing Magento for eCommerce  

If you’re looking for a new e-commerce website, the first thing you need to decide is whether you’ll use a pre-made plug-and-play website or a custom solution. There are ready-to-use e-commerce solutions available such as Shopify and WooCommerce, that offer numerous advantages, but they do not fit the needs of every business. Custom e-commerce solutions, on the other hand, require a more significant time investment but offer better scalability, flexibility, and control. Here are some unique features and functionalities of Magento that make it stand out from the rest of the available solutions for eCommerce development. 

Open Source  

Magento is an open-source platform that gives the developers and site owners access to the source code, thereby offering complete flexibility and freedom to customize the code to fit specific business requirements. In addition, the Magento Open Source is free and adaptable, so all that the developers need is some extra time and server space to build the website. With Magento Open Source, you can create your site exactly as you envisioned if you have the right technical skills. It also gives you control over the logic flow and design on each site page and access to a library of modules to develop new features and functionalities for your Magento store.  

Highly scalable  

Magento is a scalable solution, making it suitable for both small and large businesses. It can handle growth and scale accordingly. If you are a new business, you can start with a relatively basic installation and upgrade features with the proper hardware and configuration as your business grows. For instance, if your site traffic increases suddenly, you can easily manage the load by adding more backup servers. This will save your online store from crashing and improve page loading, thereby saving a lot of business for your retail store.  

One site set up for multiple stores  

Whether you have a specific product catalog that serves multiple websites or has more than one brand on the same website, you can use Magento to maintain all your products, orders, and settings in a single site setup. It supports multiple store setups from the same backend, which allows you to manage multiple stores from the same admin dashboard. The inventory and order management feature of Magento will enable businesses with various brands, sites, stores, and warehouses to create seamless cross-channel experiences. It also allows developers to extend and expand the platform to new product categories and customize it based on their brand and target market, saving a lot of money, effort, and time for retail players.  

Third-party integrations  

Magento allows you to integrate with various third-party services such as web applications, payment gateways, shipping, transportation and order tracking systems, and databases. Some of the popular integrations used by retail stores include PayPal, eBay, Google Shopping, MailChimp, QuickBooks, etc. It also offers in-built Google tools such as Google Analytics, Google Base, and Google Checkout to help you monitor site traffic, analyze website performance, and stay well-informed of the latest trends in Magento eCommerce.  

Product Recommendations  

Product recommendations are a great marketing tool to improve customer engagement, boost conversions, and increase revenue. Powered by Adobe Sensei, Magento’s product recommendation uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms to analyze visitor data and suggest relevant products. These recommendations appear on the storefront in the form of “Similar Products” and “Customers who viewed this also viewed” and create highly relevant and personalized shopping experiences.  

Live Search feature  

Magento also offers an AI-powered tool for intelligent and fast live searches. Also powered by Adobe Sensei, this tool uses real-time data to deliver automated personalized search results for shoppers to find what they want quickly. It also offers a flexible developer framework that eliminates tedious merchant tasks and provides search results with accuracy and speed.  

Flexible content and extensions  

One of the main reasons for Magento’s popularity amongst developers is its flexibility in content systems and extensions, allowing them to develop the site the way they want. It provides you with a flexible content management system to manage changes in content based on language, culture, laws, currency, etc., for global markets and customize your store for user-friendliness. Moreover, it also allows you to customize your online store with high-quality add-ons, extensions, modules, plugins, and apps designed to meet specific business needs. Adding these extensions helps enhance your site, drive more traffic, boost conversion and sales, report and analytics, and optimize the customer experience. Both free and paid extensions are available, which you can leverage based on your requirements and budget.  

SEO friendly  

Magento comes with in-built SEO features that help your eCommerce store rank in the search engines and reach your target customers easily. It includes an SEO-friendly URL structure, meta tags and descriptions for products, categories, and content pages, auto-generated sitemaps, positioning layer, and popular search terms, which improve the on-page SEO of your website.  

Mobile friendly  

As per a recent report, three out of four consumers prefer buying from their smartphones because it saves time. Catering to mobile-savvy customers is therefore inevitable for the success of your eCommerce business. Magento supports shopping experiences on mobile devices with pre-integrated HTML5 technology. In addition, it offers device-specific media capabilities, user-friendly search and results, display, pinch, multi-touch, scaling images, zoom, and easy swipe options for product images. All these features help in quickly creating a storefront optimized for a seamless mobile shopping experience.  

Security features  

Magento provides advanced security features to protect your eCommerce store from unexpected breaches and site attacks. It uses CAPTCHA and PCI Data Security for protection, which makes the site difficult to hack. As a result, it is more secure for both customers and sellers than sites built using Core PHP or WordPress.  

Multi-lingual support  

Businesses and merchants catering to multiple markets across the globe should offer their website in various languages to make it easily accessible to their customer base. Magento allows you to build multi-lingual sites, making it the go-to platform for businesses wanting to expand to new markets. Consequently, it also supports multi-currency transactions, making it ideal for building your eCommerce store.  

Magento is a sure-shot option for companies looking to implement many distinctive features to their online store. The scalability and customization capacity of Magento makes it stand out from the plug-and-play options available. Moreover, all these powerful features and benefits play a huge role in improving your eCommerce business processes which will, in turn, result in better ROI. 

Wrapping Up  

Apart from those discussed here, other valuable features for order management, customer service, analytics and reporting, product browsing, checkout, payment and shipping, and marketing and promotions play a crucial role in improving your eCommerce business. The quick load time, improved shopping experience, high-level technical architecture, and better testing and reporting capabilities make Magento a powerhouse for eCommerce. 

At Experion, we have a team of Magento certified experts offering Magento design, development, maintenance, and support services. Our Magento portfolio includes e-commerce consulting/development, architecture design, Magento migration, re-platforming, roadmap support, usability/UI re-engineering, and headless eCommerce. 

To know more about our Magento services or to get help with building a Magento store for your business, write to us at sales@blackrockdxb.com. 

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The maritime industry has been an unhurried adopter of digital transformation – with digital solutions being deployed in bits and pieces, it is fair to say that the industry has been treading digital waters at quite a slow pace. However, with most players in the industry still following legacy systems and processes, it is essential to understand the changes digital transformation can bring to the sector.   

Digital solutions and advanced automation are slowly becoming the go-to for businesses to enhance operational efficiency and improve their competitive stance. However, digital transformation is not just about using advanced technologies but about changing the business’s adaptability, cultural mindset, and process efficiency. It is about transforming the people, processes, and tools at the core.   

Transforming Legacy Processes of the Maritime Sector   

The maritime industry is struggling to stay afloat due to restricted profit margins and freight rates. It is facing challenges in meeting the immediate delivery demands of customers due to manual activities, cumbersome documentation, and complex protocols. Most of their time and investments go into training and deploying their staff to handle shipments and cargo manually. Moreover, the manual, unplanned slot allocation process on a vessel leads to revenue losses and inefficiencies in capacity management.   

The shipping industry’s future will be characterized by real-time vessel tracking, cargo management, unmanned digital voyages, intelligent capacity management, dynamic freight, digital documentation, and end-to-end port management, thanks to advanced digital technologies such as big data IoT augmented reality, cloud, etc. These technologies and digital strategies will replace the slow, time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone paper-based methods, which will result in secure, sustainable operations and improved speed and efficiency of processes.   

The Impacts of Digital Technologies Across Touchpoints   

Digital transformation will play a significant role in bringing the distributed pieces of maritime logistics under one cohesive umbrella. Connected IoT devices, big data analytics, automation, and AI are gradually becoming a reality in the industry, leading to transparency and visibility in end-to-end supply chain processes and ensuring profits.   

IoT: Enhances fleet operations and eliminates human errors 

Connected IoT devices and onboard sensors will simplify the transmission of information from the ship to the shore and substantially improve fleet and ship operations. Connected IoT will fast-track the collection of critical data, which can be used along with analytics to derive useful insights, prevent costly errors, and thereby improve efficiency.  

Sensor technology will make it convenient for ship owners to get real-time information about their vessels without visiting remote locations. In addition, onboard sensors will improve the maintenance cycles of the ships with condition-based monitoring, which will notify ship owners when a piece of equipment requires maintenance. This will benefit all the aspects of operations by optimizing maintenance, reducing service costs, enhancing route planning and cargo handling, and saving fuel consumption.   

Autonomous vehicles powered by IoT have emerged in the automotive and airline sectors, and the maritime industry will soon widely adopt them. Implementing autonomous, crewless vessels will mitigate the excessive costs of training and deploying skilled labor and drastically reduce difficulties caused due to manual errors. The remote and autonomous ships will change the maritime industry’s functions by eliminating the dependencies on manual resources and improving cost efficiency, accuracy, and speed.  

A digitally connected supply chain with end-to-end logistics and port management will improve communication with terminals, freight stations, and intermodal companies and enable optimized and effective cost structures for the shipping company, leading to smooth operations and cargo movement.   

These emerging technologies will create an interconnected digital ecosystem, eliminating the probability of manual errors, lowering the risks associated with the non-traceability of shipments and cargo, and reducing inefficiencies in the maritime industry.   

 
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning: Improves data analysis and decision-making   

With more data being collected from various sources, big data analytics is widely used across industries to analyze the data, deduce correlations, and optimize operations. For example, in the maritime sector, big data analytics will allow marine operators to predict and infer logical allocation of slots while making the most use of available capacity and space and minimizing losses.   

Artificial intelligence and machine learning can offer the shipping and maritime sector a competitive edge and lead to effective vessel maintenance, voyage planning, and optimized business processes. AI-based predictions and diagnostics will allow the crew and shipmasters to monitor and predict their vessels’ movements, maneuvers, and positions, leading to real-time decision-making in ship management, situational awareness, and safety.   

Blockchain Technology: Enables secure transactions  

Transactions in the maritime sector rely heavily on paper documents such as bills of lading, sales agreements, customs clearance documents, letters of credit, etc. These documents pass through a chain of approvals and workflows and are prone to delays, fraud, and human errors.   

Blockchain technology can make the entire process paperless and tamper-proof. As a result, stakeholders can use private and public keys to communicate safely, transfer documents, carry out payments, and perform transactions fully transparently. Moreover, blockchain can mitigate the risk of internal fraud by eliminating central parties and enabling secure peer-to-peer communication through cryptography. This will provide better security for data transmission and storage and allow updating information in real-time.  

The Cyber Security Threat  

The global supply chain, terminals, and seaports are critically interlinked infrastructures and are most subject to cyberattacks. A cyber-attack on a single terminal can spread through the entire supply chain and impact many other players. The greater the number of connected devices, sensors, systems, and agents in the smart ports, the higher the cyber risks.   

Hence, maritime companies, terminals, and ports have started investing heavily in cybersecurity. Maritime players must conduct regular operating system updates, secure satellite connections and information sharing, invest in employee education programs, use stronger passwords, and conduct regular resilience exercises to prevent cyberattacks. 

Final words   

The digital transformation wave will undoubtedly take the maritime sector towards the port of quality and efficiency. Creating a holistic digital ecosystem with sophisticated digital tools, adaptable people, and automated processes will need technology and digital transformation service providers.   

Black Rock IT Solutions has in-depth domain expertise and experience in delivering Maritime digital solutions across various sector areas. Being a technology service provider, our experts have helped envision solutions for the Maritime world and helped customers solve problems and achieve their most important goals effectively.   

To learn more about our offerings and explore potential growth opportunities, get in touch with us at sales@blackrockdxb.com.   

The post Digitalization in the Shipping & Maritime Industry appeared first on Black Rock IT Solutions – Software Product Engineering Services.

The modern customer does everything virtually and has started to see the world differently. Therefore, retailers must develop unparalleled innovations to provide unmatchable online shopping experiences that meet customer expectations and changing demands.  

Emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data Analytics & Augmented and Virtual Reality have paved the way for digital transformation solutions in the retail industry for years to come. This article will take you through the top technologies and trends that are transforming the retail industry and helping businesses to stay afloat in the current circumstance. 

1. Omnichannel customer engagement  

Omnichannel customer engagement goes beyond making physical stores’ products available online. It is about engaging customers on new online channels such as social media, marketplaces, brick-and-mortar stores, and offering a frictionless shopping experience across various touchpoints. According to a study by eMarketer, cashier-less checkouts, curbside pickups, and streamlined digital experiences contributed to increased shopping frequency and improved sales in 2020. Therefore, omnichannel customer engagement is vital to interacting with customers and providing a consistent shopping experience across channels. Retailers must synchronize various channels such as social media, phone calls, online searches, chats, and physical stores, ensuring customers interact with the business at various points and are provided a personalized experience on each of them.  

2. Data Analytics to track customer behavior  

It is essential to track the customers’ behavior and activities across all channels to create a more intuitive shopping experience for them. Data Analytics allows retailers to monitor the customers’ in-store and online store activities. It gives insights into various metrics such as the number of visits to their store per day, new and returning customers, and the success of their marketing initiatives. These insights allow retailers to make more informed decisions and better engage their customers.  

3. Contactless payments and seamless checkouts  

The need of the hour for retailers is to provide a frictionless customer experience while keeping human touch as limited as possible. Cashier-less checkout technologies and contactless payments are in high demand due to the security, speed, and convenience they offer. Touch-free technology provides a convenient retail experience by scanning each item that a customer picks up using an app and sensors and automatically charging them for the things they have picked. Contactless checkouts will flourish in the retail sector, and retailers are working closely with FinTech companies to build quick and efficient contactless payment models.  

4. Demand forecasting with Machine Learning  

There has been a vast difference in customer demand due to the pandemic. As a result, it has become a significant challenge for retailers to understand and predict customer demand and take necessary actions to meet the shifts in the market and stay on top of the industry. Data and Machine Learning can make forecasting customer demand more accurate while improving inventory management and supply chain management. Machine Learning-based demand forecasting lowers logistics and warehouse expenses, prevents overstocking, and supports sustainable production and consumption.  

5. Hyper-automation with Artificial Intelligence  

Speed, agility, and efficiency are the critical factors that determine the success of a business. Artificial Intelligence-led automation makes the retail processes more cost-effective and the shopping experience more convenient for customers. AI systems can assist the customers by directing them to the store’s exact location and suggesting related items that might interest them. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) enhances inventory management and distribution and warehouse management processes. It eliminates repetitive daily tasks that do not provide any additional value and improves service quality and compliance across the retail value chain. Soon, driverless vehicles and drones will also play a vital role in retail transformation.  

6. Immersive shopping experience with AR and VR  

AR and VR enable retailers to make shopping more powerful and experience-driven. According to a recent study, by 2025, the AR and VR market will reach 1.1 billion globally. Since customers now shop more online than in brick-and-mortar stores, it is vital to give them a seamless ‘try-on’ experience to help them make quicker and better decisions. With Augmented Reality, customers can use their smartphone to bring products to life and see how they will look on themselves or in their homes. Companies like Sephora, IKEA, and Lego use AR and VR to make digital shopping a lot exciting and personalized. In addition, retailers can use experiential marketing and virtual fitting rooms to reduce their operating costs while providing safe and engaging experiences to their customers.  

The future of retail  

The adoption of emerging technologies has saved the retail industry from drowning and help in tackling the disruptions caused by the pandemic. As customers continue to shop and work online, these technologies show no signs of slowing down anytime soon.  

Black Rock IT Solutions is helping retail businesses in adopting new technologies to redefine their processes and offer their customers a safe and immersive shopping experience. We are digital architects, domain practitioners, and technology experts working towards fostering a digital retail world. To know more about our services and offerings and discuss potential growth opportunities, get in touch with us. 

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