At the start of 2024, I was very excited to join the Umbraco Commerce Advisory Board. The team is made up of a range of roles, from technical enthusiasts to commercial and strategic decision-makers.
I am not a developer, but I have worked on Umbraco projects since Umbraco 6. I’ve always enjoyed sitting with developers, asking lots of questions, and understanding the possibilities of what can be achieved with Umbraco.
As an advisory board, we were tasked with providing ideas, viewpoints, and technical feedback to help position Umbraco Commerce in the fast-moving commerce and DX landscape.
This blog post shares some of my learnings from this year and provides my thoughts on use cases for Umbraco Commerce.
What is Umbraco Commerce?
In short, Umbraco Commerce does what it says on the tin.
It's an add-on Umbraco product that allows you to sell products on your Umbraco website. It started life as Vendr, a licensed Umbraco package expertly crafted by Matt and Lucy Brailsford. We used it on several projects that needed to sell online and always enjoyed working with it.
I was overjoyed when Umbraco acquired it in April 2023. This meant that the product would only get better and add new innovative features.
What are the key features and benefits of Umbraco Commerce?
Umbraco Commerce integrates seamlessly with the Umbraco CMS, providing a unified platform for managing both content and commerce. The key features and benefits include:
Features
-
Flexible Product Management: Easily create, manage, and categorise products, including variants, attributes, and options.
-
Robust Checkout Process: A smooth and secure checkout experience with customisable options and integrations with popular payment gateways.
-
Order Management: Track orders, manage returns, and process refunds efficiently.
-
Marketing and Promotions: Create targeted promotions, discounts, and loyalty programs to drive sales.
-
Inventory Management: Keep track of stock levels, manage low-stock alerts, and automate reorder processes.
-
Multilingual and Multi-Currency Support: Sell products in multiple languages and currencies to reach a global audience.
-
Extensibility: Customise and extend Umbraco Commerce with the suite of APIs that are available.
Benefits
-
Flexibility and Customisation: Tailor the platform to your specific needs and brand identity.
-
Scalability: Easily handle growing customer demand and expand your online store.
-
Cost-Effective: Benefit from a cost-effective solution compared to proprietary e-commerce platforms. The annual licence is £2,028 (correct at the time of publishing on 25th September 2024), and no additional fees are taken per order from the platform.
-
Integration with Umbraco CMS: Enjoy the benefits of a unified content management and commerce platform.
The use case for Umbraco Commerce
Having worked across many commerce projects, I have experience with Adobe Commerce (Magento), BigCommerce and Shopify, to name a few. This use case is based on my experience and opinions of the other commerce solutions and why I believe Umbraco has a unique position in the marketplace.
Umbraco Commerce is not trying to compete with the large SaaS platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce. Shopify is taking over the commerce world with the speed of innovation. Where I've seen these platforms fall down is when a project requirement does not fit the SaaS features of the platform i.e. an integration with an internal business system. This usually results in a bespoke middleware solution meaning the customer must pay the SaaS licence fees and see additional costs to host and maintain the middleware.
Likewise, Umbraco Commerce is not competing with the likes of Adobe Commerce and other on premise platforms. These are excellent platforms when it comes to pure commerce and complex integrations with business systems. These platforms are brilliant when your commerce website is made up of product lister pages, product detail pages and a bespoke checkout process. They are not content management systems and cannot manage non product content as well as more traditional CMS platforms.
Taking the above two points into consideration, this is where I believe Umbraco Commerce has a unique marketplace positioning.
Umbraco has a suite of APIs, making the platform extendable to any business integration without the need for middleware. Your business systems can integrate directly with the core Umbraco CMS, and there are no extra hosting and maintenance costs for middleware.
When it comes to managing content, this is what Umbraco does best. You can create bespoke content pages to accompany your commerce functionality. Umbraco has content document types that can be created to match any design. Let your designers create beautiful and engaging experiences, and know that Umbraco can surface these as content-managed aspects of your website.
If you have multiple content editors, Umbraco really excels. Umbraco Workflow allows you to create granular permissions for content editors, restricting content to specific sections and applying permissions per role. For example, you may have a team of content editors who are allowed to create content on the website, but this requires moderation and approval before it is published. This is all available out of the box with Umbraco Workflow.
To be fair to the other platforms I have detailed, Umbraco Commerce does have downsides too. The key one is the wider commerce ecosystem. Umbraco Commerce does not have the native and out-of-the-box integrations that the others do, i.e. merchandising and searchandising tools. However, this is an area that is being built out by Umbraco HQ.
Summary
Umbraco Commerce is my choice for clients who want to sell online, have key business integrations and want to have the flexibility and freedom to create stunning product and content pages.
For brands where the content and brand story is as important as the product, Umbraco Commerce is the perfect solution.
To discuss Umbraco Commerce and whether this solution will fit your business needs, book a meeting with me or get in touch.
