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In a rapidly evolving environment with technology and content demands existing in a multi-channel—and devices—world, Marketers in ecommerce face many unique hurdles that are both challenging and exciting—but can be very stressful.

In conversations in the last few years with prospects, most retail organizations believe they lag behind their competitors when it comes to marketing performance and managing the right CMS technology (web content management system). We often see these three common problems that online retailers face today:

1. Large number of SKUs. The number of SKUs and configurations retailers manage can easily reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of options.
2. Breakneck speed promotions. Working at a breakneck speed with weekly sales, promos, and campaigns in between major sales events like Black Friday.
3. Juggling different content. Handling multiple, unique sales events and projects, all with varying content, different phases and timelines.

Traditional CMS in Retail

In a traditional CMS, you have to set up many individual installations and, they are all siloed on their own database/infrastructure. Migrating content and pages from one instance to another is often a manual process, or you’ve maybe spent the time and money to automate it with scripts and other technologies that have to be constantly maintained.

Headless CMS in Retail

With Headless CMS, all of your company’s content is stored centrally. You set up one installation for content and then different "view" for each project.

Unfortunately, most Headless CMS solutions have only two “views” (APIs) to access content – preview and production.

“Preview” will deliver all content for all projects in the same view whether it’s ready for testing, and regardless of whether the content is relevant to this week’s or next week’s project. “Production” will show all live content, regardless of where you want it to appear. This can make it a nightmare to properly test and stage content each week.

For example, every week you may have sales, ads, and related content to set up and stage. test next week’s promotions if in the same view, you also saw the discounts queued for the week after and some of the marketing content for the upcoming Black Friday sales event.

The Solution – Project Spaces with SampleSite

SampleSite solves this by supporting as many project spaces as needed. You can create a project space for each individual event and deliver only the relevant content.

For example, you may have three discounts to set up: one for next week, one for the week after, and a third that spans both weeks. A CMS solution like SampleSite lets businesses create a project view for each testing before the promotions even begin.

An added advantage to this approach is that you can easily update the discount and roll it out to both weeks when you need to change it.

To understand and, more importantly, value the differences between traditional, decoupled and headless CMS platforms, you first have to let go of the idea that content management systems (CMS) are purely a marketing-focused tool. Managing the production, design and distribution of content has become a major function of most marketing departments. The marketing team has grown used to doing it all and being enabled to design and deploy a web page within their team. This is the case for a traditional CMS deployment and within large organizations the lack of governance in this model can prove troublesome.

Traditional or "Coupled" CMS

There are clearly pros to doing it alone, but that ability has come with some rather serious drawbacks. For starters, pages need to conform to the database structure they sit atop. By extension, content needs to conform as well. Before you know it, content is being forced into structures that aren’t friendly, intuitive and may not perform to expectations. For all of the benefits of the WYSIWYG editor of the traditional CMS, it can only take an organization so far.

Keep in mind that the traditional model was established for websites and was able to modify with responsive themes to adequately manage mobile, but there’s a world of change coming that won’t be satisfied with these systems. Also, traditional systems require components beyond the database, creating challenges for management and scale.

Decoupled CMS

Demands for greater flexibility and scale have led to the concept of a decoupled CMS. In this world, marketers focus on creating content, and developers focus on the presentation of the content in the front-end. With this approach, the style and presentation of the content is not stored within the content, giving greater flexibility. Marketers do what they’re good at (content), and developers do what they know and love (coding).

The downside to a decoupled approach is that the moment a front-end is chosen, the limitations of that choice are then baked into the solution. So while you’ve solved some of the limitations of the traditional approach, you haven’t solved all of them. You’re still in a world that’s tightly coupled to the past.

This decoupled model, like the traditional model, hits its limitations when content needs to move quickly to cross-platform use cases.

Headless CMS or API-First CMS

The need to have systems with even greater flexibility both now and into the future has given rise to another option headless CMS. There is some overlap with decoupled CMS in the sense that it allows for healthy separation between marketing and development needs. However, a truly headless model allows for the limits imposed by any coupled front-end to be thrown out . You end up with centralized model for content but a flexible and better-performing model for where content can go.

This is because the Application Program Interface (API) approach of a headless CMS allows content creation to forever remain separate and distinct. Born in tandem with the explosion of API growth and the focus on microservice architecture, anything can call content from a headless CMS. Content becomes just another (but very important) service that can be called by a website, a mobile device, a software platform, an automobile, VR headset, Jumbotron or whatever tomorrow’s technology looks like.

Envision a future where robots are so integrated into the foundation of human life that they become as common as smartphones. Robotics is a field that has a great potential to improve our lives at work, home, and in-play. They can be a support for learning physical as well as cognitive activities. Robots for years have helped humans do a task that was considered dangerous. Now, the field of robotics has progressed into the exploration of unreachable environments from the depth of the ocean to deep space. 

Robots being made capable enough to adapt, learn and interact with human beings and other machines on a cognitive level. Technology has progressed so rapidly that over the past few decades computing has been made indispensable. The digitalization of everything has made human life easy and so accessible. These digitizations put together with robotics assures a future that only existed in one's imagination.

Robots are becoming so capable that they can execute complex computations and interact with the world on their own, with richer sensors and better actuators. With a future close, where robots and humans work alongside is creating many new job opportunities and saving time for humans.

Robots have only advanced in industrial fields or only in factories but have also come about to do simple human tasks such a mowing our lawns, milking cows, vacuuming the house, serving in restaurants, and so many other areas. In a few years, they will touch even more parts of our lives.

Today's robots are still quite limited. They cannot figure things out and their communication is often brittle. It also takes a lot of time to build new robots. The progressive adoption of robots will require integrating robots in the human world rather than integrating humans into the machine world.