7 best CMS features for e-commerce websites

Chances are, you have an existing set of proprietary data sources, digital experience platforms, enterprise applications and marketing tech software for your e-commerce site. An integration-ready CMS can move your business forward faster by utilizing the tools and processes you already have in place. Look for a CMS that includes pre-built integrations that allow you to directly connect your storytelling and marketing capabilities with your point-of-purchase and inventory-management systems.

Integration spotlight

Shopify

With Shopify, harness the power of an e-commerce platform to start, grow and manage your business. Then, effectively engage your audiences by telling stories about your products, as well as generating awareness and driving loyalty to them, all from within Brightspot CMS.

Explore the Shopify integration 

In a modern world, it’s important to deliver content that’s optimized for all the channels your target customers visit, including digital, radio, television, print and even physical stores. Omnichannel e-commerce aligns content delivery across channels, providing a seamless and consistent experience throughout a customer’s journey. And with a modern CMS, you can easily create, optimize and distribute all your content from one place. Look for a platform that’s designed with native omnichannel capabilities, so you don’t miss an opportunity to engage consumers wherever they are.

E-commerce

How to drive e-commerce success with the right content platform

By Brightspot Staff
September 12, 2022

E-commerce is an increasingly critical aspect of nearly every organization that has products or services to sell. Combined with the right CMS, any organization—from retailers to corporate brands, independent businesses to media publishers—can create, manage and publish digital content to tell their story, engage their audience and market their products.

3 Min Read

As your customers spend more time on a variety of screens, you need a CMS that can adapt to a multi-device world. A fully responsive CMS is designed to work across many kinds of devices, delivering content across various digital touchpoints. Responsive themes provide your site with a consistent look and ensure that every page is optimized for any device. A good CMS for e-commerce should offer themes that include customizable content sections, drop-down navigation support, a sticky sidebar area, a grid layout and more.

If you want to convert users from prospects to customers, you need to harness the power of personalization. Once you know where your target customers research, shop and engage, you can create relevant content that educates and provides answers, maximizing your presence across those channels. Look for a CMS with technology designed to help you create personalized content and boost audience engagement. A good CMS can help you target site visitors using information such as geolocation, site activity and previous purchase activity, allowing you to segment your audience and deliver content that’s tailored to them.

When choosing a CMS, make sure it includes the features you need to achieve higher operational efficiency, drive time on site and improve conversion rates. The best content management systems have built-in analytics for measuring key performance indicators like where your target audience is located, what devices they’re using and how they’re interacting with your brand across devices and channels. If analytics aren’t built in, look for a CMS that offers integration with a tool like Google Analytics. A good CMS enables you to collect, process and interpret interaction data in real time, helping you understand where customers are in their buying journey.

If you want to compete in a global marketplace, your e-commerce site must be accessible in multiple languages. The best content management systems can translate text with just a few clicks, lessening the burden (and expense) on your team to create multilingual content. In addition, your CMS should have multisite capabilities so it can support as many different sites as you need (multisite capabilities extend to microsites for when, say, you need to create one-off marketing campaigns for a big new product launch). A CMS that has rules-based sharing of content, templates and modules can simplify the process. Just create content in one location, then push the content out to your other sites from that same interface.

No two e-commerce companies are the same, so you need a CMS you can easily configure for your particular processes. The best content management systems adapt to the specific needs of your organization and allow you to quickly create custom workflows—all without heavy IT support. With configurable drag-and-draw workflows provided by your CMS, you can control and simplify processes across multiple users and team roles within your organization. Ultimately, this helps create consistent, high-quality content that can be delivered faster to customers researching and looking to buy your products.