Using Contentful to grow your ecommerce business

Every online shop looks the same

Most online shops look very much alike — a list of categories, subcategories, some product detail pages, a “buy” button, and that’s it. The content is often limited to search optimization purposes, and that's the reason why its quality is mediocre at best. That's because the shop software that is at its core is designed primarily for a search experience.

Marketing is getting ever more expensive

A constant search and social marketing budget yields less traffic and fewer new customers every year. The retention cost for customers is converging with that of new customers.

Competition is heating up

While tech giants becoming bigger and bigger, venture-funded newcomers seem to have unlimited money to burn, rendering pricing and customer acquisition ever less profitable.

If those challenges indeed sound familiar, it's time to try some new approaches.

Inspire desires with interesting content

There is a world of inspirational content out there largely untapped by ecommerce businesses. Think of the Vogue magazine in fashion, or the old glossy posh catalogues, where products are not just lists of items. Instead, they are presented as.carefully orchestrated pieces of a story, displayed in a picturesque scenery – a human story which the viewers can relate to. Your potential customers will appreciate content that is emotional, inspiring, useful, entertaining, and reader-oriented, instead of conversion-optimized and sales-driven.

When you have a loyal audience, you can use that organic traffic to feed your transaction engine. That's why we suggest that you start investing in inspirational content.

Mr. Porter, an international menswear retailed, crafts wonderful stories about men's fashion in their online magazine. A product page with the “buy” button is one click away.

The CMSes of the past were really just terrible word processors. Contentful is the first true ‘content management platform’. A platform that can manage any structure of content you can imagine, not just a sheet of paper.

Gareth Ballester

Lead engineer, applications at Nasty Gal

Nasty Gal showcases style collections in neatly organized "lookbooks". A nice combination of traditional form and new medium - powered by Contentful.

Tap audiences on new devices

The web is undergoing radical change, with mobile audiences growing every year. Just having a website does not cut it anymore. At a minimum, you’ll need a responsive site – and, even better, a dedicated mobile app experience.

There are other new channels where you might engage your audience. There's Google Now pre-installed on most new Android devices, Apple News on all new iOS devices; there are numerous gigantic messaging platforms that can be used to build a following. Most of these platforms are now fresh and unexplored from an e-commerce marketing point of view.

Building a presence on emerging platforms means that you get the rewards of being an early adopter. Remember the early days of Adwords in 2004? Back then average click prices were in the single digit cents. The pioneers in the new channels are reaping similar rewards, especially when you have the inspirational content to feed to those channels.

Contentful is a content management backend that is being used by ecommerce leaders to power experience-focused shopping platforms. It is different from any CMS of old in that it's developer-friendly and designed to be multi-platform from the ground up. Ecommerce enterprises can easily add it onto their existing shop technology stack, create truly inspiring content experience, and delivery to any new (and old) channels.

• Proven to work for e-commerce. Contentful is already used by well-known brands – e-commerce pioneers, in a way to power the content for inspirational shopping experiences. Among them are Nasty Gal, Gant, Zalando and Urban Outfitters.
• Reaches every channel. Contentful manages structured content in a device-independent and presentation-free format. Once the content is created, it can be delivered to a variety of devices and channels without much work on the way. Web, mobile web, apps, print, digital signage, kiosks — it's all covered. Contentful helps bring your products to the widest audience possible.
• Content-focused. Contentful doesn’t restrict editors and designers with templates and themes. You can publish content of any type and present it in highly customized layouts and formats. That greatly helps creating and maintaining the inspirational content mentioned above.
• Plays nicely with other software. Contentful, being an API-first CMS, can be simply integrated into an existing ecommerce tech stack. That means that you won't have to throw away all your technical investment and start anew.

Schedule a demo or read how Nasty Gal built its shopping experience