This month, iMedia launched a new app in the BigCommerce marketplace called SitecoreExtend with the purpose of helping brands who are on Sitecore CMS elevate their ecommerce experience. If you are familiar with content management systems you’ve probably heard of Sitecore as one of the most powerful and feature rich content management systems available today.
The value Sitecore offers brands is immense – enabling the ability to create truly unique, personalized content experiences to users. But it is a CMS / Experience Manager first and while it does offer ecommerce capability, its usefulness in that area is far short of the leading cloud ecommerce platform – BigCommerce.
So for brands who have decided to go with a best of breed technology strategy and run these two platforms in tandem, SitecoreExtend is here to help drive a better shopping / browsing experience as it combines the ecommerce power of BigCommerce with the content experience of Sitecore for a seamless delivery of content & commerce. Here’s what you need to know.
SitecoreExtend is a Sitecore package that you download and install on your Sitecore authoring environments. Once configured with the proper BigCommerce keys it provides Sitecore developers various tools to integrate the environments. These include:
- BigCommerce Product Template – a Sitecore item template to reflect the BigCommerce product.
- Controllers / Views / Service Layer – to support the fetching of product skus and add to cart button.
The above features allow the product pages to be completely custom to Sitecore and retain the brand experience without being confined to any look and feel driving by the BigCommerce model. However the sku configuration options, and add to cart button are handled for you so there needs to be no domain knowledge of BigCommerce in order to start selling directly through Sitecore.
- Scheduled Tasks – that can be configured to pull BigCommerce products into Sitecore. By synchronizing products the product IDs are already mapped and the Sitecore environment can stay up to date.
- Header Footer Control – Ability to unify both sites header and footer.
- Single Sign On – users login once and are authenticated on both sides of the application.
The SitecoreExtend application is designed for Sitecore developers to build a unique and unified content and commerce experience for Sitecore and BigCommerce.