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Commerce as content is a strategy leveraged by digital-first companies to publish and distribute content that drives product sales through an online store. It’s all about rethinking a brand’s online retail presence; rather than just a directory of product listings, it’s a storytelling platform that draws buyers in—that entices them with impactful messaging tied to the products they’re viewing. It needs to be messaging that resonates with them and influences their journey to ultimately motivate them to purchase something from your brand, again and again. In short, commerce as content prioritizes and enhances the customer experience through powerful storytelling and drives revenue.

Notably, content is an umbrella term here. When we talk about content, it could mean product descriptions, pictures and user-generated content, or it can mean videos, blogs and FAQs. A successful commerce-as-content strategy understands which content types to use at which time and will publish a variety across different digital channels, all to create an optimal experience for the buyer.

Online shopping skyrocketed at the onset of the pandemic, and now, global e-commerce sales are expected to reach $6 trillion by 2024. Sellers are taking note and are flocking to online platforms, with an estimated 12 to 24 million e-commerce sites across the globe.

Shoppers now expect to be able to find what they need online, and whether the entire process is digital or involves in-store pickups and interactions, technology is needed to meet and serve the customer along every point of that journey, from discovery, research and comparison shopping to purchase, ordering and delivery.

Obviously, online stores don’t provide the opportunity for buyers to engage with their products physically. They can’t feel them, hold them to see how much they weigh, or try them on like they can in a store. So, without descriptive content—without videos that show how a tech gadget can easily swap out components or various images to show how a dress might look on different body types—too much is left to the imagination, and buyers will look elsewhere. This is exactly why e-commerce companies are embracing commerce as content strategies today.

When marketers and publishers from an e-commerce company strategize and execute a commerce-as-content plan together, they gain:

1. Effective, efficient methods for telling the product story: You can more easily drive product sales with the ability to place products exactly where you want on your digital footprint. 
2. Improved speed to publish: You can own and publish all product-related assets (videos, images and any other content) right within the content management system (CMS), without having to context-switch between separate systems.
3. Enhanced marketing: You can build dynamic content that pulls in products automatically based on characteristics, while also removing the manual lift that takes up too much of the team’s time or results in out-of-sync and outdated content in different systems.

First and foremost, e-commerce businesses need the ability to feature their products alongside compelling storytelling. To do so, they need a CMS that allows for integrations whereby publishers can embed and feature products into and alongside different content types, modules and pages. A headless CMS can help developers display a variety of content across different channels exactly as desired.

With Brightspot’s new Shopify integration, for example, an e-commerce business can embed and feature Shopify products into Brightspot pages, promos, articles, blog posts, listicles and more. Basically, any product pulled into the CMS via this integration exists as an asset that can be injected anywhere within the storytelling experience—something functionally impossible to do with Shopify or other e-commerce platforms.

Let’s say an online business that sells bicycles uses Brightspot as its CMS and Shopify as its e-commerce platform, and they want to showcase the best bikes for summer travel on their site. With the Brightspot and Shopify integration, the company can easily sync their product directory with Brightspot content types, so that product information about the best travel biking gear is featured prominently as potential buyers scan the site. Without Brightspot, the company’s content team would have to publish their content and manually add in links to related Shopify pages—and ensure these links stay current and accurate over time.

Now, with an integration between the CMS and Shopify store, all the bike store's gear and products can be searched and accessed via the CMS and then included with content assets and pages wherever relevant. This includes pricing and shipping details, availability, product updates and more—without ever requiring the content team to manage and validate details that will change frequently over time.