Critics

Critic: Ryan Breen

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Fastr

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<hr /> <a target="_blank" href="https://cmscritic.com/critics/ryan-breen">Ryan Breen</a> is CTO at Fastr, a digital experience composition platform built for e-commerce, and a CMS Critic Contributor. To differentiate, e-commerce businesses need to deliver the right content to the right audiences. But the “right content” and the “right audience” change every single day.That means you have to make data-optimized content changes at the same pace. That’s your minimum viable content velocity. But you’re stuck: meaningful content changes require developer intervention. AI, 2024's proposed solution to all velocity problems, only exacerbates this problem. It’s boosting the content creation pace across departments faster than speeding up developer release cycles.<h3 id="presentation-is-content">Presentation IS Content</h3>The traditional approach of minor tweaks – like adjusting copy or shuffling UI elements – barely scratches the surface. These changes are superficial, allowing for only cookie-cutter modifications. What we need goes deeper, demanding a radical shift in how content is presented. This is about more than aesthetics; it’s about structural transformation.Consider the scale of change required: the capability to serve entirely different layouts of your product detail page (PDP) to various audience segments. Take a case study where analytics reveal that users coming from search engines exhibit distinct shopping behaviors. They are more inclined to purchase related products than the specific SKU they initially viewed. The logical move? Experiment by altering the PDP layout for these users, placing related products prominently at the top, instead of their usual position below the fold.This approach isn’t about making a single change. It’s about the ability to test a multitude of visual treatments – 5, 10, even 20 variations – to pinpoint what truly engages your audience. And this testing isn’t static; it evolves daily, adapting in real time to the insights gathered.<h3 id="the-ai-productivity-paradox">The AI Productivity Paradox</h3>The advent of AI in business operations presents a profound challenge I call the “AI Productivity Paradox.” On the surface, AI technologies promise significant productivity gains across the board. Marketing and e-commerce teams are leveraging AI to generate a flood of innovative ideas, scaling their creative output to levels previously unimaginable. Imagine this: 20 individuals in e-commerce and marketing now produce 200 times as many viable, impactful ideas each day as they did last year, thanks to AI tools at their disposal.To put this into perspective, consider the equation: (A) the number of ideas generated by the team, times (B) number of target audience segments, compounded by (C) the multiple variants you need to test to get a strong signalIf A is now 200 and B and C are anything above 0, a development team is now staring down the barrel of a combinatorial explosion of demands. A neverending, ever-growing influx of content change initiatives that must be handled with no latency.At the same time, every other part of the business was already waiting on development for site updates. It’s not like development teams anywhere match a business's needs for velocity. Now, this explosion of creative output from e-commerce and marketing teams – amplified by AI – will blow open an ever-widening gap in productivity.This disparity is not just a logistical headache; it’s a strategic bottleneck that stifles innovation, slowing down the essential process of testing and learning. Without a shift towards more scalable, developer-independent systems for executing these ideas, the promise of AI-enhanced productivity is a bottleneck – not a breakthrough.<h3 id="speed-wins">Speed Wins</h3>In today’s e-commerce landscape, agility goes beyond making superficial tweaks with ease (and, sorry, your CTA text is superficial). Agility is about enabling immediate, profound shifts in how content engages and converts. Traditional approaches, marked by delays and developer bottlenecks, miss the rapid pace at which market trends evolve. All content must adapt as fluidly as consumer preferences and market dynamics do, unencumbered by the grindingly slow human latency of development time.And no: clunky, semantically void page builder components aren’t a solution. Their limited scope and bulky controls make them cookie-cutter templates with more steps. Today, we’re giving marketers components like a “carousel with 4 images.” Turning that into a labyrinth of dropdowns so they can spend hours composing a “carousel with 4 images” component into a “carousel with 4 images grouped vertically on desktop but not on mobile and with a translucency effect on hover on desktop” isn’t going to get us where we need to go.Instead, we envision a future where developers empower e-commerce, marketing, and AI tools with the capability to design every pixel of the Product Detail Page (PDP) and sculpt every underlying interaction. This isn’t about providing a bigger box of basic tools; it’s about handing over the keys to the entire workshop. In this new world, developers focus on creating sophisticated, flexible environments that offer total creative control – environments where non-technical teams can intuitively design, test, and refine every aspect of the e-commerce experience without compromise.By stepping away from the bottleneck and repositioning themselves as enablers, developers unlock the full potential of their colleagues in e-commerce and marketing. This shift is critical. It’s about equipping those closest to the customer with the means to apply their insights and ideas directly, in real time, without the mediation of cumbersome, limiting tools.This is how we get something more than pain and dashed hopes from our AI investments.This is how we overcome the AI Productivity Paradox. <hr /><h3 id="upcoming-conferences">Upcoming conferences</h3> <img style="width:29.67%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2024/01/cms-connect-2024-logo.png" alt="CMS Connect 24 logo" /><h4 id="cms-connect-24"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmsconnect24">CMS Connect 24</a></h4>August 6-7, 2024 – Montreal, CanadaWe are delighted to present our first annual summer edition of our prestigious international conference dedicated to the global content management community. Join us this August in Montreal, Canada, for a vendor-neutral conference focused on CMS. Tired of impersonal and overwhelming gatherings? Picture this event as a unique blend of masterclasses, insightful talks, interactive discussions, impactful learning sessions, and authentic networking opportunities. <img style="width:29.58%" src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2024/01/cms-kickoff-2025-logo.png" /><h4 id="cms-kickoff-25"><a target="_blank" href="https://www.boye-co.com/conferences/cmskickoff25/tickets">CMS Kickoff 25</a></h4>January 14-15, 2025 – Tampa Bay Area, FloridaJoin us next January in the Tampa Bay area of Florida for the third annual CMS Kickoff – the industry's premier global event. Similar to a traditional kickoff, we reflect on recent trends and share stories from the frontlines. Additionally, we will delve into the current happenings and shed light on the future. Prepare for an unparalleled in-person CMS conference experience that will equip you to move things forward. This is an exclusive event – space is limited, so secure your tickets today.

How to Free Your e-Commerce Business from the AI Productivity Paradox

In recent years, <a target="_blank" href="https://www.cmscritic.com/top-headless-commerce-platforms/">headless commerce</a> – or the separation of the frontend and backend of an application – has emerged to offer e-commerce sites greater freedom of expression and the ability to enrich the customer experience. In spite of these advantages, maintaining a headless architecture comes with several challenges, including the need for additional resources to keep content and features updated and the risks of decreased site speed and increased security vulnerabilities. And, of course, there are additional costs for building infrastructure and testing.So you need to ask: is going headless the right move for your organization? The alternative (supposedly) is to stick with the more traditional, all-in-one, "monolithic" platform approach. One key benefit of doing so is the built-in frontend that makes it easy for non-technical users to launch an online storefront quickly.However, monolithic systems can lock an e-commerce company into one vendor’s pre-existing development environment and limit its developers to the most common use cases. In sum, the monolithic approach tends to work better for new businesses that wish to get a website launched quickly. But, our experience is that it’s not long before these businesses begin to feel restricted by their platform’s templates and tools. <h2>Are You Really Ready?</h2>Making the decision to jump to a headless architecture can be scary. Migrating an entire frontend is hard, and more often than not you’ll also choose to migrate the backend, and it will most likely take longer than planned. Moreover, e-commerce organizations get absolutely none of the headless benefits until the migration is completed.Under this scenario, the existing site is kept on life support for the months or years the development team is focused on building the new headless frontend. And even if a development team hits all its key project dates and goes live, it’s still hard. There may still be many capabilities and features that can’t be included in that initial launch, which leaves the newly created frontend in catch-up mode.<h2>You Can Go Halfway</h2>The good news is that going headless does not have to be all or nothing. It’s possible to achieve many of the benefits of going headless without taking the full plunge.  Here’s how:<ul><li>Don’t take on more than you can handle. Especially in the current market, where every second counts and organizations likely have fewer engineers than they did last year, expecting a resource-strapped development team to rebuild an entire frontend is unrealistic, and would likely take too much time and upfront investment.</li><li>Implement a supplemental strategy where, instead of replacing a monolithic frontend in one big project, the organization chooses one critical headless capability at a time to add to the frontend. For instance, instead of replacing the whole site, e-commerce marketers could replace an element in product pages that isn't helping shoppers convert to buyers. This cumulative approach focuses the team on achieving meaningful short-term milestones. In this way, an e-commerce organization can continuously add new capabilities and progressively evolve from a monolithic system until the entire backend is segmented into microservices or different best-of-breed vendors. This approach also means that business value will be delivered throughout the migration.</li><li>Consider dedicated frontend composition platforms that implement additive strategies while allowing all business users - including developers, marketers, and designers - to help bring new functionality to the site. This can help overstretched development teams avoid becoming a bottleneck so the broader organization can deliver new experiences to the existing site more quickly. Reducing handoffs and eliminating the build step enables quicker content creation, which allows for more experimentation and, ultimately, a faster path to optimization and revenue-driving conversion improvements.</li></ul><h2>Open the Doors to Experimentation</h2>Let’s look at a common scenario. If an organization’s team does a quick analysis of its product pages and evaluates where the most underutilized real estate is on those pages, they will be able to translate that deficit into an opportunity and make that real estate more effective. For example, on many product pages, there are large swaths of whitespace and then a related product carousel tucked down at the bottom of the page where customers rarely venture. In this case, moving those related products up on the page is a good way to drive up average order value.In addition, the organization can choose to take it a step further and turn that related products carousel into a "build a bundle" offer where shoppers can attach three additional items to purchase all at once - with just one click. Ultimately, the organization can quickly and easily test anything - including the page layout and adaptive experience options, without needing weeks of lead time for planning and development. It's all about picking one’s opportunities and providing the desired experience built with the technology that gets you the shortest time to value and responsibly balances business success.The decision to go headless (or not) certainly does not need to be an all-or-nothing event. It’s possible to go halfway or to dip your toes in just a little bit. Don’t try to do everything at once; instead, focus on doing a little at a time, and take advantage of new design tools that unleash frontend creativity and agility while transitioning to your ideal e-commerce stack at a gradual pace.<hr /><a href="/critics/ryan-breen">Ryan Breen</a> is Chief Technology Officer at Zmags and a CMS Critic contributor.

Ryan Breen

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Articles by Ryan

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