How Adobe Experience Manager enhances Adobe Commerce (Magento)

What is Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)

At a certain point in its development, Magento came under the wing of the powerful Adobe, famous for such tools as the cult Photoshop, which stole the hearts of many creative people.

Adobe never tires of looking for new approaches to creating products that would significantly increase the convenience and productivity of its end users.

In 2013, Adobe introduced Adobe Marketing Cloud, which later in 2014 transformed into what is now known as Adobe Experience Cloud. In its all-encompassing package, the cloud included AEM as well. Magento in its turn became marketed as Adobe Commerce. 

Magento under Adobe

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a next-gen CMS that allows businesses no-hassle administration, the creation and editing of rich content and media, and ease of use in the distribution of tailored content across all possible channels.

At this point, you probably start waving your hands and exclaim: “Wait a minute, isn’t Magento, since it’s so versatile, enough on its own to cope with content?”

Let's look at this.

Isn't Adobe Commerce (Magento) good enough to work with the content?

For many businesses, Magento may indeed be quite enough. Look, Magento provides more than a rich set of functions for basic work with content: you can easily fill in content, edit product descriptions, and categories, and even create landing pages.

However, working with content in Magento can hardly be called convenient. And if you have a large and diverse catalog, many websites, many platforms, many formats for which you would like to prepare content, and many customer segments for which you would like to create unique content, you should seriously think about a special tool that will make your life much easier.

So my website is running on Magento, how do I understand if I need an AEM?

Content Complexity 

Does your website require advanced content management - due to intensive work with rich media, detailed personalization, or multi-channel distribution - that goes beyond what Magento offers? If your eye starts to twitch every time you need to add a series of images for a product, yeah, Magento can make you mad. Apparently, it’s nice to have a convenient tool at hand like AEM.

Lack of consistency across channels

What company doesn't want consistency in branding and messaging across different channels? Unlike in Magento, with Adobe Experience Manager, in Admins disposal are templates and forms to create consistent design elements and layouts to apply across various pages of your online store. Need a cohesive brand identity? Here, Magento might need some boost of AEM.

Lack of capacity for multichannel content production 

This point goes in synergy with the previous; if you need a seamless user experience, irrespective of the device or channel used by the customers. If you routinely work with mobile and social media, you probably won’t have enough Magento functionality to easily, for instance, work with bulk editing tags for various formats.

Scalability and enterprise-level needs

Magento is great for internationalization with its extensive localization features. Yet if your business has extensive product catalogs, international operations, or complex customization requirements, you may benefit from AEM's enterprise-grade capabilities. By making the backend safely independent from content and media updates and manipulations, you will additionally fail-proof your web store.  

Collaborative content authoring 

Let's be honest, Magento is not the most convenient environment for content team collaboration. Count the times one of your admins flushed the cache at peak time, somewhat freezing your online store. If many content creators or even teams are working together on content production and publication and you require specific workflows, role-based access restrictions, and approval procedures, Magento may not be enough. By leveraging AEM, you can avoid a lot of hassle.

Lack of analytics

Magento has its analytics functionality, yet it is more specific on inventory and sales. Do you find that you are missing out on crucial information on client actions, engagement rates, and sales? With AEM, you could harvest more valuable data to make well-versed decisions. 

Adobe Experience Manager benefits: what exactly goes with AEM integration?

Advanced content editing 

AEM's streamlined and user-centric interface for content production allows administrators and managers to successfully create and supervise complicated content infrastructures. The utilization of a drag-and-drop interface, modular building blocks, and powerful editing capabilities facilitates simple content creation.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

AEM offers powerful digital asset management (DAM) features to help administrators effectively manage their media assets, such as photographs, videos, and documents. The digital commerce site is able to use assets consistently because the DAM integration has a streamlined process for managing assets.

Digital enrollment and forms

Adobe Experience Manager Forms is a full-featured document management product that streamlines the development and electronic signature of customer-friendly forms, improving the customer experience from the point of sale all the way through to repeat business.

Learning manager and guides

AEM’s Learning Manager can be easily integrated into digital commerce sites. It can be used for various purposes, such as building customer relationships, boosting sales, informing corporate partners, and training employees. Under the hood, a wide range of options for managing and growing documentation in a variety of ways.

Personalization and targeting

Admins may make use of AEM's sophisticated customization and targeting capabilities. Your managers can also leverage these features to deliver personalized messages to certain consumer groups based on their behavior, interests, and demographics. The capacity to customize on a highly deep level has the potential to significantly enhance the customer experience and boost interest and sales.

Multi-channel content delivery

Furthermore, Adobe Experience Manager allows the distribution of data to various online destinations, such as websites, mobile applications, social media channels, and more. The software includes features that make it easier to manage and adapt content for different channels while maintaining consistency. This ensures that consumers have a smooth experience on all devices.

Scalability and extensibility 

To efficiently manage massive volumes of material and complicated processes, AEM is built to scale. Brands can tailor it to their own needs and fail-proof their growth.

AEM Integration

There are several solutions to blend Adobe Experience Manager into Magento:

• The Commerce Integration Framework (CIF) raises the level of interoperability and information sharing now possible between the two platforms.  

• With headless commerce solutions, such as GraphQL-based APIs - isolating the front layer from the underlying Magento and AEM - the adaptability of the combined infrastructure may be improved remarkably.

What are the potential challenges or drawbacks of integrating AEM Magento Integration?

• Complexity: the integration entails setting and syncing data, matching content architecture and dependencies, and ensuring smooth communication.

• Adobe AEM cost: Implementing and maintaining the AEM integration might be costly. Both systems' license fees and 3rd-party extensions or modifications might increase costs.

• Expertise: Integrating AEM with Magento demands technical skills in both systems. To comprehend integration's difficulties, organizations require engineers proficient in both platforms.

• Maintenance: AEM and Magento upgrades might make integration difficult. Monitoring, testing, and upgrades may be needed to ensure system compatibility.

You may count on our assistance if you face any of these challenges or just looking for an experienced Adobe AEM developer.