How unified marketing and commerce software is rekindling ecommerce innovation

What made you start your first ecommerce business? Were you driven to offer something unique or special to the world? Or did you sense an opportunity and seize it—something consumers needed (whether they realized it or not)? 

You might’ve started in your garage, perfecting that first product, or in your home office, dragging, dropping, and launching a simple online store. Either way, you knew your customers, understood their needs, and immediately responded to their feedback. 

Then success happened—and things got complicated. 

Blessed with success, trapped by technology   

Many fast-growing merchants eventually face a painful predicament: Tools that were supposed to help them scale start holding them back. Here’s how it happens. 

You get a few basic tools as your business begins to take off. They work fine—for a while. You start adding more as your needs change. Maybe a better email marketing platform here, a more robust inventory system there. Before you know it, you’re juggling a dozen different disconnected point solutions.  

You’re stuck in a cycle of managing fragmented software systems, reconciling disconnected data, and watching rising technology costs slowly eat into marketing budgets. You start exploring other options, but there’s a catch with each one. 

The mid-market merchant’s dilemma 

So, point solutions have piled up. You’ve outgrown basic ecommerce and email platforms designed for small businesses. But you don’t need a bloated enterprise solution built for global behemoths.  

Welcome to the mid-market merchant’s dilemma. 

Do you live with the limitations of small business tools? Accept the crushing, costly complexity of enterprise platforms? Or do you keep wasting time trying to patch point solutions together?  

To make matters worse, whichever path you choose prolongs three fundamental business problems: 

• Lost customer connections: When you spend more time managing software than talking to customers, something’s wrong. That direct connection that made your business special gets buried under administrative overhead. 

• Marketing/commerce blind spots: Your marketing team can’t see what’s happening in your stores, your stores don’t know what’s happening in marketing, and nobody can get a clear picture of the customer journey. It’s like running your business with a blindfold on. 

• Spiraling costs: Every new app or bolted-on feature requires another monthly subscription or time-intensive integration. What started as predictable software costs has become a growing drain on resources that should be going toward growth. 

Every day, merchants face this reality: The more their business grows, the further they drift from what made them successful.  

But what if technology could bring you closer to customers instead of creating barriers? What if software could scale your vision instead of complicating it?

Rekindling your entrepreneurial spirit  

The solution isn’t adding more software—it’s getting back to basics. It’s going back to that garage mentality where you could focus on your customers instead of your technology. But this time, with a simpler—but more sophisticated—approach so you can operate at scale. 

You need a software platform that unites marketing and commerce software to deliver: 

• One view of your customer across marketing and commerce 

• One set of tools and workflows for managing campaigns and promotions 

• One source of truth for your data 

• One predictable cost structure that scales with your business 

We’re not talking about some far-flung future—the connected commerce revolution’s right around the corner. Here’s how we’ll get there.   

Creating the platform that unites marketing and commerce  

At Maropost, we’re building what mid-market merchants have been asking for: Commerce Cloud, a platform that brings marketing and commerce together in a way that makes sense for growing retailers. Under the hood, Commerce Cloud is built on a foundation of: 

• Unified data: Marketing and commerce data combine to deliver deeper customer insights and more accurate performance metrics. This enables real-time segmentation and personalization based on both shopping behavior and marketing engagement. 

• Unified workflows: Manage promotions, content, and campaigns from a single piece of software. Create once and deploy everywhere, with automatic synchronization across all customer touchpoints. 

• Integrated analytics: Track the complete customer journey, from first touch to repeat purchase, with built-in attribution modeling and ROI tracking. 

Plus, you won’t need to rip and replace your tech stack each time you expand your business—we built it to scale effortlessly, so it grows with your needs. 

Built-in AI-powered personalization  

The impact of intelligent search is transformative. While typical ecommerce sites see 20% of traffic using search with a 2.4% conversion rate, Commerce Cloud’s predictive capabilities drive 25% of visitors to search – and convert them at double the industry rate.  

This means just a quarter of your site traffic can generate twice the revenue. 

Unlike other ecommerce platforms, smart search and personalized recommendations—powered by Merchandising Cloud—are fully integrated into Commerce Cloud from day one. Our AI engine predicts and surfaces what customers really want, working seamlessly across your entire catalog.  

Even if your stores have hundreds of thousands of products, Merchandising Cloud fast-tracks discovery and conversion as soon as you import your catalog. 

Merchandising Cloud discovery is blazing fast, with enterprise-grade search ensuring customers can easily navigate through extensive product ranges and find precisely what they need (even if they don’t know what they’re looking for).  

This combination of speed, intelligence, and seamless integration delivers the kind of shopping experience that drives sustainable growth. 

Retail results beyond operational efficiency   

Commerce Cloud’s benefits begin with operational efficiency, but there’s much more merchants can expect. Our tests reveal: 

• Higher conversion rates: With industry-leading storefront architecture and built-in personalization across search and the entire site, our merchants achieve 20-40% higher conversion rates than industry averages. This helps our retailers grow at 3x the industry-average CAGR in their markets. 

• Site speed advantage: Our storefronts are built to deliver the fastest stores in the industry. With more than 40% of shoppers using search and lightning-fast load times, merchants see dramatically higher engagement and conversion rates. Commerce Cloud’s performance-first approach ensures every millisecond counts toward your bottom line. 

• Faster time to market: Implementation measured in weeks, not months or years. New features and campaigns can be launched in hours instead of days. 

• Predictable costs: No more surprise plugin fees or integration costs. Our unified platform eliminates the need for multiple vendor relationships and costly third-party integrations. 

• More robust insights: Complete visibility into the customer journey across marketing and commerce touchpoints, enabling more effective personalization and targeting. 

• Improved site performance: Lightning-fast page loads and optimized mobile experience lead to lower bounce rates and higher engagement across all devices. 

Solutions to your industry’s operational challenges 

Different retail sectors face unique challenges. By unifying marketing and commerce, Commerce Cloud solves them. Here are a few examples. 

• Fashion and apparel: Manage complex product variants and seasonal inventories while delivering personalized recommendations based on style preferences and purchase history.  

• Health and beauty: Support subscription models and automated replenishment while maintaining compliance with industry regulations.  

• B2B commerce: Handle sophisticated pricing structures and customer-specific catalogs while integrating with existing enterprise systems. 

Getting back to growth 

Successful retailers never lose sight of why they started: To bring great products to customers who love them. Your technology should help you deliver on that mission, not stand in your way. 

That’s why we designed Commerce Cloud to be robust but simple and multifunctional, but seamless. We prioritized essential marketing and commerce tools over bells and whistles.  

It’s time to get back to the spirit and energy of that garage—and growth. With the right foundation, you can have the personal touch that made your business unique and the sophisticated tools you need to compete at scale. 

Want a sneak peek at what’s next for connected commerce? Book a demo.