Streamline digital commerce with the Integrated Commerce Network from Kin + Carta

At Google Cloud, we’re always looking for ways to help our retail, consumer packaged goods (CPG), and B2B and B2C customers along their digital commerce transformation, no matter the starting point. Whether you’re an enterprise manufacturer who needs to modernize and deliver a consumer-like commerce experience to your B2B customers, or a leading CPG company that is delivering new commercial models, the ideal commerce solution is one that can incorporate multiple best-in-class solutions into a composable but tightly integrated whole. There’s a need for enterprises to combine their data with powerful design, and create the moments that matter for their clients. The result is greater customer loyalty, with a personalized experience, and ultimately, increased profitability. Finding the right independent software vendors (ISVs) to meet your needs and connecting them to create a holistic solution can be challenging.

That’s why we’re pleased to announce the Integrated Commerce Network, a pre-integrated digital commerce solution from a curated group of our digital commerce ISV partners and delivered by systems integrator partner Kin + Carta. The Integrated Commerce Network is part of Google Cloud’s industry value network (IVN) strategy, and makes building an end-to-end digital commerce solution to support ongoing growth and innovation much easier.

What is the Integrated Commerce Network?

The Integrated Commerce Network brings together three essential pillars of modern commerce: a commerce personalization platform (Bloomreach), a truly cloud-native composable platform (commercetools), and an advanced digital experience and analytics platform (Quantum Metric). Kin + Carta, a digital transformation consultancy, brings deep expertise working with these solution providers and Google Cloud. Kin + Carta will develop a technical accelerator that enables faster deployment of these solutions on Google Cloud and facilitates data analysis in BigQuery. Collectively, the Integrated Commerce Network aims to deliver a modern commerce architecture that allows businesses to focus on innovation and differentiation for their customers.

The Integrated Commerce Network is part of Google Cloud’s IVN initiative and is the first such solution developed for digital commerce. IVN solutions combine expertise and offerings from systems integrators (SIs), ISVs, and content partners to create comprehensive, differentiated, repeatable, and high-value solutions that accelerate time-to-value and reduce risk for customers. By pre-integrating partner solutions on Google Cloud, the Integrated Commerce Network, an IVN solution for digital commerce, minimizes the need for clients to build bespoke solutions for common challenges. Each component is curated by layering focused solutions provided by our best-in-class, built-on Google Cloud SaaS partners, tailored to an enterprise’s specific challenges — whether they be retailers, CPG brands, manufacturers, healthcare or more.

The new Integrated Commerce Network solution from Kin + Carta and built on Google Cloud packages powerful capabilities from our partners including:

• Bloomreach - an AI-powered commerce personalization platform that seamlessly integrates with Google Cloud BigQuery. Powered by a customer data engine, Bloomreach drives commerce growth with multichannel marketing automation and intelligent product discovery solutions. It unifies real-time customer and product data so businesses understand what customers really want.
• commercetools - a cloud-native, component-based, tech-agnostic composable platform that gives you all the components you need to build and run outstanding shopping experiences across all digital and physical touchpoints. It delivers improved scalability, high availability and uptime, and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to on-premises solutions.
• Quantum Metric - a digital experience analytics platform that offers in-depth customer understanding, quantified and tied to core business objectives. It does so by providing real-time analytics, allowing you to monitor, diagnose, and optimize critical digital journeys. With Quantum Metric, you can easily discover when, where, and why customers struggle along their journey, reducing guesswork and time to resolve your customers’ digital friction so you can create compelling and easy-to-use websites and apps.
• Kin + Carta - a global digital transformation consultancy and a Premier Partner with Google Cloud. With 20+ years of experience in commerce delivery, Kin + Carta's experts are able to drive beyond customer expectations to build omnichannel experiences that drive revenue and convert customers from anonymous to advocates.

How it works

Independently, Bloomreach, commercetools, and Quantum Metric provide extensive API connectivity to each other as well as numerous third-party solutions. Each partner enhances the others by leveraging shared data to add value.

Bloomreach can use commercetools data to curate personalized purchasing experiences, customizing ads, emails, and mobile notifications. Additionally, it transforms behavioral analytics from Quantum Metric into valuable insights, fostering customer loyalty, satisfaction, and conversion.

commercetools can augment its robust commerce engine with AI-powered site search, intelligent product and content recommendations, and 360-degree content delivery from Bloomreach. You can also optimize the conversion funnel in commercetools by identifying areas where potential customers are abandoning their digital commerce journey with data from Quantum Metric.

The Quantum Metric platform can be used to identify what parts of a customer’s digital experience need improving, quantify the impact of that experience, and inform decisions around redesign, replatforming and more.

Finally, these critical components for modern digital commerce are integrated and deployed by Kin + Carta. Kin + Carta is building a technical accelerator to speed deployment of Bloomreach, commercetools, and Quantum Metric solutions as part of the Integrated Commerce Network and consolidate data analysis via BigQuery.

Built on Google Cloud

Because these tools are built and run on Google Cloud, customers can take advantage of all the benefits that Google Cloud brings to the table, including speed, scale, and security; advanced AI and ML tools; and commitment to open-source. In addition, enterprises can take advantage of our Industry Solutions team of experts and their leadership experience at top retailers, CPG brands, and manufacturers across the globe.

With BigQuery, businesses are empowered to leverage their customer data and unlock insights to improve customer experiences and boost revenue. When data from commercetools, Bloomreach and Quantum Metric is combined in BigQuery, businesses can uncover new insights into:

• Customers’ propensity to purchase
• Pricing optimizations
• Customer churn avoidance
• Marketing campaign optimization to understand customer segmentations, retargeting, and promotions

BigQuery also offers built-in machine learning which enables data analysts to operationalize ML models at scale. Further supercharge your data, allowing your commerce organizations to better uncover, summarize and make predictions into customer purchase behaviors.

The Integrated Commerce Network brings the best of Google Cloud’s partner-forward approach to an easy-to-adopt packaged solution for digital commerce transformation. Thanks to our partners, commerce organizations from industry incumbents to scrappy newcomers can take advantage of a tightly integrated, end-to-end solution that improves the customer experience and commercial outcomes while establishing a solid foundation for future growth and innovation.

Learn more about the Integrated Commerce Network delivered by Kin + Carta and built on Google Cloud.

^{Special thanks to the Google Cloud ISV Partner team, including Frank Napoletano, ISV Sales Specialist, George Keller, Partner Engineer, ISV, Tina Feng Liu, Global ISV Partner Marketing, and Liz Seidner Davidoff, Global ISV Partner Marketing, for contributing to this post.}