EPiServer Enables Online Retailers to Move Customers from Engagement to Conversion

EPiServer Commerce extends the online engagement platform from content, community, and communication to the online buying process.

CHICAGO, IL – June 3, 2010 – EPiServer, the world’s fastest growing provider of platforms that drive online engagement, announces the general availability of EPiServer Commerce. With this launch, the company challenges companies in the retail and B2B vertical markets to rethink the way they currently engage customers as they sell online. EPiServer advocates a complete, integrated e-commerce platform of content, commerce, community and communications, that helps businesses create online relationships with customers, to better understand customer behavior and identify improvements to visitor processes that seamlessly turns website visitors from “browsers” into “buyers”.

Today, more than 9,500 websites worldwide use EPiServer, and, every day, two new sites built using EPiServer go live. The company partners with more than 450 partners (digital agencies) around the world to build collaborative and engaging websites. In adding this e-commerce solution to the EPiServer platform (which also includes Web Content Management Systems (CMS) and =community building social software), EPiServer has partnered with customers such as Haglofs to help them build their product catalogue and realize an integrated approach to online customer engagement.

“As a leader in outdoor equipment, it is crucial for our customers and resellers to identify and engage with our brand in a personal way.  Our plan is to expand our site from content and the popular “My Gear” tool, to deliver a unique online experience,” said Nicolas Warchalowski, Marketing Director at Haglofs. “The next step in our partnership with EPiServer and our integration partner Cloud Nine is to upgrade our product catalogue. We have found the EPiServer platform to offer flexibility and a cost effective way to meet our visitors’ needs.”

“Ask yourself is your online shopping experience today any different than it was five, even ten, years ago? In most cases, the landing pages are static, there’s limited interaction with fellow shoppers and the checkout process remains complex,” said Martin Henricson, CEO of EPiServer. “We help our customers take a closer look at streamlining the checkout process, serving up more personalized content and offers, integrating better service and making the buying process more social.  All these steps lead to the type of business results that our customers demand.”

The addition of a proven e-commerce solution to the EPiServer platforms changes the dynamic and accelerates higher value results, in comparison to the integration model used to create most online stores today. The company has partnered with Mediachase for its .NET e-Commerce Framework (ECF) to provide an agile best practices architecture, complete with user experience controls, loosely coupled subsystems, like catalog management, order management, customer management, merchandising, promotions, and a fully exposed .NET developer framework (API).

Combined with the extensible EPiServer CMS content management system and EPiServer Community platform, .NET web developers can rapidly build and deploy state-of-the-art online stores, including multi-language, multi-currency, and multi-channel capabilities. Marketing tasks are streamlined through a single easy-to-use interface and new capabilities to correlate visitor feedback and experience with store operation and order status, at every step of the process.

”We have worked with Haglofs through many stages of their site development, and continue to find the platform approach to be economically sound,” said Marika Philipson, CEO of Cloud Nine.  “The extensibility and flexibility allow us to start from a solid baseline and create the types of functions that Haglofs visitors have come to expect.”

The EPiServer platform, combining content, community and commerce, is available now. For more, visit http://www.episerver.com/, search “episerver commerce” on Google.