My musings about Sitecore Discover

There is currently a lot going in the Sitecore space. Due to the Digital Experience Platform (DXP) transition, there are a lot of new acquisitions and as a result a lot of product / offerings. Also, after the Sitecore 2021 symposium, there are even more names! One such offering is Sitecore Discover. Reflektion is now called as Sitecore Discover I presume!

It all has to start somewhere, so I decided to take the bull by its horns. I went through what is available in the Reflektion and Sitecore sites and have done my own representation of the whole thing - an attempt to prepare myself for the future so that when I start delving into the actual offering in future, all the features don't seem new.

So, here are the features I came across:

Mainly, Sitecore Discover seems more tuned towards the Commerce business wherein visitors / buyers can be offered products of their interest based on what they search in the customer site. It will be interesting to see how OrderCloud and Discover can integrate in this space! Add to this some Artificial Intelligence wherein they are shown images matching their expectations. Then, we will also have analytics for future so that users can be segregated and generalised. This way, a similar visitor in future can be converted to a customer based on a pattern.  

So, here are the features with the above context in mind:

a. Individualized Search: For any business, customers are the key to growth. If you have to build a customer base, you need to understand their personal interests. This is where tracking their search words help and that is where search engines play a valuable role in a ecommerce business. Any site's search engine will hold the key to customer retention and to understand each customer' interests and build trends thereafter. What a user searches and what has landed him onto the business' site will be stored and based on the keywords, individual results or products / merchandise will be displayed for each user.

b. Product recommendations: Based on the visitor's search, products will be displayed and further recommendations will be made so that the visitor not only buys what they came to buy but also more than that. This is a key integration area for OrderCloud and Discover.

c. Analytics: What products or categories perform how and what are quarter on quarter sales etc. is all valuable data for the business. This is all stored and available for aggregation.

d. A/B testing for merchandising: Create model user types and test their buying experience based on what they search, applying AI is very valuable to build further buying paths. This becomes even more valuable if you can link to the device (mobile/tablet or computer) that is used for purchase.

e. Multi-locale support: As simple as, Direct customers to the nearest store based on their location

f. Category optimization: How to group products into different categories that appeal the customers, create new categories, get rid of non-performing categories or rename those based on search are all nice-to-haves for any business

g. Intent Identification: What is the visitor in for, is it a gift that they are looking for or for personal use and improve your product-base depending on the same

h. Merchandising resources: Based on search, understand the user and add all kinds of extra resource to improve the sales, it might be involving a new supplier to the mix!

i. SEO Support: Integrate with Google and other tools related to analytics

Hopefully I and you get a chance to test these features in a Sandbox environment soon!