Amplience powers rich media production with SAP Hybris Commerce

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Amplience powers rich media production with SAP Hybris Commerce.

Amplience has announced the release of Amplience Extension for SAP Hybris Commerce. Designed to accelerate and simplify the implementation of Amplience Dynamic Media solutions for retailers, the update extends the SAP Hybris solution to allow for the delivery of rich, engaging product and promotional media to customers’ devices. The Amplience Extension is SAP-certified for integration with SAP Hybris Commerce.

Whether serving apparel, grocery, pharmaceutical products or more, retailers are increasingly dependent on their ability to deliver high-quality content, ensuring quality shopping experiences across any device. The delivery of persuasive content, including product images, video and UGC, is absolutely key, as is the process by which retailers produce content. Being responsive to customers’ needs and delivering content which is timely, contextual and rich, is now the key to retail engagement in an increasingly mobile-first world.

“Amplience understands the retail engagement challenge that comes with content and commerce integrations and management,” said James Brooke, CEO, Amplience. “Content is an imperative for engaging customers today, and we want to help retailers improve the customer experience by ensuring they have the best tools for the job. The Amplience Extension for SAP Hybris Commerce accelerates time-to-market for retailers, reducing implementation risk and driving down cost. Creative and site operations teams can enjoy the benefits of powerful automated image and video management workflows, dynamic imaging and more.”

“We have a large inventory that our customers need access to,” said Steven Suddarth, eCommerce Manager at Heritage Parts. “They expect our website to be fully responsive - allowing them access from across all devices, with speedy loading of images. The best advantage of having the Amplience Extension for SAP Hybris Commerce is the simplified integration. We now have the support structure for our content production, ensuring that our website delivers excellent performance and satisfaction all round.”

Amplience Dynamic Media

Amplience Dynamic Media makes it easy for ecommerce teams using SAP Hybris Commerce to enrich the customer experience. Any channel and device combination can be supported with engaging images and videos that work responsively — improving site speed and quality.

Dynamic Media additionally supports five advanced use cases: 

• Product Badging - which generates image badges that highlight sale, stock levels, newness and other associated attributes
• Dynamic Bannering - which simplifies the production of personalised campaign and promotional media
• Product Customisation - which enables colourisation, monogramming and rich product configuration
• 360- / 720-Degree Spin Sets - which provide accurate visualisation of technical products, enabling purchasing with confidence, ideal for many B2B applications 
• Mobile-Ready Hero Images - making it easy for consumer goods retailers to deliver optimised product images that significantly improve engagement and conversion on mobile devices

Mobile-Ready Hero Images

When shoppers are using their mobile devices to buy consumer goods, they need to recognize brand, product type, pack size and variant type. The problem for some consumer products is that, when viewed on a mobile screen, the product hero image is very small, leading to a failed customer experience and poor conversion as a result. This is particularly the case in the grocery retail.

The University of Cambridge Design Group in conjunction with Unilever have created a set of standards designed to help solve this problem. These Mobile-Ready Hero Images deliver the visual information that shoppers need in order to make immediate and informed buying decisions. 

The creation of Mobile-Ready Hero Images can be an arduous post-production challenge. However, Amplience Dynamic Media allows clients wishing to adopt these standards with an automated set of tools to create and deliver mobile-ready hero images across product ranges at any scale.

Social and User-Generated Content

The Amplience Social and UGC solution allows retailers to curate the high-value authentic content that brand advocates create on social channels such as Instagram and Twitter. With integration with SAP Hybris Commerce, UGC and social content can be added to pages using a specialized widget. This enables content teams to curate and publish shoppable social images into a wide range of environments including media-walls on landing pages, carousels on product detail pages, as well as style guides and inspirational look-books.

Amplience Dynamic Media is available on the SAP App Center, the SAP digital marketplace where customers can buy solutions directly from partners and centrally manage purchases, billing and vendor communications. The SAP App Center provides customers with real-time access to nearly 1,500 innovative partner solutions that complement and extend their SAP solutions, enabling digital transformation of their business.