5 Reasons To Look Forward to Sitecore Symposium - Commerce Sessions

Sitecore Symposium is one of my most favorite weeks of the year! The opportunity to gather with the Sitecore Commerce community to share ideas and collaborate is an immense honor. It is always humbling and stimulating to engage with business leaders and share the innovations and exceptional results our XCentium team has accumulated through hard work and long days of the past year.

In reviewing the Sitecore Symposium agenda, I noticed Sitecore Commerce sessions sprinkled throughout several of the tracks. Instead of reviewing the eCommerce Experience track as originally planned, several Commerce sessions in the other tracks also stood out to me. Since one of our goals at Symposium is to increase our knowledge to create better solutions for our clients, I decided to share the five overall eCommerce sessions I am most looking forward to attending:

Seven Common Commerce Customizations

Tuesday, October 9th 11:45 am, located in Swan, Mockingbird

This session is a great opportunity for those who are new – or not so new – to Sitecore Commerce. Where else can you learn commerce tricks and see it live from the master, Rob Earlam, Technical Evangelist at Sitecore? Sitecore Experience Commerce, including the Experience Accelerator Storefront, provides a whole heap of functionality out of the box, but you will still need to implement your own customizations as part of your implementation. In this session, Rob will go over seven common customizations you'll see on most of your commerce projects, and how to implement them easily using Sitecore Experience Commerce. This sessions is a must for everyone who is looking to expand into Sitecore Commerce domain.

Inside Cortex

Tuesday, October 9th, 4:15 pm, located in Swan 10

Yeah, what’s inside Cortex. Ever thought about it? Come and understand why Cortex is going to be necessity in future, including how Cortex and Sitecore work together. In today’s world, everything is data driven, more so when you start to think about driving value with machine learning (ML). The Sitecore Product team has spent a long time finding the right architecture for machine learning in Sitecore, so that customers and partners can take advantage of the wealth of experience data that they collect. In this session, Colin te Kempel, Senior Product Manager at Sitecore will walk you through the features that Cortex Machine Learning framework provides in 9.1, and how you can take advantage of the new and powerful tooling.

How To Create Customer Loyalty Programs Using Sitecore Experience Commerce and Email Experience Manager

Wednesday, October 10th, 10:00am, Dolphin, Northern Hemisphere A2

Considering this functionality is a must have for every commerce system, I highly recommend attending this session to see how easy it is to create loyalty programs. Using Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) and Sitecore Experience Manager (EXM), learn how to create a modern loyalty program that has helped to reduce churn, increase retention rates, and drive category sales online through marketing campaigns and marketing automation. In this session, you will learn how to implement the solution and how to set your clients and their customers up to reap the benefits of loyalty programs.

Cooking Up Smart Product Recommendations: A First Step In Utilizing Machine Learning For Your Sitecore Commerce Shop

Wednesday, October 10th, 3:00pm located in Dolphin, Northern Hemisphere A2

I am extremely delighted and honored to be a speaker at the Sitecore Symposium, with my friend and colleague, John Montes, Senior Developer at XCentium. John and I are looking forward to sharing our knowledge on Sitecore Commerce and Machine Learning with the Sitecore community. Come discover how we cook smart product recommendations to deliver a great customer experience for your shoppers.  In this session, we'll show you how to easily add smart features like product recommendations that are driven by machine learning to Sitecore Commerce shops. Using readily available tools, we will demonstrate an implementation path that is easy, cost effective, and pragmatic. Your clients will think you’re a genius as you help them build trust with their customers! Bonus? We will set you up with plugins to help accelerate and extend your Sitecore Commerce development.

Creating A Commerce Feature: A Technical Walkthrough 

Thursday, October 11th, 10:30 am, located in Swan / Mockingbird

Interesting in learning SXA Commerce? Enhance your SXA knowledge and get to know the basics of Sitecore Commerce Feature extensions. When building a Sitecore Experience Commerce 9 (XC9) solution, sometimes customer need features that XC9 doesn't provide. Fear not, XC9 is designed for extensibility. In this talk, attendees will learn the process of building a new Sitecore Commerce feature, including plugin creation, modifying commerce pipelines, extending the BizFx merchandiser interface, and exposing the new functionality to shoppers via new SXA components. Users attending this talk will leave with a clear understanding of the microservice architecture of Sitecore Commerce, and how it can be extended to drive business value and delight customers.

Bottom line, there are multiple fantastic sessions covering various facets of Sitecore Experience Commerce, which made it hard to pick only five. My XCentium colleagues also reviewed the other four Sitecore Symposium tracks, as well as the upcoming Will Smith keynote. Get a head start on prepping for Symposium by reading our series, “5 Reasons To Look Forward to Symposium.” I’ll give you a hint – there are many more than five reasons to look forward to the big event. Our XCentium team is busy preparing a ton of content personalized just for you. Visit our Sitecore Symposium page to learn more or stop by and see us at Booth #705. I can’t wait to connect with the Sitecore community and have a great time at the Symposium!