What was GSI Commerce? GSI Commerce was the Ecommerce and payments platform acquired by eBay Enterprise a number of years ago. The great thing about GSI for its customers is that it had feature functions inherently built into the platform. So their retailer customers didn’t need to think about their add-ons, because GSI did a good job of handling it for them. Some examples of their add-ons were address validation, tax calculations, etc.
Recently however, eBay Enterprise decided to re-brand by sunsetting GSI, joining forces with Innotrac, and re-naming themselves Radial to become an omnichannel commerce technology and operations provider. And so with Radial, eBay is turning towards trusted Ecommerce partners like Demandware to help in re-aiming their focus on their core competencies. Ecommerce platforms like Demandware offer the increased scalability and flexibility that will not only allow eBay to focus more on their core, but will also give their current clients the expertise needed to better serve customers in the digital landscape.
So if you're a retailer given this piece of news, and are now deciding whether you will go with Demandware, another third-party Ecommerce platform, or even building your own in-house technology, what features must you consider during your discovery, or re-discovery, process? All the inherent features like address verification you may have taken for granted are now on the table to be prioritized or left behind.
How do we, Experian Data Quality, play into this story? If you decide to go with Demandware or another third-party platform, the good news is that they have marketplaces where you can find best-of-breed partners that have pre-built integrations to make your lives a lot easier. In our case, we have integrations for Demandware, Oracle ATG, and Magento. Specifically, you would use our technology at cart checkout and account signup to ensure you’re proactively managing the quality of the customer contact data being entered.
In the past, contact data management might have been handled by your tax provider or some other non-traditional data quality provider. However, those tools are not focused the overall customer experience. For example, if you forget an apartment number, those tools will only passively make corrections, but the customer won’t be prompted to ensure that the most accurate information is entered for operational and marketing purposes. See, data quality isn’t these businesses core competency; it’s just something that’s kind of built in their overall product as an afterthought.
While the sunset of GSI may seem like a headache right now, it may be a blessing in disguise. It opens up the opportunity for you to work with a partner, (and we're talking about us here), that's trusted by some of the most popular Ecommerce platforms on the market.
If you find yourself in this situation, let’s talk. We’d love to explain why top retailers choose to use us in their third-party platforms or home-grown websites.
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