What is ADVANCED COMMERCE?
Advanced Commerce is an all-in-one search, merchandising, and personalization software built for enterprises.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is Advanced Commerce (GrapheneHC)?
Advanced Commerce is an enterprise-grade SaaS search, merchandising and personalization platform built for merchants to help them sell products effectively on their e-commerce platforms. The company offers a merchandising platform known as GrapheneHC.
Andre Brown, CEO of Advanced Commerce (former CEO of Attraqt), in an excerpt from Silicon Review, said this about their core product:
“Graphene HC™ is a revolutionary new merchandising platform designed to provide retailers with all the tools they need to merchandise their online stores effectively while delivering best-in-class Customer Experience. The Software-as-a-Service platform has been built with an API-first architecture for the Headless Commerce environment, making it easy to integrate with third-party applications and eCommerce platforms.
Graphene HC is effectively three core technologies in one - site search, visual merchandising, and product recommendations - providing retailers with all of the tools they need to merchandise their sites effectively. It is extremely flexible, supporting multiple approaches to merchandising, and includes many innovative features packaged within an easy-to-use intuitive interface. It has been designed to become the gold standard for Merchandising, outperforming many current platforms in terms of speed, functionality, flexibility, and price.”
Advanced Commerce is first on the cover page of the SME business review “5 Best Software Development Companies to Watch 2023,” which showcases the company as a revolutionary search and merchandising platform.
Who uses Advanced Commerce?
As enterprise-grade software, Advanced Commerce has many users (most of whom are e-commerce retailers) who use and trust the platform. Let’s take the company case studies below:
Ego: Ego is a UK-based online fashion brand that offers clothing collections and accessories. After experiencing some difficulties with Magento Enterprise, Ego decided to try out Advanced Commerce. This collaboration led to a 15% increase in click-through rate (CTR), a 30% increase in CVR, and 16% average revenue per user. See the case study here.
The Conran Shop: The Conran Shop, also based in the UK, is a furniture company that sells everything from home appliances to lighting. The company's collaboration with Advanced Commerce led to time savings and rules automation. See the case study here.
Why is Advance Commerce a good choice for e-commerce businesses?
What benefits does Advanced Commerce (GrapheneHC) offer businesses?
Headless Commerce Support and eCommerce Integration
GrapheneHC’s robust API-first platform makes it easy for brands to integrate GrapheneHC into any headless environment. The APIs also allow GrapheneHC to connect with the most popular eCommerce platforms, such as Shopify and WooCommerce.
Mobile Optimization
Since most customers shop from their mobile phones/devices, Advanced Commerce allows customized merchandising on your website to be optimized for mobile devices. This means customers will get the same merchandising experience they receive on your website right on their mobile phones. You could also customize your merchandising strategies to fit on various mobile devices.
Scalability
Being an API-first platform isn't the only thing that makes Advanced Commerce scalable. GrapheneHC significantly reduces the processing demands for handling product catalogs, allowing it to perform with remarkable speed on a large scale. Updates are also implemented automatically and instantaneously, so you don’t have to worry about manual processes.
Seamless third-party integrations
Advanced Commerce lets you integrate more features and third-party apps (BigCommerce, Magento, Shopware, Shopify, WooCommerce, Squarespace, etc.) into GrapheneHC. Any new third-party tool you integrate will automatically work well with what GrapheneHC already has. For example, you can integrate tools for building apps, handling users, and running business operations, and everything syncs up seamlessly. Plus, GrapheneHC makes it easy to switch to using advanced online store technologies in a few easy steps.
Support for multi-lingual & multi-currency capabilities
If you are an e-commerce business dealing with customers from different countries, you will love the multi-lingual/currency capability of Advanced Commerce. The platform supports multiple languages and currencies, allowing you reach and sell to your customers wherever they are.
How is Advanced Commerce different from Competitors?
Despite being a relatively new solution (founded in 2020) compared to its competitors, Advanced Commerce brings impressive stand-out capabilities. Here are some capabilities the company handles better than competitors:
Search Algorithm: Advanced Commerce has a powerful search algorithm that automatically recognizes colors, sizes, and costs to transform your written search into filters. For instance, entering the search term “cheap” will filter all products within or below the price range of $20.
Voice Search technology: If you love using “Siri” or “Alexa,” then you will love the voice search feature in Advanced Commerce. This feature isn't widely available amongst its competitors, which is a huge selling point for the company.
Faster loading: Loading of products on Advanced commerce is extremely fast compared to competitors.
Core Features of Advanced Commerce
Let's dive in and look at the core features of Advanced Commerce.
Merchandising
GrapheneHC Merchandising blends: Merchandising blends (a term used by GrapheneHC to describe various merchandising strategies offered by Advanced Commerce) are the driving force behind GrapheneHC. You have the freedom to create an unlimited number of merchandising blends.
Elements such as price, size, and stock availability can be combined with site analytics like popular products, trending products, and average additions to shopping baskets. Additionally, you can incorporate external data sources to introduce more metrics into your blends.
Based on the chosen blend, GrapheneHC arranges the sequence in which products are displayed, making sure that the appropriate products are prioritized and placed right in front of customers.
GrapheneHC Merchandising Templates: GrapheneHC’s merchandising template allows you to combine different merchandising strategies/blends in one place. Even without knowing how to code or hiring a development team.
Stock fragmentation: In GrapheneHC, you set rules for managing stock-level fragmentation. This means you can handle situations when inventory levels are unevenly distributed or broken down into smaller, harder-to-manage quantities using specified rules.
Custom ranges: In GrapheneHC, you can define your own custom ranges for any metric based on numbers, such as a product's price. This means you can group products or data points into specific categories based on their numerical value.
Search
Intent Recognition: GrapheneHC's product search can be recognized when a user's search query includes specific product details like size, color, or brand. It then automatically selects and applies the corresponding, relevant search filters to the results. This means a search for "blue jeans in size 16 for less than £50" will yield results like some blue jeans available in size 16 and priced at £50 or less.
Customizable search results based on search terms: You can choose the filters and facets to display based on the search term. For example, include a waist size filter for blue jeans searches but not for shirts. Interestingly, search terms in GrapheneHC can be used to initiate a personalized merchandising approach that remains active throughout the user's session, except when you create a new strategy.
Synonym Library: GrapheneHC includes a feature known as a synonym library, which is essentially a database or collection of alternative words or phrases that relate to your products. This functionality allows you to map different terms that customers might use to refer to the same product. For example, if you're selling sneakers, customers might also search for them using terms like "trainers," "running shoes," or "athletic shoes."
Search Redirects: GrapheneHC can help you guide users directly to a particular category based on their search terms. For instance, if a user types in "Sale," you can set up the system to automatically redirect them to the "Clearance" section. Moreover, GrapheneHC allows you to capture specific search terms and direct users to a custom-made landing page filled with products that are only relevant to their search.
Personalization
Advanced Commerce offers personalization tools for eCommerce businesses. This works because businesses can create personalized shopping experiences by using onsite action (customers' most visited product pages or most viewed product) to trigger personalized merchandising strategies. These strategies can be applied to product list pages, search results, and product recommendations—ensuring that the right product is shown to a customer. Not only that, GrapheneHC allows you to collect zero-party data through questions, forms, or surveys, which can then be used to personalize the shopping experience further.
CDN and image processing
GrapheneHC leverages its proprietary image processing technology to efficiently handle, store, and enhance product images for online display. This technology includes a content delivery network (CDN) to ensure images are efficiently distributed. What more? GrapheneHC equally supports integration with external image processing services and CDNs. This is feature I don’t see in a lot of search and merchandising platforms.
Open-source templating engine
GrapheneHC stands out with its open-source templating engine, inspired by Shopify. This engine offers familiarity and ease of use for those who have experience building Shopify websites. This feature simplifies customizing and creating eCommerce sites. GrapheneHC is also great at data handling and can return data in various formats, including JSON, through its APIs.
Support
GrapheneHC has a dedicated support page where you can easily contact the team. They have a knowledge base section, but it isn’t very easy to find unless you search out “Advanced Commerce knowledge base.” Unfortunately, the knowledge base only contains dummy text and no real guides. Also, there isn't any publicly available documentation about the APIs and how to use them.
There is a blog page where you can read case studies and blog posts to get insights about the company.
Pricing
There isn’t a publicly available pricing model for Advanced Commerce, so you must contact the sales team for more information.
WHAT DO USERS SAY?
Conclusion
Advanced Commerce's GrapheneHC platform is great for search and merchandising. Although its strength focuses on merchandising specifically, it's still good for handling search—although it's not one of the best for handling search compared to its competitors.
Its innovative features, like intent recognition and voice search, still make the platform stand out.
To learn more about implementing these solutions, feel free to contact us at Hamari Agency.
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