Introducing Additional Personalization Approaches and Customer Consent Management

Laura uses segments in the process of defining a target group inside a customization. She typically doesn’t know which individual customer is currently assigned to a segment, nor the strength of this association–the affinity.

Instead of using Backoffice to define these associations manually, software developers can automate this process using custom code.

The good news: Laura’s daily tasks of defining and using customizations remain untouched.

Instead of using developers to manage segments and their customers’ association, it is also possible to apply the optional integration to SAP Emarsys. This integrates another powerful SAP tool optimized for sales purposes like campaigns and personalization. When integrated, SAP Commerce Cloud sends all storefront user activities to SAP Emarsys. This click stream includes, for example, executed searches, visited Product Detail Pages and products put into the cart.

Based on that input, SAP Emarsys now dynamically handles the "user to segment" associations and corresponding affinities from weak to strong. It then sends the information frequently back to SAP Commerce Cloud. There is more good news: Laura's daily tasks to define and use customizations again remain untouched.

It's important to make sure products presented to customers on the storefront are products the customer is interested in. This kind of merchandizing is very time-consuming when done by hand, or even impossible. With the power of AI, the task becomes a lot easier.

Intelligent selling services for SAP Commerce Cloud, or ISS for short, extends the functionality of SAP Commerce Cloud (licensing terms apply). As previously described for SAP Emarsys, all customer activities, the "click-streams", are also sent to ISS and processed there. ISS uses AI capabilities to present interesting products to customers, usually via product carousels. These carousels are populated based on user behavior, site-wide metrics like trends, and configurable business metrics like margin.

Laura's colleagues from Merchandizing and Sales are responsible for tuning these carousel metrics to decide which product mix will be displayed. There are several product mix types available. Each one is generated using different inputs for different purposes, such as trending, recently viewed, complementary, or related products.

The good news: Laura’s task is simply to add these ISS product mix carousels to the best matching locations on the storefront. She uses SmartEdit to drag and drop them to the correct content slots.

Laura handles ISS product mix carousels like "regular" components. They display personalized content without the need for customization in SmartEdit. Intelligent selling services for SAP Commerce Cloud provides the information in the carousels directly to the storefront.

The following image shows a product carousel of the most popular products generated by ISS and added to the home page by Laura using SmartEdit:

Before covering the possibilities of consent management provided by SAP Commerce Cloud and other integrated solutions, let’s understand the purpose of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) first:

GDPR applies to the processing of personal data of natural persons, whatever their nationality or place of residence in the EU. It gives individuals control and protection of their personal data. It affects data controllers, who determine the purpose and means of processing personal data, and processors of these controllers.

Who must comply?

Organizations that offer goods or services to, or monitor the behavior of EU data subjects and the people that process or hold the personal data of EU residents.

Great, but what does it means for customers visiting Laura’s Web site?

In essence, we have two groups of users visiting the storefront:

1. Anonymous users
2. Logged in users who had registered before

Anonymous users can decide whether they want their data to be tracked by accepting or declining consent. The consent popups appear at the top of the storefront and display the name and description of a particular user tracking service. When the anonymous user accepts or declines to give consent, the popup disappears, and the decision is saved to the system.

The same decisions are also provided to logged in users when visiting the storefront for the first time, saved to the system and reused from now on. These decisions also overwrite any previous ones made as an anonymous user. Consent management is also available in the My Account area and enables the logged in users to manage their consent choices. A logged in user may provide more data than an anonymous one, for example, previous buying journeys and orders, gender, geo-location, age, and so on.

Even though it is not Laura’s responsibility to enforce GDPR compliance of her Web site, she should at least know the following facts:

SAP Commerce Cloud doesn't make a company’s webstore GDPR-compliant automatically. The solution only assists in providing the tools, features, functions, and so on, to help meet some of the relevant requirements. Many of the GDPR requirements are not related to the solution. Therefore, GDPR compliance depends on the individual company using SAP Commerce Cloud.