The Benefits of an Agile CMS for eCommerce Stores: A Storyblok Review

In the world of eCommerce, content is king. The success of an online store largely depends on the quality of the content it produces. However, creating and managing content can be a daunting task, especially for the eCommerce businesses that seek to tap into new markets and regularly introduce new product lines.

We frequently hear from eCommerce retailers who struggle with their content creation workflows. Their content creation processes are often slow and disorganised, lacking the necessary structure and reliable tools to facilitate the rapid introduction of new content.

To tackle these problems, we’re beginning a series of articles in which we’ll review some of the best content management solutions we’ve found while working with retailers for nearly 15 years as an eCommerce agency. We’ll be talking about tools and techniques that eCommerce stores can use to streamline their content management and start publishing better content at a faster rate.

The first solution on our list and a tool that Media Lounge has been recommending to nearly all clients and prospects alike is Storyblok. Storyblok is a headless CMS that aims to help eCommerce stores create and manage their content in a more efficient and effective manner.

Storyblok has all the characteristics of what we’d call an agile content creation system. There are many benefits to using an agile CMS in eCommerce, but here are some of the most important ones:

●     It’s easy to use and saves a lot of agency and clients’ time.

●     It greatly increases content creation speed.

●     It helps produce high-quality content that captives audiences, engages your customers, and drives sales.

●     It allows you to scale your content with the growth of your business.

●     It uses agile workflows to improve team collaboration.

Let’s go through these benefits one by one to help us understand how taking this agile approach with Storyblok helps eCommerce businesses exactly.

Ease Of Use And Time Saving

You may think that, as an agency, we want our clients to be completely dependent on our services and come to us with every single issue they might have with their website. This way we can bill them for as many hours as we can and hit our sales targets. But in reality, we want the complete opposite.

Developer resources are scarce and expensive. Having to constantly allocate these resources to little bug fixes and minor issues on a client’s website is not a good use of neither our nor the client’s time. This is why we prefer a situation where clients are able to fix small issues themselves and be able to keep introducing new content to their stores without relying on agency resources or external partner’s delivery times. This gives both us and the client more time to focus on long term optimisation that results in growth.

Storyblok eases this pain greatly. Its intuitive design makes it easy to use for even non-technical users to manage content without requiring coding knowledge. This way retailers can prioritise quality content creation and save time without getting bogged down by technical back-end details.

Creating High Quality Content And Publishing It Everywhere

What Storyblok does best is what’s in its name. It helps create captivating stories from content blocks that are more engaging than the stagnant and overused content you will see on many eCommerce websites. These blocks can then be adjusted and reused any time across your website as well as other media. Instead of treating every tweak to a web page like a separate, monumental task, Storyblok provides you with a range of content management tools that will help organise content in a more effective way. This includes the ability to categorise and tag content for easy searching and schedule it for publication at a later date.

This is particularly helpful for eCommerce stores that add a large number of new products, need frequent updates to product pages, or want supplementary content added to specific product lines. For instance, if you sell restricted items, you can simply create a content block that explains your verification process, instead of manually adding it to every relevant page. Or, if there is something unique about how you source materials for a particular product, you can create a block to explain it on the product page without relying on your agency for updates or new templates.

Improved Team Collaboration

According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, businesses that use agile content creation enjoy a 22% increase in team collaboration compared to those that do not use this approach*. Storyblok makes it easy for teams to collaborate on content creation and helps to remove workflow bottlenecks and streamline the content creation cycle.

With Storyblok, your team can focus on their own tasks within one CMS. At the same time, multiple users can work on the same content simultaneously. Storyblok provides a version control system that tracks changes to the content, so you no longer need to worry about conflicts or losing work. This ultimately leads to better quality content and fewer errors.

Should You Consider Storyblok For Your eCommerce Store?

While Storyblok is designed to work seamlessly with almost any eCommerce platform and can be integrated to work across multiple content channels, the benefits it could bring to a particular eCommerce store will depend on their content creation needs and the platform they are using.

Stores that use platforms that require a lot of dev work and coding, such as Magento, will benefit the most as Storyblok will allow them to simplify their content creation process by shifting a large part of their day-to-day content work to the front-end. This will make it much easier to add new content and free up a lot of developers’ time, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks.

However, stores that use a SaaS platform like BigCommerce can also benefit from using Storyblok. While most SaaS platforms typically have their own themes and templates, adding Storyblok can significantly improve the available options and enhance your content creation capabilities. If you’re a store that frequently publishes new content, then having Storyblok will be highly beneficial, even if you’re on a SaaS platform.