What are Storybooks?
In SAP Upscale Commerce, Storybooks allow you to create unique merchandising experiences, blending together products, categories, articles and images as well as linking to templates in your experience to tell a story. Storybooks provide flexibility on the layout of this content. You can think of Storybooks as aggregated content slots which hold different content types that you can mix 'n match.
You can use Storybooks for many business cases, for example:
- Highlight a promotional event that is coming soon or running currently
- Tell your brand's story.
- Create a compelling banner for each category
- Create shoppable content on your homepage
- Augment your site with complementary content, like showing recipes to complement your tea and coffees
- Suggest complementary products or content to the product or category being browsed, in a visually exciting way.
In this blog, I'll try to show you examples of how you can make use of the power of Storybooks, but first let's have a look at the key features of Storybooks:
- Add specific, preconfigured content, such as articles, categories, and products, to your Storybooks. Alternatively, add a content source, which supplies dynamic content from either a category, next sell, or tailored categories.
- Add a Storybook component anywhere in your SAP Upscale Commerce experience.
- Choose which fields you want your Storybook to display, its layout, and certain product behaviours, such as ATP checks on products.
- Configure triggers so Storybooks appear when consumers select a specific item, such as articles, categories, or products.
Now, Let's say you have a key shopping season coming up and want to highlight a promotional event: a sale on select types of coffeemakers.
It's as simple as creating a Storybook and adding content to it. This "content" would be the "Select Coffeemakers" category, using an image from the "Digital Assets" to highlight the category.
This will enable the consumer to go directly to the "Select Coffeemakers" category you have on sale when they click on the image. for example...
Using Storybooks, you can create a story with shoppable content on your homepage. Storybooks can blend content, such as a coffee guide, a link to the coffee beans category of products available for purchase, as well as some direct purchase items such as espresso makers.
You will be surprised by how easy it is to configure all of that from SAP Upscale Commerce workbench. The screenshot below provides you with an idea of how this is configured in the workbench.
Note: SAP Upscale Commerce allows you to assign one product to multiple categories so you can imagine having a temporary category for certain products you are offering on sale. That temporary sale category can be assigned in a Storybook for certain dates that you control.
You can easily control the Storybook display, layout and behavior in the "Experience". For example, in the Storybook layout, I chose the "Slide" Style and "Grid" with "3" columns in the "layout options" to create visually compelling and dynamic content and in the Behavior tab, I chose to "Autoplay slide" so the consumers don't need to slide it themselves.
I can also change the layout to be "Asymmetrical" to highlight one product and show other 4 products around the highlighted product.
That was just an example of a basic Storybook that has static "Content". Let's talk next about how to add a "Content source" to the Storybook.
Adding a "content source" to the Storybook supplies dynamic content from either a category, "Next Sell", or Tailored Categories.
For example, instead of displaying an image that directs the consumer to a category like the "coffeemakers" in the previous example, having "Category" as a "Content source" allows you to display all the category "Products" for the consumer to browse them directly from the Storybook. You can also control the display, layout, and the behaviour of this storybook. This allows you to create very dynamic browsing experiences.
What about adding some Artificial Intelligence to the Storybook?
SAP Upscale Commerce has great AI source types like "Next sell" and "Tailored categories" which you can add to your Storybook to add a personalized experience for your loyal consumers
"Next Sell" suggests some products to the consumer since they have already made a purchase. These products are determined by the data that’s compiled by the Intelligence service. This list of Next Sell products also changes each time this Storybook appears.
"Tailored categories" enables you to expose certain categories based on consumers based on their current session clicks, current location, last purchase, last product viewed and a prediction of what next category they are most likely to buy from.
Storybooks are extremely flexible when it comes displays, layouts and behaviors. Please check our Storybook layouts help page to know more about the different styles that you can use in Storybooks.
ok, now I get what Storybooks are, but how i can maximize the benefits of using it?
Introducing Merchandising Triggers
Triggers for Storybooks can be configured so that a specific Storybook is displayed in the context of a consumer's selection.
Merchandising triggers allow merchants to display a specific Storybook based on what the consumer selected: Articles, Categories or Products. The 'Products' tab allows you to select specific products or to select a category and have the Storybook associated with any product in that category.
For example, you can have an article talking about "The Espresso Breakdown: What's in a Latte?" and have it display a specific Storybook of shoppable products complementary to or referenced in the article. To do this, you would create a Storybook with merchandising triggers to be "triggered" when this article loads.
You can choose from "Articles", "Categories" and "Products", where your Storybook should be triggered
Conclusion
Storybooks can be powerful! Customers can use them to create unique and dynamic merchandising experiences to tell a compelling brand story. They give huge flexibility in design, storytelling and behavior.
Have questions on SAP Upscale Commerce Storybooks, don't hesitate to reach out to us.
Documentation links:
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