AppDirect Enhances Commerce Platform

APPDIRECT ENGAGE — AppDirect on Tuesday launched major enhancements to its AppDirect commerce platform that enables multidimensional commerce, or the ability to add, bundle, price and distribute new products and services.

The announcement was made in conjunction with AppDirect Engage, the vendor’s digital economy summit, which kicks off this week in San Francisco.

The platform enhancements include a next-generation checkout, report-builder tool and a new storefront builder.

AppDirect’s Dan Saks

“In a digital economy, we recognize that businesses want to sell multiple products – that could be SaaS, infrastructure, hardware as a service, support and all kinds of services, for example – so we enable a multiproduct environment,” Dan Saks, president, co-CEO and co-founder of AppDirect, told us. “It’s also multisided, which means that you can sell your own products but you can also sell third-party products, and multichannel, meaning that we can enable that across any channel, whether that’s a traditional channel such as retail, telesales, point of sales or CRM, and [we] also enable online channels like online marketplaces, app stores and third-party distribution, or connected-device app stores.”

Here’s a closer look at the new commerce platform enhancements:

AppDirect rebuilt Storefront Builder from the ground up. It’s the front-end shopping experience that allows companies to create a tailored marketplace experience for their customers.

Storefront Builder includes a theme manager and developer toolkit. The theme manager contains all of the components and styles needed to assemble, organize and manage a storefront without the need for code — for functions such as adding new pages, changing up merchandize or re-organizing elements. The developer toolkit contains an integrated code editor along with additional local developer utilities to provide full flexibility in creating unique and differentiated digital commerce experiences.

The Storefront Builder is supported by the new Next-Generation Checkout.

“One of the things that’s different in the digital economy is that it’s not just about selling services, it’s about managing those services in a recurring way,” said Saks. “That means that the customer experience starts at the point of sale.”

The next-generation checkout allows users to bundle and sell any type of product on the fly. From cloud services to physical products, the AppDirect platform now offers a marketplace with support for a range of products, including those with recurring billing. Features include shipping address handling, fulfillment services, shipping cost information, purchase history, physical device management, and convenient device configuration during checkout.

AppDirect also released new API addressable checkout services to create custom checkout experiences on and off the platform, enabling customers to bundle in third-party solutions wherever they have a digital channel. Additionally, the platform now features improved customer-facing invoicing options that allow for the addition of custom visuals and data objects.

The augmented commerce platform offers the new Report Builder tool, which gives the channel access to data and more intelligence about the customer, said Saks. The Report Builder tool allows users to access and query marketplace data including history, customers, invoices and payments, to generate or schedule customized reports.