What exactly can Adobe Commerce merchants accomplish with Klaviyo? 100x ROI, for starters

Justin Ragsdale, VP of strategy at full-service digital agency IM Digital, calls Adobe Commerce the “Rolls-Royce of ecommerce platforms.”

Think of it this way: A typical Toyota “is standardized and mass-produced, and the average manufacturing time for a car is around 18 hours,” Ragsdale points out.

With a Rolls-Royce, by contrast, “parts are hand-built. Each feature is custom-designed and tailored to the buyer, and production time takes around 4 months.”

In other words, if your ecommerce store is built on Adobe Commerce, you value extensibility, flexibility, and the ability to scale up and down as necessary—which is exactly what makes Klaviyo such a smart solution for the Adobe Commerce merchant’s marketing, data, and analytics needs.

Within Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe offers its own proprietary marketing, data, and analytics solutions. But you’d need to purchase at least 3-4 separate products to replicate Klaviyo—and none of them are cheap.

“Those products are super powerful,” Ragsdale says, “but they require extensive development, and they can cost significantly more than competing out-of-box solutions like Klaviyo.”

Not to mention hundreds of thousands dollars a year in licensing and maintenance. In the midst of a historic economic downturn, even a business doing $50M-100M a year probably doesn’t have those kinds of resources—financial or human.

“Members of smaller teams wear many hats and spend a lot of time focused on all the other aspects of the business,” Ragsdale points out. “Being able to easily integrate Klaviyo, grab all of that data, and then set up these set-it-and-forget-it type of automations, has a dramatic impact on the top and bottom line of the business.”

Most of IM Digital’s Klaviyo clients, whether B2C or B2B, use Adobe Commerce as their ecommerce platform. “They’re using Klaviyo for everything because it’s so incredibly easy to use,” Ragsdale says. “With everything else that’s going on, Klaviyo requires a relatively small investment of time and money to get powerful automations up and running.”

The numbers show just how cost-efficient Klaviyo really is: On average, Adobe Commerce merchants achieve 100x ROI with the platform. And the more cost-efficiently your business can operate, the more funds you’ll have available for expanding product lines, standing up different teams, and building a better brand experience for your customers.

Read on to learn:

1. Why ecommerce merchants choose Adobe Commerce
2. What makes up the typical Adobe Commerce tech stack
3. 3 reasons Adobe Commerce merchants achieve 100x average ROI with Klaviyo
4. How to get started with Klaviyo on Adobe Commerce
5. Adobe Commerce FAQs

Why ecommerce merchants choose Adobe Commerce

After acquiring Magento in August 2018, Adobe now offers two ecommerce platforms.

Magento Open Source, previously known as Magento Community Edition, is a stable, customizable, self-hosted ecommerce platform that offers essential ecommerce features available free of charge. According to Adobe, it’s part of the company’s initiative to “empower individual developers and foster small businesses who aspire to grow fast.”

Adobe Commerce, previously known as Magento Enterprise, is a cloud-hosted, “agile B2B and B2C commerce platform which enables merchants and brands to accelerate revenue through customer-centric digital commerce experiences across online and physical spaces,” according to Adobe. Compared to Magento Open-Source, it provides more out-of-the-box features, including what Adobe calls “the richest set of enterprise-grade commerce experience capabilities from marketing to merchandizing to fulfillment.”

What makes Adobe Commerce different from other ecommerce platforms? Adobe puts it this way: “Whether you’re a B2B ready to go direct to consumer or a B2C managing several brands in 10 different languages, Commerce lets you manage multiple channels and brands and expand into new countries, simply, from one platform.”

Importantly, both platforms are open-source, offering full code access and what Ragsdale calls “unrivaled flexibility” from a development perspective—which means businesses operating out of them can build a unique ecommerce solution from the ground up.

“That’s why people buy Adobe Commerce,” Ragsdale says: “so they can get in there and configure it however they want to configure it.”

What kind of business should operate on Adobe Commerce?

Whereas the ideal customer profile for Magento used to be “anybody and everybody,” Ragsdale says, Adobe Commerce is an ecommerce platform that caters specifically to larger businesses making at least $30M in GMV—and, ideally, significantly more.

“You’re going to be paying higher licensing and maintenance costs with Adobe Commerce vs. some other ecommerce platforms, and it costs a lot more to implement,” Ragsdale says.

Plus, with a custom-built solution, retailers that operate on Adobe Commerce require ongoing dev support to maintain and update the system. Whether that support is in-house or outsourced, it’s usually not cheap.

The ideal customer profile for Adobe Commerce, then, has shifted toward “enterprise businesses that have unique, tailored processes and need a lot of custom functionality,” Ragsdale explains.

“People buy Adobe because of its flexibility, because of its scalability, and because of its ability to tailor and customize unique online shopping experiences that specifically suit their business model and their consumers’ expectations.”

3 examples of “extensibility, flexibility, and scalability” at work

“Extensibility,” “flexibility,” and “scalability”—all these words get thrown around a lot in the ecommerce tech space. But what do they actually mean?

Ragsdale provides a few concrete examples:

1. You want to customize your check-out process

Let’s say you want to give your customers the option to pay with ACH or a purchase order, or to place an order without offering payment at the time of check-out.

Many ecommerce platforms won’t let you do this. They require a dollar value and a payment to complete an order, Ragsdale points out, and the basic check-out flow is untouchable—which is why all check-outs built on other platforms look the same.

Or, “it’s possible, but you’d have to custom-develop complex workarounds,” Ragsdale explains.

With Adobe Commerce, by contrast, “you can easily build a unique check-out process tailored to your business model,” Ragsdale says.

2. Your website needs to accommodate regular spikes in traffic volume

Ragsdale recalls one client that launched a sale in partnership with a celebrity—and watched web traffic jump from a couple hundred visitors to 100K per minute.

With a SaaS platform that hosts on your behalf, “you don’t have any control over the speed of the platform, or how many resources are being dedicated to the servers at a given time,” Ragsdale points out.

In the event of a massive increase in traffic, then, “you would have to create a waiting room where, instead of throttling resources for your platform, you’re throttling traffic into the platform, because you know you can only handle so many,” Ragsdale explains. Otherwise, “it would just break.”

By contrast, when you’re hosting your own website, “you can go into the hosting provider and allocate more resources so you can manage all of that traffic.”

3. You sell highly customizable products

Maybe you sell jewelry and offer a variety of options for customers to customize their order based on size, alloys, karat, custom engravings, and jewel shape or type.

Or maybe you sell gaming computers, and your customers use your website to custom-build their own systems, selecting their preferred case, power supply, hard drive, graphics card, and more.

“That would be incredibly difficult to build on another ecommerce platform,” Ragsdale explains. “It would require a lot of extra work, because you’re building so many customizable options and you’re making a series of decisions in real time with that technology to provide visual or price or whatever it is you’re playing around with.”

Because the open-source framework that powers Adobe Commerce, by contrast, allows for an unlimited number of attribute sets, it “enables you to take that information from the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system—what the product is, what the price is—and then implement it in a composable manner,” Ragsdale explains.

In other words, with Adobe Commerce, these kinds of unique applications are “what it’s made to do,” Ragsdale says. “It’s designed specifically to accommodate those types of business needs.”

What makes up the typical Adobe Commerce tech stack

Ragsdale says the typical Adobe Commerce merchant’s tech stack begins with a “source of truth”—typically an ERP system, which larger businesses use primarily for accounting and invoice procedures, as well as keeping track of customer details and managing inventory across multiple locations and sales channels.

After that, IM Digital usually sees the following elements in the typical tech stack for a merchant using Adobe Commerce:

• Order management system: Your order management system is how you track products along the supply chain, forecast demand, and streamline inventory replenishment.
• Shipping and fulfillment: Also known as third-party logistics (3PL) or warehouse management software, shipping and fulfillment technology helps you manage the fulfillment process from picking lists to packing to shipping to last-mile delivery.
• Product information management system: Also known as catalog management, this technology allows you to view, edit, and update your SKUs and catalogs to identify and resolve duplicate entries and display the right products with the right stock information.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) system: CRM technology optimizes the user experience and customer journey by managing and maintaining customer relationships, tracking your sales leads, and delivering actionable data on accounts, leads, contacts, and opportunities.
• Point of sale (POS) system: Crucial for ecommerce businesses with a brick-and-mortar presence, POS systems are payment processors designed for in-person transactions.
• Payment gateways: By contrast, payment gateways are how you accept payment from customers over the internet. They speed up the order-to-payment process and help you process orders conveniently, accurately, and securely.
• Fraud management system: This end-to-end commerce solution helps companies monitor, evaluate, mitigate, and prevent fraud of all types.
• Content management system (CMS): Often—but not always—built into ecommerce platforms, a CMS helps you manage, create, and modify content on your ecommerce site, including product images, landing pages, and more.
• Marketing automation platform: The best marketing platforms combine email and SMS in one platform and use automation—technology that manages, schedules, and executes marketing campaigns and processes, automatically, by applying if/then logic to prospect and customer behavior.
• Data and analytics platform: The purpose of data and analytics technology is to collect and display real-time insights about how your business is performing.

Across these tech solutions, most integrations with Adobe Commerce “are available via an API, which allows systems to communicate with each other,” Adobe explains. “The problem is that all platforms are not supported via an API, so understanding what is possible from a technical perspective is paramount.”

3 reasons Adobe Commerce merchants achieve 100x average ROI with Klaviyo

With a solution like Klaviyo, which combines marketing automation capabilities with powerful options for collecting, unifying, storing, and activating customer data across your tech stack, API limitations are not a concern—and neither are speed, sophistication, or scalability.

With 300+ built-in integrations and an open API philosophy, Klaviyo syncs data from across your entire tech stack, giving you the ease and flexibility to manage various personalized email and SMS marketing efforts across multiple stores. It’s the same flexibility you’re accustomed to with Adobe Commerce—brought into your marketing platform.

Here are 3 specific reasons leading Adobe Commerce merchants like Catbird, Ruroc, and CaseᐧMate use Klaviyo to deliver experiences that drive revenue, improve retention, and build lasting customer relationships:

1. Klaviyo integrations make it easy to unify your tech stack

When evaluating ecommerce integrations, Ragsdale says merchants should think about “all the things that you can do with that integration, how stable and secure that integration is, and how many people use that integration right now.”

And he believes Klaviyo’s pre-built Adobe Commerce integration, which syncs with your online store in just a few clicks, is one of the best on the market.

The larger the business, the more complicated the tech stack—especially for ecommerce stores built on an open-source framework like Adobe Commerce. Ease of integration, then, is of paramount importance when selecting new software.

“You want to be a data-driven company. You invested in an enterprise-grade ecomm platform. Why aren’t you monetizing it?” Ragsdale points out. “Klaviyo’s Adobe Commerce integration affords you the opportunity to monetize all of that data that you’ve been gathering this whole time.”

And the Adobe Commerce integration is just the beginning. With 300+ built-in integrations to top tech tools and open, flexible APIs that offer even more freedom to connect with any data source, Klaviyo makes it easy to unify your tech stack and access all the data you need—no matter the complexity of your business or product catalog.

2. Klaviyo powers limitless personalization—at scale

Many of the clients IM Digital transitions to Klaviyo were accomplishing the basics just fine with their previous marketing platform—abandoned cart automations, welcome series, promotions.

But “that’s not what Klaviyo was designed for,” Ragsdale says. “Klaviyo was designed to ingest all that customer data and create thoughtful, personalized experiences and communications across your digital channels.”

He’s talking about Klaviyo’s advanced segmentation and personalization functionality for sending ultra-relevant email and SMS messages at scale—all of which help Adobe Commerce merchants build more valuable relationships and boost customer lifetime value.

Thanks to Klaviyo’s built-in data capabilities, individual customer profiles within the platform effortlessly organize customer data from multiple sources. Unlike some other platforms, Klaviyo lets you use all that data to define target audience segments with as many conditions as you want, from customer demographics to past purchase behavior.

Here are just a few examples of the segments Adobe Commerce merchants can target by syncing their customer data:

• Product-specific audiences
• Full-price buyers
• Last year’s Cyber Monday shoppers
• Shoppers who’ve viewed the same product 5+ times without purchasing
• Customers who only buy on certain days
• Customers who are most likely to buy within the next 10 days

When building out ecommerce email marketing campaigns and flows in Klaviyo, dynamic content blocks and customizable templates make it drag-and-drop easy to personalize customer experiences. And because Klaviyo automations are built for ecommerce, Adobe Commerce merchants can use real-time data from across their entire tech stacks to trigger perfectly timed messages across email and SMS.

Klaviyo’s dozens of pre-built, time-saving automations include:

• Browse abandonment
• Abandoned cart
• Win-back emails
• Cross-sell
• Price drop alerts
• Birthday discounts
• Order and shipping updates

Ragsdale is a particularly big fan of that last bullet. “Most ESPs struggle to provide a solution for transactional messages,” he says—and providing a solution for transactional messages matters beyond ensuring a consistent brand experience.

“The happiest customer is the customer who just placed an order, or who just got their order delivered. Those are great times to market to your customers,” Ragsdale points out. “When your order confirmation and shipment emails are running through Klaviyo, you’re collecting data on that, and now you have the ability to monetize those customer engagements.”

3. Klaviyo pulls back the curtain on business performance

Finally, with Klaviyo’s built-in reporting tools, Adobe Commerce merchants can track campaign and flow performance and monitor all their most important business metrics in one place.

Klaviyo’s data and analytics features include:

• Pre-built and custom templates: Build your ideal reports and prioritize the metrics that matter most.
• Report scheduling: Automate reports on a weekly or monthly basis.
• Predictive analytics: Forecast future customer behavior and use predictions to hone audience segments.
• Personalized benchmarks: Quickly identify strengths and opportunity areas by comparing your performance against data from peer businesses.
• Automated A/B testing: Test variables like subject lines, images, and CTAs on your Adobe email campaigns and flows, text messages, and sign-up forms to learn what drives the highest open rates, conversion rates, and more.

How to get started with Klaviyo on Adobe Commerce

IM Digital can usually get Adobe Commerce merchants up, running, and ROI-positive on Klaviyo within 4-6 weeks, Ragsdale says.

Getting started generally requires just a few steps:

1. Determine which version of the Klaviyo extension you need.
2. Install the Klaviyo extension in Adobe Commerce (Magento 2).
3. Configure the Klaviyo extension.
4. Enable the Adobe Commerce (Magento 2) integration in Klaviyo.
5. Monitor the historical data sync to confirm it was successful.
6. Convert Adobe Commerce (Magento 2) order values into a single currency.

Migrating to Klaviyo from another marketing platform? If you’re ready to leave your old ESP behind, follow the relevant link to a step-by-step resource that walks you through migration process:

• How to migrate from Mailchimp
• How to migrate from Constant Contact
• How to migrate from Campaign Monitor
• How to migrate from HubSpot
• How to migrate from Listrak
• How to migrate from Sailthru
• How to migrate from Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• How to migrate from another email service provider

Combined with the flexibility of Adobe Commerce, a tech stack integrated with Klaviyo is the ultimate cost-effective solution for enterprise brands looking to turn one-time transactions into lifelong customer relationships.

“It’s so easy to get started quickly and start seeing results,” Ragsdale says. “Then you can continue to optimize and learn how to better use the data that’s coming into Klaviyo.”

Adobe Commerce FAQs

Does Adobe Commerce include ecommerce functionality?

Adobe Commerce is a full-featured ecommerce solution. Ecommerce features include:

• Quick, secure, mobile-friendly check-out experience
• Multi-brand solutions
• Integrated B2B functionality
• Headless commerce
• Channel management
• Product recommendations (powered by Adobe Sensei)
• Page-building tools
• Catalog services
• Live search
• Inventory and order management
• Store fulfillment
• Customer account management
• Payment services

Is the Adobe Commerce platform cloud-based?

Adobe Commerce is available as a cloud-hosted solution, but you can also host and develop locally on your own server or with a hosting provider of your choice. Explore Adobe’s detailed breakdown of the pros and cons of cloud vs. on-premises hosting.

What is the cost of Adobe Commerce?

Pricing for Adobe Commerce is not publicly available. To estimate the cost of Adobe Commerce, consider the following factors:

• Developmental resources, either in-house or outsourced, to manage the initial extensive implementation (it can cost $300K+ and 4-6 months just to get up and running on Adobe Commerce)
• Developmental resources, either in-house or outsourced, to manage ongoing maintenance
• Ongoing licensing fees, which vary based on the size and complexity of your business