Adobe Systems Inc. today moved into the rapidly expanding e-commerce technology market with the launch of Commerce Cloud, a new service that builds on its $1.68 billion acquisition of Magento Inc. last year.  

Magento developed a popular online retail system that processed $155 billion in annual sales for merchants at the time of the deal. This system serves as the foundation of Commerce Cloud, which Adobe is offering as part of its newly updated Experience Cloud platform for online managing customer experiences.

Carrying over Magento’s core feature set, Commerce Cloud enables companies to create and maintain online storefronts using an integrated set of tools. Adobe has added on a number of new features designed to help merchants run their day-to-day operations more efficiently. Among these capabilities is a collection of analytics dashboards, aptly named Commerce Dashboards, that track inventory status and key business metrics.

An even bigger enhancement in Commerce Cloud is its expanded integration with other platforms. The service can work in tandem with Adobe’s marketing automation tools, dynamically customizing e-commerce content for different audiences with no human input, and now supports Amazon.com as well.

“Adobe Commerce Cloud seamlessly integrates with Amazon marketplace to help brands automatically synchronize product catalog, inventory and order information across channels. All orders from Amazon can be managed directly from within Adobe Commerce Cloud,” Jason Woosley, Adobe’s vice president of commerce product and platform, wrote in a blog post.

Having a presence on Amazon is becoming increasingly important for merchants. It’s estimated that the online retail giant’s share of U.S. e-commerce sales jumped 30 percent last year, to more than $258 billion, which represents nearly half the total market.

Commerce Cloud is just one of several additions that Adobe introduced for Experience Cloud today. Another key highlight is the new series of connectors that the company has added for Microsoft Corp. products. Enterprises now enrich the customer data they keep in Adobe’s Marketo platform with information from LinkedIn, as well as the Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales customer relationship management platform.

Image: Marco Verch/Flickr