Unlock the Potential of Composable Commerce with SAP Commerce Cloud

The world of eCommerce is rapidly evolving, and organizations need to keep up with the latest advances to remain competitive. SAP Commerce Cloud is a powerful platform for businesses to leverage the power of composable commerce, helping them to unlock new levels of success and growth.

In this article we’ll dive deeper into the benefits of composable commerce for SAP Commerce Cloud users, how you can go composable without replatforming and why you should begin your composable journey with frontend as a service.

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What is composable commerce?

Composable commerce is a new way of thinking about eCommerce. It builds on the concept of headless commerce , where the frontend and backend of a web store are decoupled, giving businesses greater flexibility, scalability, and control.

Unlike traditional eCommerce models, composable commerce is designed to be more modular and agile. It enables businesses to quickly and easily update and customize their web store to meet their customers’ ever-changing needs. With composable commerce, businesses can take advantage of the latest technologies and services to deliver a seamless, personalized experience to their customers.

Why you should decouple your SAP Commerce Cloud-based store

There are a number of reasons why businesses may want to decouple their SAP Commerce Cloud-based store. Here are some of the key reasons:

Flexibility - Decoupling your store gives you the flexibility to quickly and easily update, customize, and add new features to your store. This makes it easier to keep up with the ever-changing needs of your customers.

Scalability - With this approach, you can easily scale up or down to meet your customers’ demand levels. This makes it easier to manage your store’s growth.

Control - This will give you greater control over how your store looks and operates. This makes it easier to create a customized experience for your customers.

Performance - Easily improve the performance of your store, since the frontend and backend run independently.

Security - Greater control over the security of your store, allowing you to better protect your customers’ data.

Understanding the advantages of composable commerce for SAP Commerce Cloud users

Instead of the conventional commerce solutions with their limited personalization options and restrictions for frontend developers, headless commerce solutions are here to take their place. SAP Commerce Cloud users can benefit greatly from composable commerce, as it offers a suite of powerful tools to improve their omnichannel retail strategy. Here are some of the advantages:

Faster time-to-market - Separate development cycles for a functional layer and a presentation layer make it feasible to quickly adapt to market changes by running tests and introducing extra features.

Scalability - Decoupling your store makes it easier to scale up or down to meet your customers’ demand levels. Additionally, the system can be quickly augmented through technology-agnostic integrations third-party modules.

Fast web performance - Websites can be incredibly fast with a decoupled system, where the frontend and backend are connected through an API. This makes page loading faster and more efficient, greatly improving web performance.

Personalized customization - You can adjust the system to your exact business needs, facilitating an ideal customer experience.

Enhanced security - Decoupled layers only make the frontend accessible to the public, while the backend remains hidden, offering enhanced security of personal data.

No doubt, there are certain risks associated with this approach:

Initial expenses - Since headless platforms don't provide a complete product, the launching of distinct projects for frontend construction and other systems integration could prolong the time needed to reach the desired outcome.

More complex control - The possibilities for content display and presentation are reduced with a headless platform, so other services might be required for certain operations.

Encounters when going through the usual replatforming process

A full replatforming is a complicated, multi-stage endeavor which can take up to a year. This process has two parts: developing a fresh composable stack distinct from your current commerce system, then moving your data and transitioning when it is tested and working. Consequently, the advantages of a new composable framework will only be apparent after several months, not weeks, as opposed to a step-by-step method.

• High initial outlay

When replatforming, you have to take into account the expenses of a new eCommerce platform, frontend solution, headless CMS and other composable tools. On top of that, adding the cost of development, hosting and regular maintenance significantly increases the original investment.

• Extended return on investment

Due to the long development cycle and high original costs of full replatforming, you will have to wait a number of months before the investment is profitable. A fully developed eCommerce company with well-planned operations may come across many difficulties while performing both frontend and backend replatforming at the same time. Fortunately, by adding a FEaaS-based frontend like Vue Storefront on top of SAP you can gain flexibility, faster page loads and improved customer experience as well as eliminate all the obstacles mentioned above.

Go composable without replatforming

When businesses hear the word “composable”, they often think of replatforming. However, this is not the case. Replatforming involves completely rebuilding a web store, while composable commerce involves decoupling the frontend and backend of a store, allowing businesses to quickly and easily update and customize their store.

There is no need to replace your reliable eCommerce solution to take advantage of composable commerce. If you initiate your transformation with Frontend as a Service, which offers ready, pre-constructed and highly adjustable components and integrations, you can avoid custom development and attach a powerful frontend on top of your current SAP Commerce Cloud software without expensive and drawn-out replatforming.

With 50+ pre-built UI components, pre-made frontend architecture and multiple out-of-the-box integrations with popular eCommerce solutions like SAP Commerce Cloud, Vue Storefront will help you along, reducing the total cost of ownership and speeding up time-to-market.

A quick word about Frontend as a Service

Frontend as a Service (FEaaS) is an effective way of developing a frontend for a website that allows for a user-friendly, attractive, and fast frontend that is customizable with a single tool. This reduces the amount of time and money invested, resulting in a more powerful digital customer experience that can be implemented from the start.

Thanks to the already-available core elements for frontend development, developers can create a mobile-friendly and performant frontend layer in a significantly shorter amount of time, instead of having to construct it from the very beginning.

Why you should begin your composable journey with Frontend as a Service

The frontend of an eCommerce website is the most important part of an online business. It is the user interface that all promotional activities lead to, and it is the first chance to attract and impress shoppers when they arrive on the website. The store's outlook is a key factor in their selection to buy. As the customer's journey happens on the frontend, you need a speedily loading and mobile-friendly storefront architecture to construct and oversee top-notch customer experiences.

However, merely investing in a range of costly point solutions will not suffice. Poor architecture can result in slow loading speeds, slow indexing and poor customer experience, and these problems cannot be solved just by using third-party tools to increase conversion at specific touchpoints. Thus, it is better to build a new frontend foundation that is optimized for speed and mobile, rather than just plugging the holes.

When talking about SAP and fronted solutions, we should also mention that SAP Commerce Cloud announced the end of Spartacus 4.x lifecycle. If you want to learn more about the best alternative for Spartacus, or how to choose the right composable frontend option for SAP Commerce Cloud, head to our recent article on SAP Spartacus: New Alternatives to Consider .

Start with Vue Storefront

The new pre-composed solution from Vue Storefront and SAP Commerce Cloud makes it easy to start a composable commerce transformation. This setup eliminates the need for replatforming, allowing merchants to enjoy a lightning-fast frontend with their existing backend capabilities. By doing so, they can achieve increased revenue and improved customer experience from the outset, without the tremendous effort and cost associated with a full migration.

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Whitepaper: Vue Storefront & SAP Commerce Cloud

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