As more businesses are entering the e-commerce market, it has become excruciatingly difficult for them to keep up with the pace, adopt technological trends, meet consumer demands, and maintain consistent deliverability and productivity.
On top of this, adherence to the monolith architecture and rigid commerce platform makes it difficult to adopt transformation, leverage data, and customize business services. To overcome these shortcomings, SAP came up with a modern and radical solution termed SAP Commerce Cloud.
A cloud-based platform, Commerce Cloud empowers an e-commerce business with enhanced efficiency and productivity, expandability, customizability, and personalization.
Even though it sounds to be a much better solution than relying on a typical monolithic commerce architecture, businesses should gain appropriate knowledge about this platform. That being said, the following article will highlight the basic facts about SAP Commerce Cloud, including its features, architecture, benefits, and many more. ‘
Introduction to SAP Commerce Cloud
SAP has launched an array of generic tools and software platforms to manage various business operations, systems, and workflows. Commerce Cloud is one such tool that allows B2B and B2C businesses to provide an omnichannel experience to consumers across all touchpoints, including website, POS, mobile, and many more.
Cloud integration, allows enterprises to tap into datasets and acquire valuable insights about the market, consumer base, competition, and internal operations so that proper strategies can be put into place for further advancements and transformation.
The architecture of SAP Commerce Cloud
Before proceeding with SAP Commerce Cloud integrations, businesses must understand the platform’s architecture. It leverages the core commerce platform to handle all types of technical aspects, including storefronts, order processing, image and data rendering, and many more.
Apart from this, it also allows developers to write a custom codebase and personalize several features of the e-commerce platform as per the business requirements. Following are the technologies associated with the SAP Commerce Cloud platform.
- Java is used as the main programming language, both at the core and the custom codebase.
- Frameworks like Hibernate and Spring are used to handle the Java codebase at the backend and other cross-platform programming languages for the front end.
- The entire Commerce Cloud platform from SAP is hosted and run on the Tomcat server.
- To ensure a high degree of customization, the platform also encompasses Apache ANT language.
SAP Commerce Cloud and its features
Following are some of the prime features of SAP Commerce Cloud that businesses can leverage to foster innovation and facilitate improvements across several operations and workflows.
Omnichannel experience
The first feature that Commerce Cloud has is its omnichannel performance. It allows businesses to deliver a rich customer experience across all touchpoints, thereby ensuring consumers can have a customized buying journey. To ensure this feature, several headless APIs are implemented that allow decoupling of the workflows and independent functioning.
Real-time merchandising
With Hybris Commerce Cloud, it becomes possible for every e-commerce business to upload and manage web content in real-time through product image rendering, content rendering, page loading, and many more. As a result, customers can be easily driven to the core business as all the processes are conducted with optimal accuracy and precision.
Cloud-based infrastructure
From the name itself, it is evident the platform is cloud-based and allows businesses to tap into huge datasets for better decision-making, accurate and precise forecasting, and strategic analysis.
Once the core platform is migrated to the cloud server, all business operations can be conducted remotely. Furthermore, the cloud-based infrastructure allows optimal scalability and flexibility on the go, ensuring businesses can manage resources as per their requirements.
Pre-developed architecture
One of the major features of SAP Commerce Cloud that makes it a competitive commerce platform is the pre-developed architecture. The entire backend and frontend codebase is already present in the hosting server.
So, developers won’t have to write anything from scratch. all they need to do is work on the custom codes, provided the business wants to change any pre-existing feature or develop a new one for their e-commerce platform across all touchpoints.
Benefits of integrating SAP Commerce Cloud
- SAP Commerce Cloud offers numerous integrations with other third-party applications and tools, including the all-time famous Spartacus. So, businesses can render the advantage of the MACH-based architecture to reduce the complexities of a monolith architecture.
- It offers a seamless customer experience throughout their journey with the e-commerce business across all touchpoints, ensuring optimal performance and minimal friction.
- Thanks to the custom codebase of the Commerce Cloud, businesses can deploy personalized features to enhance customer experience and their engagement with the commerce platform.
- Another major benefit of SAP Commerce Cloud is its enhanced adaptability. In other words, the platform can be tuned to meet the requirements of several commerce businesses based on B2B and B2C models.
- Thanks to 99.5% SLA and advanced performance health checks, SAP Commerce Cloud delivers optimal performance and maintains a high level of productivity in real-time situations.
Conclusion
In this article, we have talked about the basic facts about SAP Commerce Cloud that businesses should learn before taking the next step. Even though it enables the core business to facilitate innovation and productivity, certain challenges should be addressed. Once done, it will become much easier to tap into the huge range of features and benefits of the platform.
