In a recent survey from Aberdeen, 45% of customer experience  leaders say the top challenge for keeping up with changing customer expectations is that “increased competition requires differentiating based on customer experiences.” This emphasis on differentiated customer experiences calls for maximum agility, flexibility, and speed at the center of gravity of today’s modern enterprise: the digital commerce platform.

In today’s complex and multi-channel marketplace, organizations must constantly optimize to deal with emerging channels and new competitors while serving their customers best-in-class experiences to earn their trust and loyalty. Commerce systems that are not built for this design principle cannot help organizations adapt quickly or cost effectively.

Compose on Your Own Terms, Not Your Vendor’s

At ShopTalk, SAP is pre-announcing its new SAP Commerce Cloud composable offering, a different approach to composability than what has been available in the market thus far. This offering is predicated on the recognition that every industry and enterprise is unique and that existing one-size-fits-all approaches to composability are not ideal for most businesses. Through this SAP Commerce Cloud composable offering, merchants will be able to compose commerce experiences that best suit their individual needs today, wherever they are in their digital maturity journey, without jeopardizing flexibility down the line.

For example, some businesses may want a more traditional, “all-in-one” approach across areas such as order management, product information management, content management, personalization, and marketing engagement. Meanwhile, more digitally mature enterprises may want to compose best-of-breed digital commerce experiences and can now do so on a single platform. SAP’s unique approach to composable commerce can give our merchants that level of flexibility as well as anything in between, enabling them to future proof their investment without sacrificing agility. By adopting best-of-breed SAP and partner solutions on top of a highly flexible and proven platform, SAP Commerce Cloud customers can extend the solution’s capabilities and create an offering that fits their own unique business strategy, today and tomorrow.

Digital Commerce Composability Done Right

With SAP’s unique approach to composable commerce, SAP Commerce Cloud customers can drive profitability through agility by leveraging a feature-rich, extensible “digital anchor” solution, coupled with a vast pre-integrated and certified partner ecosystem. With its continuous innovation delivery model, SAP Commerce Cloud enables merchants to focus on delighting customers instead of investing in table-stakes capabilities that require stitching together disjointed solutions not designed to be interoperable at scale. SAP Commerce Cloud, composable storefront, the solution’s full API-coverage, “headless with-a-head” software, in conjunction with SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and Kyma Runtime, enables developers to extend SAP Commerce Cloud functionality with containerized microservices and serverless functions while keeping pace with their customers’ expectations.

Highly Curated and Strategic Partner Solutions

A rich and vibrant partner ecosystem is a key aspect of digital commerce success, so SAP is also introducing strategic relationships with the following curated, best-of-breed vendors from its existing extensive partner ecosystem:

• Contentful helps businesses connect, create, and extend content more efficiently so they can build faster and deliver at scale, no matter the channel or touchpoint.
• Coveo provides artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search and discovery, recommendations, and personalization to improve merchant profitability through higher conversion, increased average order value, and customer lifetime value.
• Akeneo provides an easy-to-use product experience management solution for retailers, distributors, manufacturers, and brands to organize and enrich product content, delivering impactful product experiences across all owned and third-party channels on a modern cloud-native platform.
• Bolt powers one-click checkout, identity, accounts, payments, and post-purchase infrastructure, helping to reduce friction for the customer by turning every checkout moment into an opportunity and driving higher conversion for the business.
• Mirakl enables businesses to capitalize on the platform economy by bringing their digital marketplace to life, expanding their business vertically to deepen customer and channel partner relationships and drive profitability while simultaneously reducing inventory risk.
• Pricefx supports the entire pricing journey, from setting optimal prices and managing the rebate process to maximizing your organization’s pricing power.

Benefit from an Industry-First Approach to Digital Commerce

SAP’s long and rich history of helping organizations from more than 25 industries grow and transform enables us to tap into our deep industry knowledge and expertise to deliver industry-specific digital commerce capabilities.

Unlike other commerce vendors that emphasize strength of technology alone, SAP is taking a more customer-centric approach by also pre-announcing the availability of our headless composable storefronts for financial services, travel, telecommunications, utilities, and public sector, on top of our currently available B2C and B2B composable storefronts for retail, consumer products, wholesale distribution, and industrial manufacturing. Industry add-ons can provide unique business workflows with pre-configured tools, capabilities, and storefronts that help shorten time-to-market, increase operational efficiency, and drive sustainably profitable growth through digital commerce.

Hear from our partners and customers:

“With SAP Commerce Cloud’s approach to composability, we’ve been able to create our own commerce platform with solutions we need, such as Contentful, to deliver the best commerce experience to customers. SAP Commerce Cloud is the essential power to implement business agility and flexibility, and ultimately to generate increased profitability for us.” 

– Matthieu Houle, CIO, ALDO Group

“SAP’s composable commerce approach allows us to work with customers in a way that offers significant extensibility on top of a proven, robust feature set. We’re excited to create the most flexible, scalable, and customer-centric solutions with these world-class ISV partners while maximizing the business value of our customer’s investments.”

– Ryan Heusinkveld, Chief Technology Officer, Smith

“We are thrilled to join with SAP as the content partner for SAP Commerce Cloud, composable storefront. The Contentful Composable Content Platform meets the unique demands of digital teams by making it easy to orchestrate content from multiple sources and publish to any digital channel. This helps companies reach new customers faster, maximize their SAP Commerce Cloud investment, and drive revenue.”

–  Steve Sloan, CEO, Contentful

“We are thrilled to have Coveo certified as an SAP endorsed app. SAP has been a natural partner for Coveo in B2B and B2C commerce. Together, we extend digital commerce capabilities to unlock profitable commerce growth with AI. Our enterprise-class AI platform complements the SAP Commerce Cloud portfolio by helping companies power online buying experiences we believe today’s shoppers expect – fast, dynamic, effective product discovery and relevant recommendations – and also provide the AI platform merchandisers need to maximize business outcomes versus managing manual rules.” 

– Louis Têtu, CEO and Chairman at Coveo

Drive Digital Commerce Excellence across the Entire Value Chain

By seamlessly and comprehensively connecting demand signals with the supply chain, SAP Commerce Cloud enables enterprises to drive profitable growth, regardless of their industry, business model, or level of digital maturity. SAP is consistently recognized as a leading digital commerce solution vendor by Gartner, IDC, Paradigm B2B, and other industry analysts. SAP Commerce Cloud can provide a highly scalable, fully featured, and flexible commerce platform for B2B, B2C, or B2B2C use cases.

SAP reaffirms its commitment to the digital commerce and customer experience categories and is taking a bold step into the future with a unique, industry-led approach to composability that puts merchants’ digital commerce needs front and center.