Composable Storefront
Companies live from existing and new customers buying their products and goods. This is no longer a matter of course - neither in B2B nor in B2C. It is important for providers to understand target group needs and to think holistically and in an integrated way about the internal areas of marketing, sales, e-commerce and ERP. And then there is the digital provision of all solutions for target group-oriented market communication. With Composable Storefront as the interaction layer and the SAP commerce backend as the headless commerce engine, companies that rely on SAP can now put some serious horsepower on the virtual road.
A global manufacturer of components for motorcycles and bicycles addresses trade partners (vehicle and bicycle dealers) in the spare parts and service business, but also sells its products directly to the OEMs of the vehicles. End customers in turn receive valuable information on the products from a user perspective as well as a selected range of merchandising products for purchase.
The multi-level marketing and sales strategy focuses on different information and product offerings for the specific target group. Just as OEM customers, retail partners and end users expect in terms of value-adding and meaningful customer journey experiences.
Retirement for the Accelerator
SAP Commerce is an excellent engine for such a communication and e-commerce scenario. Thanks to its headless architecture, it offers sufficient flexibility and comes with a strong front end based on Angular. The days of complex and moderately flexible accelerator frontends are (fortunately) over. We also encounter the usual stumbling blocks at SAP with regard to the naming of their software products: yesterday part of the open source world "Spartacus", today the "Composable Storefront" fully integrated in SAP Commerce. This time, the software is really mature and powerful, so we can forgive this.
A digital orchestra
A clever data model is the basis for the scalability of the various application components of the SAP Commerce Cloud: Order Engine, Product Content Management, Smart Edit CMS etc. interact smoothly with other components of the SAP portfolio, such as SAP Marketing Cloud and S/4 Hana, as part of the end-to-end business processes. The OCC layer (Omni Commerce Connect), a RESTful API, handles the playout and receipt of data for the individual storefronts.
From an experience perspective, each target group has its own customer portal - the gateway to valuable, relevant and personalized information and purchasing options for products and services. The customer portal seamlessly accompanies the target groups along their specific journeys - from the first marketing moment through the purchasing process to digital customer service.
How do companies like the component manufacturer arrive at a customer-focused solution? The decisive factors are not so much the technical aspects - it is much more important that companies focus on their target groups and use this as the basis for a holistic digital vision for customer communication. Such a vision becomes the North Star for all initiatives that emerge in the further course of time. Only when the preferences of the target groups along their customer journeys have been clarified is it time to implement the digital platform. SAP Composable Storefront is the long-awaited environment for creating outstanding experience worlds in B2B2C models with SAP Commerce Cloud.
