The world of eCommerce technology has undergone a rapid transition over the past couple of years. With consumers increasingly demanding a diverse range of experiences both at the accessibility level as well as the functionality side, the era of tightly-coupled monolithic eCommerce platforms is nearing its end.
Today, more eCommerce platform vendors are treading the headless and composable commerce architecture domain for their offerings. This is to empower businesses to have more control over modular or even granular experience elements on their storefronts. On this note, the recent shift by SAP in its Spartacus avatar holds great importance.
Spartacus 5 was officially released in November of 2022 and has transitioned into a fully-mature SAP product and given a new name – SAP Commerce Cloud Composable Storefront. Let us explore what it means for the online retail industry.
What Is SAP Spartacus 5?
Spartacus 5 is the official storefront for the SAP suite of eCommerce offerings currently aggregated under the SAP Commerce Cloud brand. Technically, the storefront, as its new name indicates, is a completely composable, Angular-based JavaScript storefront that gels with the SAP Commerce Cloud exclusively via the Commerce REST API. The predecessor, Accelerate UI, is now being deprecated. Moving forward, Commerce Cloud customers will be offered Spartacus – Composable Storefront as the exclusive storefront for their retail website.
What are the Biggest Changes that Come with Spartacus 5?
Now that Spartacus 5 is officially available as a product offering from SAP, there are a ton of benefits that customers can enjoy as part of the changes that happened in the process. Let us explore the top 5:
Expanded Support
In the past, when Spartacus was mostly considered an experimental initiative, the support available for the storefront was limited. For developers, getting insights into relevant module details or configuration best practices was highly challenging. They often had to rely on 3rd party websites like Stack Overflow to understand what other developers had done for different scenarios.
However, with Spartacus officially becoming an SAP product, it gets a boost on the support front. All official SAP support channels will now support Spartacus, and getting answers to complex technical obstacles will no longer be a challenge. SAP will ensure that dedicated teams with expertise on the storefront will enable continuous knowledge transfer into official community channels to help the product achieve a highly supportive growth roadmap.
Technology Standardization
With Spartacus 5, all libraries within the storefront have been migrated to Angular 14. This ensures that developers can experiment with a wide range of development paradigms, tools, and scripting languages. In the end, this will help bring a more dynamic range of user experience capabilities to storefronts, helping businesses win over customers faster.
Backend-frontend communication and dataflows were previously handled by NgRx libraries, and SAP is in the process of eventually enabling the same with commands and queries, as the NgRx approach is not very customization-friendly.
Cart Abstraction
One of the biggest changes reflecting the composable commerce model of the new storefront in Spartacus 5 is the separation of the checkout cart into a unique package. With its dedicated library, the cart functionality offers better performance and enhanced flexibility.
Configurable Product Integrations
With the entry of Spartacus into SAP’s official product line-up, it has also been equipped with the ability to integrate seamlessly with other configurable products in the SAP Commerce Cloud family as well as the extended SAP suite of offerings like ERP, CRM, etc.
This brings forward exciting possibilities for businesses that already have their retail operations powered by SAP products. They can now leverage the composable storefront without worrying about how data transfers, configurations, etc., can be managed and administered in an integrated ecosystem.
One of the biggest beneficiary scenarios will be where businesses can easily empower shoppers to configure products at a single level or multi-level on the storefront before purchasing.
Quality Assurance
The new storefront will be guaranteed frequent releases as it continues to evolve into a powerful eCommerce solution. But with the accelerated pace of release, businesses can often feel apprehensive about stability and quality. This is where SAP steps in with its dedicated quality focus.
No build pipeline will make it into production without undergoing rigorous internal quality processes to ensure guaranteed performance and high quality of service.
The Way Forward
Spartacus will redefine how eCommerce experiences are engineered in the SAP ecosystem. On a simpler note, it will allow retailers who currently trust SAP’s powerful commerce and ERP solutions to bring a consistent and seamless experience to their online storefront as well.
However, getting ahead in a highly competitive market requires not just a great product like Spartacus 5 but also the experience and ability to utilize its features in the right way and configure the best operational scenarios for a seamless customer experience. This is where online retailers need to have a technology partner like Sapours.
Get in touch with us to know more.