Contentful is renowned for its ability to empower businesses to create exceptional digital experiences across every channel. Already a leading solution in content management for ecommerce, Contentful is further strengthening its capabilities in this area with a new feature library specifically designed for SAP Commerce Cloud Composable Storefront. 

The feature library is now in active development and will provide SAP users with an even more streamlined and powerful way to leverage Contentful's flexible content management within their existing ecommerce framework. Moreover, we’re proud to share that Contentful is one of the few content management systems endorsed by SAP, passing a premium-level certification for integration to SAP offerings and adherence to best practices.

Why we are building this

While SmartEdit, the default CMS for SAP Commerce Cloud, offers a quick start, it can sometimes become a bottleneck as your business grows and your content needs evolve. 

Imagine needing to manage content across multiple storefronts, languages, and channels — this is where SmartEdit can quickly hit its limits. 

For those seeking advanced multichannel, multilingual capabilities, Contentful emerges as the better choice.

Our feature library streamlines the integration of Contentful for SAP Commerce Cloud customers using SAP Composable Storefront, making the migration process smoother and faster. 

This standardized approach allows you to unlock the full potential of Contentful and elevate your digital commerce experience.

What is SAP Composable Storefront?

SAP Composable Storefront is a cutting-edge headless commerce solution built on Angular. 

This means you have the flexibility to manage your storefront independently from your SAP Commerce Cloud instance, enabling greater agility and faster release cycles. 

Think of it as separating the frontend presentation of your store from the backend commerce engine, allowing your development teams to work more efficiently.

You can watch SAP’s presentation Introducing SAP Commerce Cloud Composable Storefront for the full breakdown, where you’ll learn about key concepts like the Angular-based Single Page Application (SPA), its Progressive Web Application (PWA) features and SAP’s Omni Commerce Connect (OCC) REST APIs. 

The Composable Storefront application is managed independently from the linked Commerce Cloud instance, allowing organizations to maintain separate teams, workstreams, and release cycles between the Composable Storefront and Commerce Cloud applications. 

It is based on the open source Spartacus storefront application that was developed by SAP as a replacement for their legacy JSP storefront application.

A glimpse into the architecture

SAP Composable Storefront follows a standard model-view-controller design. The storefront application contains the components for the views and controllers, and the models (data) are provided by Commerce Cloud. 

The controllers access the models through connectors in the storefront application and pass the retrieved data to the views. A custom connector is necessary for retrieving a model (data) from any third-party applications, such as an alternative CMS.

Image courtesy of SAP, CRM and CX Blogs by SAP, Architecture of Spartacus & How To add a feature

Explaining the Feature Library

As part of the initial setup process, customers can select the features that should be enabled. To support this, SAP Composable Storefront uses a modular architecture that allows each feature to be enabled or disabled without impacting any other features. 

If two or more features share functionality, then that functionality is placed in its own module so it can be imported into any other modules. A feature module can contain a number of elements that can affect the behavior of the storefront application. These can include things like UI components, custom connectors, and scripts to support viewing the storefront application in a CMS. 

SAP Composable Storefront includes a SmartEdit feature library that can be used as a prototype for other content management systems. This is where Contentful comes in.

Contentful feature library: Current status and future roadmap

Currently under active development, our Contentful feature library is slated for release in the first quarter of next year and will be available on GitHub as an open source project.

The feature library is being developed primarily as an accelerator for existing SAP Commerce Cloud customers using SAP Composable Storefront and looking to migrate from SmartEdit to Contentful. However, it can also be used to accelerate new implementations. 

Beyond the initial release, we're committed to continuous improvement. Future iterations will include features like personalization, A/B testing, and pre-defined content components based on Contentful best practices. Imagine delivering personalized content recommendations to each shopper or running A/B tests to optimize your product pages — these are just some of the possibilities we're exploring.

In addition, we are considering making the feature library installable using the SAP schematics design pattern.

The bottom line

This new Contentful feature library for SAP Commerce Cloud Composable Storefront promises a major step forward in empowering SAP users to leverage the full potential of Contentful's agile and flexible content management capabilities. 

By streamlining the integration process and providing a standardized approach, we're enabling faster time-to-market, easier content updates, and ultimately, a superior digital experience for your customers.

With its modular design, future-proof extensibility (including planned features like personalization and A/B testing), and open source availability, this feature library is poised to become an invaluable asset for both existing SAP Commerce Cloud users and those embarking on new implementations. Stay tuned for the official release in Q1 of next year!

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