Adobe Releases SaaS Offering and a New Headless Frontend, Commerce Optimizer

Adobe Summit is Adobe’s annual conference bringing together industry leaders, marketers, developers, and business professionals to unveil the software giant’s latest product releases. This year was an exciting, potentially landscape-shifting, year of announcements for Adobe as they unveiled their new SaaS offering, Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service. 

Adobe Commerce’s strengths are well-known: it is a mature, highly extensible platform able to support solutions with highly complex and custom requirements. As new, more modular, lower-priced, and business-user-friendly platforms move upmarket though, Adobe’s complexity and TCO were becoming issues for certain merchants. The move to a SaaS offering, among other announcements, shows Adobe positioning themselves as a still powerful and flexible platform, but in a friendlier, easier-to-use, lower-TCO, accelerator-filled, cloud-native package.

Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Solution is a Faster, Simpler, Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Solution contains all the power and flexibility businesses and developers love about the platform, what’s new though is that the solution now includes pre-built themes, marketplace apps, native personalization capabilities, and pre-built data flows to expedite the movement of information between systems, like inventory info from a PIM to WMS for example. The new offering shows Adobe responding to market trends by making their platform faster and expediting time-to-market with no less powerful capabilities. Some other exciting new features of Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Solution include:

What’s New In Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Solution

• Cloud-native approach lowers TCO, removes some licensing fees, and accelerates innovation.
• Simplified developer onboarding means easier platform setup and feature deployment.
• Pre-built themes accelerate storefront launch and development and a includes B2B-focused theme, Bodea, launching this fall.
• Enhanced content authoring has pre-configured options for document-based or WYSIWYG editing.
• Auto-configured API mesh seamlessly integrates with the commerce backend, runs locally, and acts as an orchestration layer allowing modular selection of backoffice systems.
• Faster integration buildout simplifies connections with ERP, CRM, PIM, taxes, shipping, and payment systems.
• Pre-defined data flows and scaffolding include product options, customer data, stock, orders, and shipments.
• Pre-built scaffolding streamlines setup for payment gateway, tax, and shipping integrations.
• Marketplace apps and ISV integrations include support for Braintree, Stripe, ShipperHQ, Dotdigital, Akeneo, Yotpo, HubSpot, and more.
• Migration Services ensure a smooth transition from legacy instances to SaaS, including integrations and customizations via App Builder.
• Expanded marketplace apps include ERP, PIM, payment, shipping, and tax integrations.
• Native personalization and experimentation offer integrated testing and customer experience optimization.
• Seamless deployment of data sharing with Adobe Experience Cloud for enhanced insights and performance.

Adobe Commerce Optimizer is a Modern Frontend, Compatible With Almost Any Backend 

Adobe Commerce Optimizer is a headless frontend offering personalization capabilities, intelligent search and discovery, generative AI options, and an ability to aggregate data and product information from various backend systems and consolidate it into Adobe’s category filters. 

This frontend allows businesses to “optimize” their commerce solution because it improves data flow and CX while granting access to Adobe Suite products without replatforming their whole commerce system to Adobe Commerce. By importing catalogs from pre-existing backends into Commerce Optimizer, merchants gain access to Edge Delivery Service, AEM, or any other Adobe Suite products. The Commerce Optimizer makes gaining access to Adobe’s customer experience-improving products easier than ever before.

The Commerce Optimizer can be used as a baby step to replatforming onto Adobe Commerce for brands on competing platforms or legacy homegrown solutions. 

Some other exciting features of Commerce Optimizer include:

• Scalability and customization options that expand product catalogs and business units seamlessly.
• Organic Traffic Growth Boosts search engine rankings (SERP) and improves conversions with data-driven insights.
• Data Aggregation that ingests and unifies data from multiple sources for better decision-making.
• Organizational Structuring defines business groups through customizable channels.
• Access Control & Personalization policies that filter data access to deliver the right content to the right experience.
• SaaS-Based and Scalable Services powered by a robust catalog data model for efficiency and flexibility.
• An enhanced search experience that includes:
  • Real-time search results with typo tolerance.
  • Search merchandising rules for better product visibility.
  • Synonym management to refine search accuracy.
  • Intelligent Facets – Ranks and selects the most relevant filters for precise results.
  • Ultra-fast search performance (under 200ms).
  • Supports B2B and multi-language environments.
• Advanced Personalization & Recommendations
  • 13 unique recommendation types.
  • Includes behavior-based, personalized, item-based, and popularity-based recommendations.

These two announcements are massive, and on top of that, Adobe announced an integration with Tik-Tok Shop, making it clear that Adobe is leveling up their already extensive offering. 

This Adobe Summit shows the platform is moving aggressively toward the future, looking to expand their market share of the enterprise space. 

Are you curious about how these new offerings might impact your solution? Do you want to implement Adobe Commerce Optimizer and see what it can unlock in your solution? 

Talk to an expert at the Commerce Practice of Publicis Sapient today!