SAP Commerce Cloud kicked off the new year with many exciting features to help our customers drive profitable growth! Time and time again, we’ve heard how critical it is for organizations to provide connected, seamless experiences across all digital and physical channels, while driving profitable engagements and increasing lifetime value.
These themes were reiterated at the recently concluded Shoptalk event in March, where SAP showcased how organizations can drive agility and end to end processes by connecting their commerce, marketing, sales, and service data with back-office ERP data. Customers also saw how they could harness the power of insightful and AI-powered scenarios to future-proof their businesses and drive profitable growth with the power of adaptive composability. I am also extremely excited that we announced SAP Commerce Cloud, open payment framework, a new solution that extends payment options for customers. You will find more details for this later in this post.
Let’s dive in a bit more and have a look at the top features that have been released in the last 3 months for SAP Commerce Cloud. For more information and to see the product in action, take a look at the Q1 2024 Highlights webcast to learn more about our latest innovations.
Industry-Tailored
Achieve Profitable and Accurate Shipments Through Flexible Order Orchestration
Order Management Services empower organizations to seamlessly integrate all owned or third-party purchasing channels with fulfillment channels for consistent order experiences, a unified view of inventory, and valuable insights across all touchpoints. SAP Order Management Services helps ensure that your organization is meeting key goals for omni-channel order orchestration, is fulfilling customer promises reliably, and is utilizing data to understand relative performance and make improvements to the business.
Gain more control for orchestrating orders with deeper decision capabilities and easy to follow logic through no-code, low-code mechanism that speeds up implementation and drives agility. For more complex decisions, you can use any number of branches with a multitude of conditions with guaranteed scalability and performance. Order Management Services can provide real-time updates to business users and end customers based on order changes in backend systems. This provides more accurate visibility into the fulfillment of orders, allows a response to late customer change requests, and reduces returns by preventing unnecessary shipments.
Improve Customer Satisfaction Through Flexible Sourcing Controls, Including Bundles
SAP Order Management Sourcing and Availability provides higher agility on sourcing products that might come as a group of products sold together in a bundle. We can now source products either as a full set or as individual products, removing complexity for shoppers. This enhances revenue generation by offering products both individually and as part of sets, simultaneously boosting customer satisfaction through the assurance of complete set availability. Newly added capabilities will allow organizations to configure the following:
- Support for sourcing and availability of sets/bundles
- Separate availability of each product of the set when required
- Enforce the availability of full sets/bundles
- Option for sourcing of all products in a set/bundle from the same location
Improve Operational Efficiency through Sourcing Analytics and Insights
We’ve added the ability to review past sourcing information to improve operations in a unified commerce environment. Order specialists can go back in time and analyze requested products, selected sites, and sourcing results more broadly. This helps to gain insights through analytics that can improve operational efficiency, all without having to re-run the sourcing logic.
Enhanced Financial Services Accelerator now available on SAP Store
SAP Commerce Cloud, financial services accelerator is designed to empower organizations in the financial services sector. With its self-service and commerce capabilities, customer experiences are simplified through digitalization, reducing duplication in data collection, and providing customers with personalized product options for easier purchase decision-making. Our modern composable storefront enables insurance and banking customers to quickly customize and build their own insurance and banking products using a set of predefined process templates. The inclusion of self-service capabilities allows customers to conveniently view their dashboard, compare quotes, change policies, schedule appointments with an agent, and perform other tasks results in time savings and a streamlined experience.
SAP Commerce Cloud, composable storefront, also received many recent enhancements that improve the B2B buying experience, the management of user profiles, and the search experience. These enhancements provide more control, save time, and make for a more intuitive experience.
B2B Quotes Provide Greater Control and Ease of B2B Transactions Between Buyers and Sellers
Have your sellers ever wanted to be able to start and view a B2B customer quote, and to minimize the back and forth needed to finalize the transaction? This is now available in a headless fashion for SAP Commerce Cloud, composable storefront, to streamline the B2B quote process.
B2B Commerce Quotes enable the negotiation of a final price for an order between buyers and sellers. Buyers can create and submit quote requests to sellers. Alternatively, sellers can also create quote requests for their buyers using the Assisted Service Module (ASM). This lets you open a new sales channel and increases your team’s productivity by negotiating digitally with full access to customer preferences. SAP CPQ is also supported in SAP Commerce Cloud, composable storefront, to empower your sales team and partners to offer complex product configurations, optimized pricing, and great-looking proposals.
Drive Productive and Intuitive Workflows with User Experience Enhancements
We have improved the user experience with My Account UI and Recent Searches to save users time on managing their profile and viewing search history. With My Account integration from SAP Customer Data Platform, shoppers can quickly and easily manage their personal details such as email address, password, notification preferences and consents, and view service request details. This, along with previous Customer Data Platform integrations such as those highlighted in the Q3 2023 release blog, further strengthens the benefits of connecting SAP solutions.
With Recent Searches functionality, shoppers no longer need to remember what they were searching for, and if it is still relevant. Shoppers can now revisit previously used search terms, saving time and frustration while providing a streamlined search experience. Recent Searches can boost conversion rates as shoppers are more likely to make a purchase when they see search phrases they have recently used and find relevant results quickly.
On a technical note, we are also using the newer <picture> tag instead of <img> throughout for better control and better-looking images at specific screen sizes. This enables responsive image selection for modern browsers that have support for srcset and media queries. But what if you are using legacy browsers? Not to worry because, as a fallback option when srcset is not provided, the media component will use the <img> tag.
Adopt Frontend and Backend Updates More Easily
Starting in February 2024, SAP Commerce Cloud, composable storefront uses the same continuous release numbering system as core commerce (2211.21 April 9, 2024), making it easy to align the frontend and backend update releases. There is now one place for all documentation, with one continuous documentation set, clear visibility of what’s new, and the same structure as core commerce, making it simple to find content.
Around February of each year, there will also be an annual framework update release to the newest Angular version. By having the framework update release around the same time each year, we are making the updates predictable. The framework was most recently updated to Angular v17 to keep up to date with compliance and provide faster performance. According to the Angular blog, v17 improvements include “deferrable views which brings performance and developer experience to the next level, up to 90% faster runtime with a built-in control flow loops in public benchmarks, and up to 87% faster builds for hybrid rendering and 67% for client-side rendering.”
Connected
Extend Payments Options with Open Payment Framework [Preview]
SAP Commerce Cloud, open payment framework, available in preview now, integrates with multiple third-party payment providers, including Stripe, Adyen, Worldpay and Airwallex. Organizations can easily adopt this plug-and-play solution, reducing integration complexity. The framework is extensible and headless, enabling independent operation of front and back ends, catering to diverse channel needs, and adding innovative solutions seamlessly. It covers common payment requirements and end-to-end payment processes across authorization, capture, refunds, and re-authorization and automatic updates with security and compliance standards. It also ensures customers have the freedom to pick their preferred payment method, which enhances the checkout experience.
As we take on the challenge of payments, we hope you are as excited as we, and our partners are about this, and enjoy this sneak preview before its General Availability release!
Insightful
Observe, Track, and Manage Performance of SAP Commerce Cloud Environments with Personal Access Token in Dynatrace
Customers can now access Dynatrace data via API to monitor the performance of their SAP Commerce Cloud environments. Personal Access Tokens enable customers to generate a token for API usage without administrator rights. The available scopes are bound to your permissions, which means you can only use the API counterparts of authorized features, and you can only access the data from authorized management zones.
View the documentation on how to generate the Personal Access Token.
Optimize Your SAP Commerce Cloud Infrastructure Utilization for Better Performance and Compliance
Have you ever wondered if your SAP Commerce Cloud infrastructure is performing at its best? SAP experts can help you be more effective with your infrastructure usage.
With Infrastructure Assessment Service for SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP experts will review your SAP Commerce Cloud environment and highlight any areas where the infrastructure is being most heavily utilized. Specialists from SAP will dig into these areas to identify potential improvements that could reduce and optimize the use of infrastructure while enabling efficient operations for peak seasonal loads.
Adaptive
Painless Kubernetes Upgrades Minimizes Disruption
SAP Commerce Cloud will now remain accessible and operational throughout upgrade process with no downtime. Customers can get the latest security and performance patches without interruption from our new cloud upgrades, meaning full continuity for your customers’ shopping experiences.
What’s more is that these changes are transparent and do not require testing of your implementation. All new environment upgrades will be executed with this improved method. You can read the FAQ in SAP for Me for more details.
New SAP Store Additions Bring Innovation and Cutting-edge Solutions
Recent additions to the SAP Store bring more innovation to our ever-expanding ecosystem, enhancing your digital experiences. We are excited to spotlight OneView Commerce that enables seamless omnichannel order execution. Omnichannel order execution requires coordinating across many channels and optimizing organizational resources, with the goal of delighting the customer with a seamless, convenient shopping experience that can create loyalty and high customer lifetime value.
- Oneview Unified Commerce Platform extends SAP Order Management Services into the physical store to maximize profitability and improve customer outcomes. Oneview Unified Commerce Platform provides shopping convenience by supporting all in-store fulfillment types for web-based orders ensuring that more orders are fulfilled rapidly and eliminates cancellations. Order types include pick up in store, reserve in store, ship from store with major carrier integration. Associate-optimized workflows also allow for efficient pick and pack orders and preparing them for customer pick up or to ship directly to the customer using built-in carrier integrations. Finally, if you have your own last mile delivery fleet, Oneview Commerce provides an intuitive delivery driver solution for at home deliveries.
- Are you a new customer that needs your commerce site to go-live quickly? SAP CX Services has an Accelerated Implementation Service for SAP Commerce Cloud that enables just that. The site can be up and running in only nine weeks! SAP CX Services can help you to fast track to value by offering a fixed scope, proven and reliable approach to implement standardized features with the flexibility built in to provide you with a solution that feels unique to your business.
Finally, we have some great news to share. We are extending our end of support for deprecated Accelerator UIs to Q3 2028 (previously stated as no earlier than 2025), and you can see the updated SAP Help documentation for more details. We will also have a dedicated webcast where we will cover the technical details of this topic in depth. Keep an eye out for calendar dates in our newsletter.
For more details on the above release features, check out the following resources:
- Q1 2024 SAP Commerce Cloud Release Readiness Kit
- Performance Optimization Best Practices
- SAP Commerce Cloud update cycle
- SAP Commerce Cloud Release Navigator single access point to release content
SAP Help Portal
Composable Commerce
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