From a technical standpoint, there’s never been a better time to build an eCommerce front end than now. The market is full of modern, well-built, and capable solutions, and you can be sure that you’ll be able to find the perfect one for your business. It can provide a stable foundation for you to build captivating experiences for your customers.
However, technical prowess isn’t the whole story here. Although we don’t tend to think about them as such, some eCommerce front ends come with inherent advantages in terms of marketing. SAP composable storefront, formerly known as SAP Spartacus, is one of the clear leaders in this area due to a number of key decisions in its design and development.
Here are 10 ways why choosing SAP composable storefront as your eCommerce front end will also directly improve your marketing capabilities.
1. Smooth user interface
For anyone who deals with web products, it’s obvious that there are a lot of nuances and specialized skills that go into designing user interfaces (UIs). However, judging whether the end product is any good effectively comes down to just two simple questions: is it smooth to operate and does it look attractive?
SAP composable storefront’s UI fulfills both of these criteria. It provides the building blocks that ensure a smooth user experience, but, at the same time, it leaves a lot of space for brands to express their unique identities. You can think of it as a canvas of sorts for designers and marketers to capture the attention of customers and enhance their shopping journeys.
Image source: Envato Elements
Attractive and functional design has been proven to boost conversion rates and customer satisfaction and loyalty, which are all crucial metrics for marketing efforts. It’s also a key part of creating memorable and shareable experiences for your audience. Although they’re more difficult to measure, they’re just as important to the end success of an eCommerce business.
As an example of the possibilities offered by the storefront, have a look at THAT Concept Store’s and Crocs’ websites. Although they both operate in the fashion and clothing industry, they’ve leveraged SAP composable storefront in very different ways to create experiences that reflect the unique character and values of their brands.
2. Optimized performance and scalability
Things move quickly on the internet. Trends come and go in the blink of an eye, and users jump from one cultural phenomenon to another. Your eCommerce business might experience a huge surge of interest at any time, either as a result of your marketing efforts or purely by chance, and its infrastructure needs to be ready to handle it.
SAP composable storefront is the right tool to transform the challenge of traffic management into a marketing advantage. Because it’s built with high performance and scalability in mind, it ensures that your marketing campaigns won’t compromise the website’s speed or functionality. This allows you to confidently embrace the fast-paced nature of the modern internet with flash sales, targeted marketing campaigns, and other high-stress activities, knowing that the platform can handle the increased traffic efficiently.
Black Friday is the perfect example of an event that’s a huge opportunity in terms of marketing. Depending on your strategy, it might be the most important day of the year for your business in revenue generation. At the same time, though, it can be a major stress test for your infrastructure and one that you can’t afford to fail, or you’ll have to wait a whole year for the next chance.
It’s a delicate balance to strike. Your system needs enough power for the peak moments, but maintaining it all the time would be a huge waste. This is where SAP composable storefront’s seamless scalability can make all the difference.
3. Flexibility and easy customization
Marketing success often hinges on personalized and targeted strategies. In today’s environment, personalized experiences aren’t the novelty they once were. Now they’re expected by customers and almost necessary if a business doesn’t want to stay behind its competition.
On top of this, the ability to adapt to evolving customer needs is becoming a marketing strategy in itself. It allows marketers to swiftly respond to market trends and consumer preferences to maintain a competitive edge in the dynamic landscape.
SAP composable storefront leverages this trend to offer unparalleled flexibility and customization options, both in terms of the broader marketing strategy and tools. It allows marketers to sculpt the storefront and implement highly customized solutions that best fit the strategies of their businesses.
Image source: FAEMA
For example, luxury brands such as FAEMA might want to take their product pages in the direction of elaborate, almost landing page-like art pieces that wow visitors. On the other hand, clients of Oilfield Marketplace, which specializes in industrial equipment, likely wouldn’t appreciate it. For them, clarity and concrete information are the top priority and the store’s functionality reflects it.
4. Agility and freedom in the choice of tools
Staying at the forefront of marketing trends requires agility. One day, you’re discussing the color of a dress, and the next, you’re photoshopping Bernie Sanders and Squid Game characters into your team photos. As you know all too well, this agility has to manifest itself creatively but also needs the right tools to bring the visions to life.
SAP composable storefront facilitates this through its seamless integration with SAP Commerce Cloud. This ensures that marketers have access to the latest features and enhancements and, thanks to them, are able to craft captivating campaigns that embrace current trends and technologies. Marketers can leverage the platform's continuous updates to keep refining user engagement, implement innovative marketing tactics, and stay ahead of the competition.
In practical terms, the integration with SAP Commerce Cloud means that your entire eCommerce infrastructure becomes composable. This allows you to select and implement the precise marketing tools, such as mailing modules, loyalty programs, review solutions, and so on, that best fit your business needs and the current trends. There’s no need to worry about having to compromise because of vendor lock-in, technical incompatibility, or other similar factors.
5. Industry-specific marketing solutions
In the world of marketing, products and services within different sectors of the economy come with very different sets of challenges and solutions. For instance, think about marketing efforts related to the retail and B2B sectors. They have almost nothing in common except for the “marketing” name. Different industries require different skillsets from marketers but also solutions that support them.
SAP composable storefront isn’t a marketing solution per se, but, at the same time, the presentation of products in eCommerce is very much a marketing effort. In this regard, the storefront’s ability to seamlessly support many different industries and business models can be a key asset. Here are a few examples:
- In the retail sector, customers will appreciate personalized recommendations and seamless checkout processes. LEGO is a great example of a store built on SAP composable storefront that perfected these aspects.
- In B2B scenarios, such as Förch, SAP composable storefront offers robust account management, bulk order processing, and configurable product offerings.
- For manufacturers, such as Xella, it can be easily extended to handle unique product configurations, order tracking, and integration with supply chain management systems.
These targeted solutions empower marketers to craft effective strategies and campaigns that precisely respond to clients’ needs. The flexibility of having all of these solutions available in a single storefront could be especially important for businesses whose stores cover more than one sector at once, like, for instance, a retail-first store that also runs a B2B module.
6. Seamless transition to another CMS for enhanced marketing agility
While most popular eCommerce ecosystems tend to be all-in-one solutions with tightly coupled front and back ends, SAP composable storefront offers much more flexibility in this regard. It makes swapping back-end components, content management system (CMS) included, an easy and straightforward process.
Why would you want to swap a CMS, though? From a marketing perspective, there are a few easy wins to achieve with this maneuver:
- Some CMSs are better suited for certain types of marketing activities than others. For instance, you might want to prioritize text-editing capabilities for a content-heavy strategy or file storage for hosting lead magnets.
- If you decide to introduce third parties, such as, for example, a freelance writer, into your marketing process, you might want to switch to a CMS that facilitates this through user roles or a dedicated portal.
- If you’re planning a shakeup in your customer journey, a new CMS might be necessary to properly reflect that on your website.
Of course, a CMS is one of the key building blocks of an eCommerce infrastructure, so, realistically, you shouldn’t be changing it all the time. That said, the ability to do so can be an ace up your sleeve that will let you quickly pivot and stay in front of your competition if either your marketing strategy or wider market trends happen to shift.
7. Social sharing friendly for amplified marketing reach
Although the current trend among tech-savvy users is to slowly move away from social media, it still plays a huge role in your audience’s online activities. Because of this, the use of these platforms in your marketing strategy should still be a fairly high priority, and eCommerce solutions that facilitate that have an inherent advantage over those that don’t.
SAP composable storefront is among the former. The solution is engineered to be social sharing friendly, which makes the process of sharing content across various social media platforms quick and effortless. Marketers can capitalize on this feature to amplify the reach of their campaigns and harness the power of social networks to generate organic promotion, user engagement, and brand advocacy.
Image source: carhartt
To be fair, you don't really see people randomly sharing eCommerce links on their feeds. That would be simply weird and not what real human users do. However, the real power of social sharing lies in private communication. The Christmas season is just around the corner, and a convenient sharing button might provide the extra nudge to send Santa the link to the dream gift.
Another realistic use case for this function is leveraging user-generated content. The ability to seamlessly connect your storefront with social media platforms can facilitate a number of engaging campaigns. For instance, popular posts that use a certain hashtag might be automatically pulled onto product pages or a dedicated section on your front page.
8. Built from the ground up for PWAs
Yet another area where SAP composable storefront stands out as a valuable marketing asset is the fact that it has been designed from the ground up with progressive web apps (PWAs) in mind. PWAs serve as an extremely valuable middle ground between native mobile apps and websites. They deliver a fast, engaging, and app-like experience to users that enhances user interaction, improves retention, and boosts conversions.
Marketers can leverage this PWA foundation to create immersive and dynamic campaigns. The technology ensures that messages reach the target audience in a way that best matches evolving user expectations for a seamless, engaging, and personalized experience, both offline and on.
Although much the same can be said about native apps, PWAs have a few significant advantages over them:
- PWAs are much faster and cheaper to develop.
- They aren’t installed through app stores, which means they aren’t bound by restrictive approval processes.
- They need only a fraction of the disk space that native apps require.
- They’re inherently accessible and inclusive.
As a result, many businesses opt for PWAs instead of native apps to enhance their marketing efforts, and the trend is likely to last. Building your eCommerce infrastructure on SAP composable storefront means that you’ll be able to embrace the technology seamlessly and use it to your advantage from day one.
9. Responsive design for multi-device consistency
SAP composable storefront supports responsive web design (RWD) straight out of the box, which is a fundamental asset for creating consistent, engaging, and accessible customer experiences. Whether customers access a storefront from a desktop, tablet, or smartphone, the platform adapts seamlessly to provide the optimal experience.
Image source: Mirka case study
This responsiveness caters to diverse user preferences but also supports marketers:
- RWD can help your team avoid headaches related to consistency in terms of logos, colors, and other key design elements.
- It improves conversion rates through a streamlined customer journey.
- It makes maintenance easier and cheaper because you only need to make the necessary changes once, and they’re automatically implemented over all the different views.
- RWD technology is also appreciated by search algorithms and can play a big role in boosting your website’s positioning.
10. Server-side rendering for SEO improvements
Going even deeper into the technical nitty-gritty, server-side rendering (SSR) is another feature of SAP that’s worth mentioning here. In simple terms, SSR comes down to rendering on the server itself rather than in the web browser as it typically happens. In this process, the server generates an HTML file that encapsulates the entire content of the website and then transmits it back to the user. Consequently, the user receives a fully rendered HTML page that includes all the essential information needed to view the site instantly, which eliminates the need to wait for JavaScript or CSS files to load.
From a marketing perspective, the benefits of this technology are twofold. First, it’s a good look when your website loads quickly: it’s as simple as that. Second, it also positively impacts SEO performance. When web crawlers have access to a fully rendered HTML page, they can find more details that lead to better indexing. In the end, marketers can count on achieving higher organic search rankings, driving increased traffic, and improving the overall discoverability of the website itself and specific marketing campaigns.
A surprising asset for your marketing efforts
SAP composable storefront is as versatile as it’s underrated in terms of marketing benefits. It offers multiple features that enhance the overall eCommerce experience from the perspective of users, managers, and marketers. The platform's smooth UI, agility, customization capabilities, and other technical features make it a canvas to paint captivating marketing campaigns.
Of course, the marketing benefits mentioned above aren’t unique to SAP composable storefront. You can successfully achieve each of these with other tools and solutions. However, having to use multiple tools is the key here. SAP composable storefront shines because it’s a single robust platform that incorporates all of them into a cohesive whole.
There’s a lot to gain by building your eCommerce front end on SAP composable storefront, but doing it on your own isn’t always the optimal strategy. If you’re thinking about starting such a project for your eCommerce business, make sure to reach out to our experts to discuss the approach that will suit your unique needs the best.
Published December 14, 2023
