SAP Commerce Cloud offers several options to implement a storefront in your online store. One of them is Spartacus. In this article, I present situations in which it is beneficial to switch to this headless solution.
I shared some information about what Spartacus is in previous posts about SAP Commerce Cloud. Now I’d like to focus on when to migrate to Spartacus.
What frontends can you use in your SAP Commerce Cloud?
There are three ways to implement frontend in the SAP Commerce Cloud:
In October 2019, SAP published an excellent article reviewing all possible storefront solutions for SAP Commerce Cloud. (You can find it here.) The article recommends which solutions to choose; it also mentions that when you’re using an Accelerator you should plan a rewrite to Spartacus, which is the topic I’d like to elaborate on.
In their article SAP propose a simple scheme guiding the choice between Accelerator or Spartacus but for me, it is not a question whether to migrate to Spartacus or not; the question is when to do it, as it is clear that Spartacus will make Accelerator-based storefronts obsolete someday.
3 situations in which to migrate SAP Commerce Cloud to Spartacus
Upgrading SAP Commerce
If you are planning to upgrade your SAP Commerce version to 1905 or 2005, it is worth analyzing whether it’s the right moment or not. First, you have to estimate how much work it would require for your storefront upgrade and then compare it with the estimated rewrite to Spartacus. The second number will surely be higher but you have to take into account the technological debt caused by sticking with Accelerator.
Rebranding
Rebranding clearly requires at least a partial frontend rewrite. In this scenario, the cost of a rewrite to Spartacus might be close to the cost of staying with Accelerator. What is more, Spartacus makes your commerce PWA-ready.
Step-by-step migration
It worth mentioning that Spartacus supports a step-by-step migration. This means that you don’t have to migrate your whole application at once. You can start by moving a single page to Spartacus and then move the rest one by one. You can read more about it in the official SAP Spartacus documentation.
Conclusion
It is clear that migration from Accelerator to some other storefront solution might be required someday. To save costs, it is important to plan this ahead of time. In this article, I’ve described some good moments when it makes good sense to migrate to Spartacus. I’ve also mentioned the possibility of step by step migration.
It is worth mentioning that, together with Spartacus, you gain an excellent storefront but also some modern mobile-first solutions like Progressive Web Apps, push notifications, and mobile app-like performance.
Contact us if you need a Spartacus training, consultation or migration cost estimation.
Published May 12, 2020
