Nowadays, customers have high expectations; they want a fast, reliable, and smooth e-commerce experience across multiple devices, especially on mobile. Headless e-commerce solutions such as SAP Commerce Cloud Composable Storefront (also known as Spartacus) provide best-in-class technologies and practices to ease the creation of these experiences while supporting complex selling models.
There are numerous reasons why you should choose the SAP Spartacus as your Headless e-commerce solution:
Extensibility
SAP Spartacus is not just a one size fits all solution. Although the Composable Storefront comes with out-of-the-box features and functionalities that cater to well-known e-commerce business models, it can be easily customized to suit specific customer needs. The architecture allows customers to create a unique brand experience where they can customize components, pages, themes, checkout steps, and business logic.
Here are some of the extensibility features provided by the Composable Storefront:
- Fully CMS-Driven: Business users can configure and customize pages and components in SmartEdit (The next-generation web content management solution provided by Sap Commerce Cloud).
- Configurability: A large set of configurations can be changed and adjusted. Such as languages, currencies, URL structure, and checkout- steps, among others.
- Custom Theming and Styling: The Composable Storefront offers a set of mechanisms to facilitate replacing or extending the standard styles that come out of the box. It also supports the creation of multiple themes.
- Dependency Injection (DI): Developers can use dependency injection to customize existing business logic.
Upgradability
One of the biggest challenges in software development is upgradability. As many things can break, and the process of fixing these issues can be tedious. Thankfully, Sap Commerce Spartacus has been designed to be upgradable. Template-based code generators (schematics) and scripts are provided to take care of several upgrade tasks.
Performance
Modern e-commerce solutions are robust in terms of features; however, the end customer is still expecting a fast website, which can be challenging from a technical perspective.
The Composable Storefront has been designed with performance optimization mechanisms to help improve the speed and responsiveness of a website. This will help improve your Google Lighthouse score and the user experience for your customers, which in turn leads to a higher page ranking on search engines.
Some of these performance optimizations include:
- Above-the-fold loading
- Server-side rendering
- Deferred loading
- Lazy loading techniques for loading modules
- Components
- Images
- Content dynamically, as well as caching.
Decoupled Architecture
The Composable Storefront is decoupled from the SAP Commerce Cloud Backend as it is 100% API-driven and is intended to be run in a headless fashion. This means that frontend and backend teams can have separate focus, potentially having separate deployment/release cycles.
By default, the Composable Storefront connects to SAP Commerce Cloud APIs. But the underlying framework allows you to work with other systems through connectors.
These days, it is extremely hard to find developers with skills in both back-end and front-end technologies. It is a best practice to separate front-end and back-end responsibilities into different teams to allow you to increase productivity and scalability. Thankfully, the SAP Commerce rest APIs have evolved to fully support any JavaScript-based storefront technology, allowing you separate back-end and front-end development.
SEO Capabilities
Search engine optimization is an essential element of SAP Spartacus. The framework strength is in the architecture rather than on specific features so that a solid foundation exists for adding or extending the out-of-the-box SEO capabilities.
The SEO implementation in the Sap Spartacus includes the following:
- Indexable Pages
- Configurable URLs
- Stateful URLs
- Structured Data
- HTML Tags
Ready-to-Use Features
One of the biggest benefits of using the Composable Storefront is that it comes with complete and ready-to-use features fully integrated with SAP Commerce Cloud, reducing development time and speeding time to market.
Reach out to our team to learn more about how we can leverage SAP Spartacus to drive the e-commerce results you are looking for
