Adobe Summit 2025 is officially a wrap, and I have pages and pages of notes to go through with my team to plan out our year! The two terms that appear the most in my notes are Performance and Personalization. Customer expectations continue to rise, and the demand is higher than ever for lightning-fast sites that keep shoppers engaged, with hyper-personalization that lets them know brands care about them, leading to loyalty and customer retention. These themes were consistent throughout the sessions that I attended throughout the week.
ADOBE COMMERCE AS A CLOUD SERVICE
This summer, Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service will officially be available. This high-speed storefront is a fully SaaS solution that can be provisioned in just a few minutes. It is version-less and maintained by Adobe, eliminating the maintenance costs that come along with patches and upgrades. Catalog Service, Intelligent Merchandising, Payment Services, Product Asset Management, and Developer Tools are added on top of the existing Commerce Foundation.
The results are super-fast experiences delivered from the edge, perfect Lighthouse scores, boosts to search engine rankings, more organic traffic, and higher conversions. Add in generative AI to rapidly build personalized variations of content, alongside analysis of shopper behavior and sales data for that next level personalization that keeps customers coming back.
ADOBE COMMERCE OPTIMIZER
Available at the same time, Adobe Commerce Optimizer offers the same features as Cloud Service but allows customers to keep their existing commerce back-end. The experience layer provides the storefront, catalog and merchandising tools, allowing for quick wins with ROI and modernization. Pre-built APIs and Connectors can be utilized and tweaked as needed, to get to launch as quickly as possible. Then, if desired, the commerce back-end can be migrated later, at the merchant’s pace to realize the full set of benefits that come with Cloud Service. Adobe offers migration tools to make the transition smoother.
KEY FEATURES
The new Storefront is powered by Edge Delivery, resulting in four times faster page loads, fifteen percent or higher increase in organic traffic, improved search engine rankings, and ninety or higher Lighthouse scores. Separating the front-end from Commerce Foundation in a composable fashion, and loading data in, increases stability and security, and decreases total cost of ownership.
Authoring options include drag and drop visual, and document based via SharePoint or Google. Content creation powered by generative AI helps create personalized experiences from content variations, which can then be validated with built-in A/B testing. This helps merchandisers find the right content to display to the right customer at the right time.
With integrated digital asset management powered by AEM Assets, gone are the days of uploading product images and other media directly into Commerce. Through the power of AI and integration with Firefly and Express, product image variations can be generated in bulk and stored in the DAM. The images are easily linked to SKUs making them immediately available for product pages, once they are published. Enhanced experiences are possible with the product variations, 3D models, and augmented reality.
Intelligent Merchandising can increase conversion rates and order values by tailoring search results, category pages, and product recommendations based on customer behavior, account history data, and business goals.
SCALABILITY AND REDUCED TCO
Catalog Service can handle 250 million SKUs with 30K prices each, syndicated across multiple channels and audiences without any duplication. By using a single catalog, 10K products and 50K prices can be ingested per minute from integrated systems.
The cloud-native platform scales dynamically for increased traffic and order volumes. 330 data centers and API orchestration on the edge allow for 99.9% availability and over 10K requests per minute with ease.
Continuous updates managed by Adobe, and instant access to new features turned on via toggle when ready, remove hours and hours of maintenance. Boilerplate themes and drop-in components allow for sites to be built rapidly with less development needed. Starter kits, APIs, events, web-hooks, and marketplace apps speed up integrations and time to launch. This reduction in operating costs allows resources to use the freed-up time for fine tuning strategies for rapid, continued growth.
OMNI-CHANNEL SUPPORT
B2B buyers are expecting the same personalized experiences at work, that they receive through personal interactions with brands in their daily lives. Over 60% of B2B buyers develop selection criteria or finalize a vendor list based solely on content available to them. Adobe makes this achievable by supporting B2C, B2B, and B2B2X all one the same platform. Toggle-able features designed for B2B users include parent-child account model with support for multi-buyer assignments, a storefront context switcher, standing quotes, requisition lists, and contract pricing. All that needs to change is access to them on the storefront, driven by the customer’s account type. The new Storefront has boilerplates for both B2C and B2B.
Experiences on other channels like social media are just as important, providing additional touch points for a brand to interact with customers. Adobe has partnered with Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and TikTok to release apps for seamless integration. Product catalogs, ratings and reviews, and cart rules can be sent from Commerce to the corresponding social platform. Direct integrations with ad accounts allow this data to be used for product promotions. The customer can then use social shops, or link directly to a brand’s website to purchase products, with all orders automatically flowing through Commerce.
The well-known Extension Marketplace is also receiving some updates and becoming the Apps Marketplace. Pre-built apps from third parties can be acquired to enhance native features or provide features that might be specific to only certain industries. These apps are built on API Mesh and App Builder, which can also be used by brands to build their own apps to solve their unique business needs.
ADVANCED ADOBE EXPERIENCE CLOUD FEATURES
Adobe Commerce data, including storefront clicks, back-office fulfillment information, and customer profiles can be shared with AEP for use with other Adobe applications. CDP can be used to analyze data and build audiences for advertisements, merchandising, and abandoned cart campaigns. AJO can be used for personalized journeys and offers. Marketo can be used for automated marketing campaigns, account nurturing, interactive webinars, and dynamic chat. These are just some of the possibilities!
AEM Sites Optimizer uses an AI agent to identify issues and propose resolutions, showing immediate value. The entire funnel is optimized, from acquisition, to brand engagement, and ultimately conversion. The agent identifies issues, projects lost traffic and revenue and suggests resolutions for review and deployment with a few clicks.
It is estimated that 39% of consumers already use AI for online shopping, and over half of Fortune 500 companies will adopt experience agents to match that growing expectation. Adobe Brand Concierge is a virtual assistant, that uses first party data to deliver true personalization. Built on AEM, CJA, AJO and AEP, it is connected to assets, insights, profiles, and campaign orchestration. Customers can interact with Brand Concierge through welcome or purchase confirmation emails, or once they log into their account again after onboarding. Using account history and profile preferences, Brand Concierge interacts with customers using buttons, and text or voice prompts. Curated search results, and product recommendations can be shared, and easily purchased, making it the ultimate shopper assistant.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Adobe remains committed to their customers and will continue supporting the existing on-premises and PaaS versions of Commerce. The nearly 9 million lines of Commerce Foundation code remains unmodified, and the business logic will continue to be available and supported. If you would like to learn more about any of these solutions, or plan out an incremental approach to implementation, Perficient is here to help. Please contact us to set up time to review some of our success stories and discuss your future customer experience and commerce strategy. Talk to you soon!
