As ecommerce businesses are striving to achieve excellence and make themselves future-ready, SAP Commerce Cloud has played an undeniable role in their purpose. From providing them a cloud-native commerce platform to allowing them to establish a centralized operational medium, it has enabled businesses to focus more on customers and incorporate the market trends in their services. However, the older versions of SAP CC had innumerable glitches, which somehow prevented professionals from leveraging the platform to the fullest.
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That’s where SAP Commerce Cloud 2211 enters the picture. Being the first cloud-native platform released for the digital landscape, it allows commerce businesses to thrive and excel in terms of revenues, consumer base, and market position. Since its launch in 2022, the platform has received a myriad of new upgrades, spanning over three quarters. These integrated features will not only help businesses to position their products correctly but also provide a rich and intuitive customer experience across all touchpoints.
Commerce Cloud 2211 Q1 Release Highlights
Composable Commerce
In today’s fast paced world, ecommerce businesses cannot achieve the desired excellence and provide an intuitive and gratifying customer experience with the age-old monolith architecture. Its rigidity and underlying software complexities prevent professionals from scaling the storefront and the backend functionalities, thereby rendering the overall business inefficient in terms of meeting the customer expectations. However, with SAP Commerce Cloud 2211, it is now possible to leverage a modular architecture for increasing the commerce capabilities and expanding the domain functionalities with ease.
- Composable commerce from SAP will help businesses to orchestrate modern and custom ecommerce strategies while scale their existing action plans.
- Thanks to the decoupled architecture and modular microservices, developers can create bespoke features for the ecommerce platform, ensuring better services and digital capabilities.
- It will be easier to create industry-specific solutions tailored to meet individual consumer demands and achieve the business goals and objectives.
- Thanks to the end-to-end integration capabilities of the composable commerce architecture, businesses can create a unified platform to provide a rich customer experience across all touchpoints.
SAP S/4HANA Integration
Being the fourth generation of business ERP suite databases, S/4 HANA is quite different from the regular databases most ecommerce businesses use in the sense that it doesn’t store any data on the disk. Instead, it stores, fetches, and operates on business data directly to and from the memory, thereby reducing space complexities. Since Commerce Cloud 2211 can now be integrated with this innovative platform, B2B businesses will have an upper hand in this hypercompetitive market ecosystem. Following are some of the benefits they can enjoy.
- The simplified data structure and Universal Journal will help businesses leverage powerful and reporting features of making data-driven decisions.
- If multiple ecommerce storefronts are involved, the ERPs handling each one of them can be seamlessly integrated for unified operations and management.
- Also, business operations can be streamlined further with S/4HANA integration so that the overall efficiency and productivity improve with time.
- Order processing and management will also become easier, thanks to the real-time data validation and feedback loops from SAP S/4HANA.
- The self-service return feature of this module will help businesses to handle customers swiftly while reducing the load on the Customer Service teams simultaneously.
Composable Storefront
In Q1, one of the major release highlights of SAP CC 2211 is the composable storefront. It features a modular architecture where the backend and frontend layers are completely decoupled from one another, along with the inclusion of service layer APIs for communication. It will not only help businesses provide a rich and enhanced customer experience but also handle store operations swiftly.
- The composable storefront will help businesses view current and future statuses of their stocks while controlling order management processes swiftly.
- They can also configure different payment modes for the consumers, especially in the B2B ecosystem.
- Also, the composable storefront comes with Assisted Service Module and Online Ticket Creation that will help businesses gain a 360-degree view of their customers and their past interactions with the brands.
SAP Order Management
With the innovative SAP order management module, businesses will be able to leverage a unified buying and order fulfillment platform and generate a rich customer experience across all touchpoints. From offering real-time inventory data visibility to seamlessly integrating logistics, billing, and finance modules, the module comes with a myriad of advanced features. For instance, businesses can easily orchestrate their sales funnels, gain comprehensive views of individual customer orders, and optimize inventory availability via machine learning algorithms. Thanks to the built-in Sales Transfer and Audit features, businesses can spot errors instantaneously and provide AI-based product recommendations to their customers.
SAP Emarsys Integration
Another highlight from the Q1 release is the integration of SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement module with Commerce Cloud 2211. It allows businesses to synchronize their customers from multiple storefronts across all touchpoints while keeping them updated with new products and exciting offers. Furthermore, it also ensures businesses can create a customized and tailored product discovery and buying journey for their customers, thereby improving the conversion ratio and increasing customer loyalty.
Intelligent Selling Services
One of the most interesting features of Commerce Cloud 2211 that businesses will be able to leverage is the ISS or the Intelligent Selling Services module. It is an AI-based platform that tracks and evaluates first-party data to generate accurate product recommendations. In other words, businesses will be able to identify the correct products to be positioned for a specific targeted audience across all the touchpoints. Apart from this, it also enables a rich and intuitive product discovery phase for businesses to position their new products and allow customers to have a wonderful buying journey.
Blue/Green Deployment
SAP Commerce Cloud 2211 has enabled blue/green deployment feature where businesses will be able to test the new features and code builds (the green part of the deployment schedule) alongside the existing functionalities (the blue part of the deployment) directly in the production environment. Not only will it help save time and efforts but also ensure the code builds and data patches can be directly deployed and tested in the production. Apart from this, it will also reduce server downtime and application outage, thereby enhancing user experience and driving higher ROIs.
Commerce Cloud 2211 Q2 Release Highlights
Enhanced Personalization
One of the trendsetting features released in Q2, 2023 is enhanced personalization abilities of SAP Commerce Cloud 2211. Businesses can leverage customer data, like behaviors, actions, past interactions, and order histories to understand their personas and provide a rich and resonating experience. Such a high level of personalization will certainly culminate in increased conversion ratio, improved ROIs, and enhanced customer loyalty.
Seamless Third-Party Integrations
With this new release, businesses will now be able to connect their non-SAP and SAP tools and applications with the Commerce Cloud. These include CRMs, billing and finance software, ERPs, and many more, which is why they will be able to flexibly operate and manage the business processes and workflows from a centralized platform.
Accelerated Page Loading Speed
Page loading speed has always been a concern for the ecommerce businesses as poor speeds resulted in a significant loss of the customer base and generated a bad impression. However, with the new version release, Commerce Cloud 2211 now features an accelerated page loading speed that will allow customers to swiftly navigate through the storefront pages and discover the products they have been desiring for. Furthermore, it will help reduce the bounce rates and keep the customers engaged for a long time.
AI-Driven Customer Support
One of the major highlights that businesses can leverage in Q2, 2023 release is the AI-driven customer support module. The intelligent chatbots and automated responses will help them address customer queries and concerns promptly in the real-time scenario, thereby enhancing the engagement rate and overall customer experience. Furthermore, it will also reduce the pressure on the Customer Service teams substantially, allowing businesses to maintain their budget and improve the deliverables.
Comprehensive Data Analysis
Comprehensive analytical and reporting abilities lay the foundation for successful ecommerce establishments. Therefore, Commerce Cloud 2211 brings an entire suite of powerful data analytical tools that will help businesses to evaluate various types of data sets and generate accurate and in-depth reports and forecasts. Whether its understanding customer behavior and persona or gaining insights into the marketing and sales operations, businesses can leverage these comprehensive data reports to make the right call.
Commerce Cloud 2211 Q3 Release Highlights
With the latest SAP Commerce Cloud upgrade, businesses will gain access to more advanced and groundbreaking features of the Commerce Cloud 2211 platform. These will include:
- Refining the industry-specific requirements and incorporating augmented agility in the processes.
- SAP Cloud integration will allow businesses to leverage customer data and enhance their operational abilities for better experience.
- The Assisted Service Module will further help in understanding deep links in customer actions and queries, thereby enhancing the customer service process.
- Also, the workflow automation tool will help users gain more control on the business processes, allowing them to pre-test the action strategies before their implementation and customize the business workflows for better operation and improved deliverables.
Conclusion
SAP Commerce Cloud 2211 is undoubtedly one of the leading platforms ecommerce businesses can leverage to achieve their goals and objectives swiftly in the coming years. Whether it’s enhancing customer experience across all touchpoints or reducing production leaks and improving deliverables, this platform will enable professionals to modernize the business operations and offer a customer-centric journey.
