SAP Commerce Cloud always helps you deliver great commerce experiences central to your digital strategy. However, with the recent release of SAP Commerce Cloud 2205, your team’s ability to deliver amazing commerce experiences can become even better!
In version 2205 of SAP Commerce Cloud, SAP focused on improving areas that are key to scaling and growing your business. These areas include, but aren’t limited too:
- User experience
- Headless commerce
- Intelligence selling services
- Integrated one office
This blog highlights just some of the new features and enhancements you’ll soon appreciate in this latest release of SAP Commerce Cloud.
Improved User Experiences
Appearance Customization
Commerce has been using the same theme for a long time now. This release finally provides users with the capability to configure themes and branding in the back office.
Common themes can be applied system-wide by Admins or can be set up by individual users for their UI locally.
SAP has provided two themes by default for Back Office operations: SAP Quartz Light and SAP Quartz Dark. Administrators are allowed to further create up to 10 additional custom themes (based on the default themes).
How Does Theme Customization Benefit Users?
Theme customization in SAP Commerce 2205 enables its clients the ability to easily change SAP’s interface to align with the company’s branding. This will streamline efforts to deliver consistent messaging and branding across multiple channels.
Commerce Cloud Back Office Themes image
Compare View Enhancements
Customization improvements have also been made elsewhere in version 2205. For instance, in the Product Cockpit, upgrades that allow for better product management can be seen under the Compare View tab.
The upgrade allows users to compare items by dragging the selected attribute of an item and dropping it to the relevant field of another item.
Commerce Cloud Back Office Compare View image
Why Compare View Enhancements Benefits Users: This allows back office employees to compare products quickly, and make necessary adjustments to pricing, inventory, rich media and more.
SmartEdit Improvements
SmartEdit improvements are here! And they are noteworthy because they mean that SAP is listening, adding even more flexibility for clients in the back office.
Override Shared Slot: You can now convert a parent content slot to a local shared content slot or a non-shared content slot. You can also convert a local shared content slot to a non-shared content slot. This feature provides you with the flexibility to control what information is displayed in the slot.
For example, clients that leverage different media in product merchandising or marketing may find this additional flexibility useful to maximize messaging opportunities.
Enhanced Link To Feature: In previous releases, you were only allowed to link to URL links in the Simple Banner Component and Simple Responsive Banner Component. From this release, the ‘Link To’ feature is enhanced so that you can also link to the content page, product page, and category page.
This makes the user’s life easier because the additional customization will allow more flexible product showcasing.
Enable PDF Component: The PDF document component allows you to add a PDF document to the component. You can upload a PDF document from your local disk or you can select a PDF document from the media library. You can configure how to present your PDF document with supported attributes.
Examples of industries that would find this beneficial are manufacturing, or retail.
Upload Media to a Specific Folder: In previous releases, when you upload media, it’s directly uploaded to the Root folder. From this release, you are allowed to upload media to a specific media folder created in the back office.
This helps connect siloed information and makes managing content easier.
Headless Commerce – Spartacus
For Headless Commerce, this release includes the following new features that will help increase sales and encourage higher website traffic:
- Future stock: SAP.com says, “This feature tells the user the date by when new stock will be available for the selected product in context.”
- B2B Registration: According to SAP.com, “Earlier, B2B users were only on-boarded by Admins, now B2B-account users can self-register through a registration page to request access. Also, this release offers flexibility to businesses to force early login on B2B storefront for its users.”
Commerce Cloud B2B Registration user experience image
- Punchout: “With the PunchOut functionality, you can seamlessly access the Supplier procurement system from within your B2B Commerce platform. This release allows flexibility for B2B customers to place an order on the storefront but simultaneously send out the order to their procurement system (e.g., Ariba) for internally processing”
- Product Image Zoom – Product images can now zoomed for the thumbnails on the Product details page.
- Bulk Order – This feature allows users to add multiple products to their cart quickly.
- B2B Inventory Display – allows sellers to control the display of the stock visible for a material class or for the whole storefront.
Intelligent Selling Services
Intelligent Selling Services (ISS) provides real-time personalization through Recommendations and Merchandising product carousels to drive customer loyalty.
This version provides alternatives for deprecated functionalities like clickstream and context-driven services in the Commerce Cloud. It also provides testing, reporting and management tooling to understand, monitor, and improve personalization performance. The recent enhancements include:
- Product Recommendation Carousels – for displaying trending, related, personalized, and recently viewed products
- A/B Testing – to test the Product Recommendation Carousels against one another to establish the top performers on the site
- Multi-Site Support – Artificial Intelligence-powered merchandising capabilities can be used on multiple sites sharing one instance
- Dashboard Tiles – get an overview of your site(s) via a new start page displaying the status of tracking, catalog synchronization and Machine Learning training.
Your back office will love ISS, and so will your customers! The customer journey becomes more tailored to their persona, creating more engagement and brand loyalty. The back office loves those. Plus, the streamlined processes reduce cost.
INTEGRATED ONE OFFICE
Order Integration has been improved for integration between Commerce cloud and S/4HANA for B2B Users. It provides a holistic digital experience of SAP Commerce Cloud features and comprehensive business rules of SAP S/4HANA Sales for B2B users.
Order Integration for B2B Storefront Users image
Ready to Upgrade to SAP Commerce Cloud 2205?
Contact ASAR Digital for a free SAP product demonstration.
ASAR Digital is an SAP Gold Partner that can upgrade your CX strategy today, with rapid deployment programs.
AUTHOR, Amit Singh. SAP Practice Director, ASAR Digital.