Customers rarely think about the technology behind a storefront. They notice whether the site loads quickly, whether the price is right, whether a product is available, and whether the checkout works.
SAP Commerce Cloud + Vercel: Build, deploy, and iterate on all of your stores
For commerce teams, delivering that experience is anything but simple. Behind every purchase sit catalogs, promotions, customer accounts, inventory, payments, orders, and fulfillment. A seemingly straightforward storefront change can quickly become part of a much larger release.
SAP Commerce Cloud and Vercel are working together to give teams a more flexible way forward. SAP Commerce Cloud continues to manage the commerce data and processes behind the transaction. Vercel runs the customer-facing experience and gives teams the infrastructure and workflow to build, review, release, and operate it.
The tools to transform customer experience are here, but tools alone don’t win. You must consider operating models too. Our partnership with SAP Commerce Cloud pairs Vercel’s web stack—including world-class performance, faster iteration, and scale that holds up under peak demand—with SAP’s trusted data and processes, and governance built in from the start.
Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Chief Operating Officer, Vercel
The operating model is straightforward. Teams can change the storefront without having to change everything behind it at the same time.
A faster starting point for cutting-edge storefronts
Consider a commerce team preparing to enter a new market. It needs a localized storefront, a different customer journey, and a campaign built for that audience. In a tightly connected architecture, those changes can become dependent on a broader release involving pricing, inventory, orders, payments, and fulfillment.
Separating the storefront gives the team more freedom to work. It can design and release the experience for that market while SAP Commerce Cloud continues to provide consistent product data, prices, availability, customer information, and order processes.
Vercel is developing Next.js storefront templates for SAP Commerce Cloud to help teams get started. The templates connect to core capabilities such as product discovery, content, cart, checkout, and customer journeys.
The templates are backed by Vercel global delivery, managed scaling, deployment workflow, and observability, which improve engineering velocity and faster performance yielding more conversions.
As a result, frontend teams gain room to move, while commerce teams retain control of the rules that protect revenue and customer commitments.
What this changes for commerce teams
Campaigns and customer expectations move quickly. Vercel creates a preview deployment for each change, giving developers, designers, marketers, and business teams a working version to review before it reaches production. Teams can test the experience against SAP Commerce Cloud services, gather feedback, and release approved storefront changes with fewer dependencies on a larger backend release.
The same approach helps organizations manage different brands, regions, languages, and buying models. A consumer placing a quick order has different expectations from a business buyer working with negotiated prices, an account-specific catalog, or complex purchasing rules. Teams can build a distinct experience for each audience with SAP Commerce Cloud powering the operations behind it.
In addition, Vercel’s global network, edge routing, and caching bring storefront content closer to customers. Its managed infrastructure is built to scale with demand, including the traffic associated with major campaigns and peak shopping periods. Built-in observability gives teams visibility into traffic, errors, latency, and calls to external services, helping them identify problems that could affect the shopping experience.
Making AI impactful in commerce
AI-assisted development can dramatically accelerate the path from idea to experience. But speed without trusted context can simply produce more low-value experiences, faster and at greater cost.
Connected to SAP Commerce Cloud, AI experiences can draw on trusted commerce data and processes. This gives teams a stronger foundation for building impactful customer journeys that are accurate, brand-aligned, and connected to how the business actually operates.
Leveraging Vercel’s AI SDK, development teams get a common toolkit for building great commerce applications using the AI model provider of your choice.
For teams starting with an idea for a new interface, Vercel’s v0 offering can help marketers and developers design, iterate, and turn that idea into an experience they can review and refine.
The right storefront strategy depends on the business
There is no single storefront approach that fits every commerce operation.
SAP Commerce Cloud, composable storefront, is available for organizations that want a closely integrated, SAP-managed experience. Vercel provides the new SAP templates on the Vercel Frontend Cloud for teams building highly differentiated experiences on their own cadence using storefront technology used by millions of developers. Both options are backed by SAP Commerce Cloud with market-leading commerce capabilities to drive profitability for growing companies and the world’s largest enterprises.
Your customers expect storefronts to be fast and easy to use. They also expect accurate prices, reliable availability, and an order that arrives as promised. SAP Commerce Cloud and Vercel bring those two sides of commerce together: an experience that can keep changing, backed by the data and processes that keep the business running.
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