Non-product content management has for many years been the weakest link of the SAP Commerce platform. Formally, the suite had a WCMS module from the very first version, but it was obvious to everybody that the solution was terribly old-fashioned and outdated.
Already back in 2016, SAP Hybris Commerce was extended with a new solution, SmartEdit. On the one hand, SAP released it too early. Many commented that the product is underbaked to replace WCMS Cockpit. Even two years later, Smartedit had drawn much criticism from the users and developers. On the other hand, it was long overdue. We had been waiting for a replacement for years.
In the search of the truth, in 2018, I was examining Smartedit in detail and shared the findings here on Hybrismart. There hasn’t been a lot of water under the bridge since 2018, but the situation with Smartedit has taken a definite turn for the better. However, being a “non-mandatory” component during two years, it was generally ignored by the community. After all, why should we use Smartedit if there is a good old WCMS Cockpit, time-tested and proven, albeit with known issues and poor customizability? This is why only a small percentage of developers are aware of Smartedit from the technical perspective. I hope this article will help them to move forward. Read More »
When an anonymous customer has a non-empty cart and wants to log in, what shopping cart should they see? The question is about what should happen to the items in the account-linked carts versus the items in the anonymous carts. There are different options, and some of them come with SAP Commerce Cloud. In this article, I will review the existing implementations and propose a new one to consider as a possible alternative. Also, you will see why the merging cart strategy implemented in SAP Commerce Cloud requires additional optimization for high traffic and large volume websites. Read More »
Over the last years, there has been a huge boost in the popularity of headless eCommerce. Many chose this approach to give more flexibility and freedom around the front-end of their site and how their product catalog is showcased. Creating the storefront from scratch is challenging and full of fun, but very risky if your team doesn’t know this topic inside out.
Vue Storefront is known as an open-source mobile-first Progressive Web App storefront, one of two free PWA-ready storefront frameworks available on the market.
In this article, Rauf Aliev and Timofey Klyubin explained how Vue Storefront and SAP Commerce can be integrated together. Advantages, limitations, technological “pitfalls”, rejected and chosen solutions, and a demo of what was accomplished. Read More »
In this article, I structured the main concepts, best-practices, design recommendations, interaction patterns and visual design considerations for the faceted search. I believe this work covers every aspect of the facet search UI: everything you need to know to create facet search component from scratch or using the ready building blocks from the SAP Commerce Cloud out-of-the-box search module. At the end of the article you will find a summary explaining what features are implemented in the default SAP Commerce Cloud Accelerators; for those which are not implemented, you will find my ballpark estimations of the efforts needed. Read More »
Come take a look into the 1811 release. We’ll cover cool and interesting new features, enhancements, and changes, and offer some commentary on what we like and what we like… less. Judge for yourself what SAP did well and what might warrant some extra polish. Read More »
The hot trends in e-commerce have shifted recently. Microservices, headless e-commerce, AI, voice and other technologies & designs are all the rage. In this article, we will take an extensive look at headless e-commerce, in the context of a “best of breed” solution involving the #1 e-commerce solution, SAP Commerce Cloud, and a top ranking CMS solution, Sitecore. Learn why this type of solution makes sense for certain enterprises, what the benefits are, and see for yourself the solution in action through General Electric Healthcare’s live solution. Read More »
In the various sources, the terms like Autocomplete and Suggestions are not defined clearly. They turned out to be too wide to avoid confusion when defining design patterns and software requirements. The customers use the wrong terms in the RFPs, the partners try to use the RFP language and mix that with their own terminology. In this article, I review these topics in depth. Read More »
Writing software is easy. Maintaining it and evolving it over the long haul is hard. And the business reality around finding time and money to refactor code in support of this makes this even harder. This is the “refactoring challenge” all product companies face.
In this article, I will explore how well (or not) Hybris (now SAP) has done in keeping the Hybris Commerce codebase “fresh” and overcoming the “refactoring challenge”. Read More »
Groovy Scripting allows you to access server objects directly from your browser. It is an essential tool for troubleshooting and debugging. This article is 7th part of the series. Read More »
In this article, you will find a review of the new product from SAP, an angular storefront for SAP Commerce Cloud, known as Spartacus.
Until recently, SAP Commerce Cloud has been offering two toolsets for mobiles, a Mobile SDK (iOS and Android) and responsive storefront template. Spartacus is the next step in this direction towards better customer experience. Read More »
