SAP Commerce Cloud 2205 Release Highlights

SAP Commerce Cloud is purpose-built to help you drive consistent profitable revenue through agile innovations, intelligent decision making, and with an enterprise-grade commerce platform that can scale and grow your business.

The recent innovations of SAP Commerce Cloud solution reinforce our commitment as a long-term partner to our enterprise customers, supporting their growth, modernization, and efficiency.

This blog highlights some of the new features and enhancements in this latest May release and other recent innovation highlights, and provides helpful resources for you to take advantage of them.

Watch the replay of SAP Commerce Cloud 2205 Release Briefing Webcast from June 2, 2022.

Convert Every Engagement with In-the-Moment Personalization

Intelligent Selling Services (ISS) for SAP Commerce Cloud provides real-time personalization through Recommendations and Merchandising product carousels to drive customer loyalty and improve conversion rates.  It also provides testing, reporting and management tooling to understand, monitor and improve personalization performance. Just some of 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

ISS Dashboard Tiles

Empower your Employees and Improve Usability

Easily change to align to your branding. Administrators can now configure Themes and Branding in Backoffice and choose to set an organizational theme or allow individual users to select their own theme.  Backoffice provides two themes by default: SAP Quartz Light and SAP Quartz Dark.  Administrators can further create up to 10 additional custom themes (based on one of the two default themes).  Additionally, Administrators can replace the default SAP Logo with an image of their own choice in the login page and shell bar.

Commerce Cloud Backoffice Themes

Manage product efficiently and rely on accurate product data. The Compare View in the Backoffice Framework has been enhanced, allowing users to modify the compared items through dragging the attribute of an item and dropping it to the relevant field of another item.

Commerce Cloud Backoffice Compare View

Users may now directly send feedback about their Backoffice experience to SAP via a new Feedback button in the top system bar, to help SAP continue to enhance the product:

Commerce Cloud Backoffice Feedback Button

Future-Proofing your Business with Secure Data and Processes

When creating or editing user profiles, Environment Permissions in Commerce Cloud can be upgraded from a subscription-based model to a more flexible environment-based model access to separate access for specific environments (e.g., development and production).  By defining and restricting access for certain users, and introducing 2-factor authentication, you can increase security further.

For customers that invested in their own privately hosted infrastructure or have higher security requirements than using a secured publicly available Git repository, Private Git Support allows you to connect your private code repository to SAP Commerce Cloud for added security to protect you from external threats and risks.

Major framework and library upgrades, including Java, Mockito, Groovy, allow for enhanced security, improved maintainability/support, and new feature/language/syntax capabilities.

Maximize Agility and Monetize Every Engagement

We have been offering Headless Commerce support for years, and continue to deliver important innovations. This release includes new Omni Commerce Connect (OCC) APIs, that enable you to gain agility and build engaging, new experiences using a headless commerce approach. Some of the new APIs that we introduced include:

• Future stock: “Tell me when new stock will arrive”

Commerce Cloud Future Stock user experience

• B2B Registration: “I want to force early login on my B2B storefront and enable B2B-account users to self-register”

Commerce Cloud B2B Registration user experience

• Punchout: “Let me purchase from your site but send the order back to my procurement system (e.g., Ariba)”

Commerce Cloud Punchout User Experience

With new capabilities added to Project “Spartacus”, our lean, Angular-based JavaScript storefront for SAP Commerce Cloud, you can de-risk projects and achieve lower TCO by updating your frontend independently of the core commerce platform. You are also able to deliver rich buying experiences through new visualization capabilities. Enhancements include:

• SAP Enterprise Product Development (EPD) Visualization Integration – provides support in Spartacus for visual picking of spare parts using 2D or 3D models when ordering replacement parts
• Product Image Zoom – now supported
• Quick/Bulk Order – now allows users to quickly add multiple items to their cart
• B2B Inventory Display – allows sellers to control the display of the stock visible for a category of products or for the whole storefront

EPD Visualization with Spartacus

Make Intelligent Commerce Decisions with an Integrated “One-Office” Approach

Order Integration has been improved to integrate Order Capture for B2B Storefront Users with SAP S/4HANA to combine a holistic digital experience for B2B storefront users of SAP Commerce Cloud with feature-rich and comprehensive business rules in SAP S/4HANA Sales.

Order Integration for B2B Storefront Users

Create a central hub to connect (and isolate) all your sales channels and fulfillment locations with the SAP Order Management foundation Integration and gain performance insights to manage your omnichannel business performance.

Order Management Performance Insights

And leverage additional integration benefits included in the integration extension pack such as:

• Giving customers timely information and control over all the orders with integration to SAP Variant Configuration and Pricing which includes the ability to exchange and cancel orders, receive delivery and goods issue confirmations.
• Simplifying your customer’s discovery and buying process by being able to sell CPQ bundled products and SAP Variant Configuration and Pricing products on the same storefront.
• Ensuring frictionless buying experiences with request for Quote support for both SAP CPQ and SAP Variant Configuration and Pricing.

Watch the highlight video of the SAP Commerce Cloud 2205 Release

What’s Next for SAP Commerce Cloud?

Our vision in SAP Commerce Cloud is to enable every enterprise to continuously deliver connected, trusted, and sustainable digital commerce experiences.  When we look towards our future roadmap, we identified 5 dimensions for our key investments.

• Agile, Enterprise Commerce Platform – Continued investments to modernize cloud native, extensible, and composable platform, consumed as SaaS, automatically updated to empower innovation and agility
• Sustainable Commerce – SAP Commerce enables new business models like rentals, refurbishment, and resale, that extend a product’s life and reduces waste, driven by the Sharing Economy, Everything-as-Service and Sustainability
• Experience-led Commerce – Achieve higher conversion rates and basket sizes and increase business users’ efficiency through better seller and buyer experiences like social commerce and intelligent recommendations
• Amplify your SAP Investment – Tighter end-to-end integrations with SAP products to amplify business value across the entire value chain from the front-office to the back-office, connecting demand and supply
• Trust, Privacy and Efficiency – Keep customer data secure and enable fast, efficient, and safe deployments with global security, compliance, privacy standards, faster certification, and an optimized platform

Change and innovation happen every day and we keep solutions state of the art by focusing our roadmap along these key investment themes.

SAP Commerce Cloud is your partner in delivering revenue generating commerce solutions.

For more details on the above release features (and more) check out the following resources:

• About SAP Commerce Cloud Release 2205
• What’s New in SAP Commerce Cloud in the Public Cloud 2205?
• What’s New in SAP Commerce 2205?
• What’s New in Intelligent Selling Services?
• Release Information for All Versions of Spartacus Libraries