If you’re an existing Adobe Commerce merchant, you won’t want to miss the advances in content management brought out by Adobe Experience Manager’s Edge Delivery Services and Adobe Commerce Storefront. Let’s talk about what it is, and how you can start using it today!

Storefront Architecture

In today’s world, Commerce on-prem and cloud alike should power headless storefronts that deal with things like catalog, customers, and order processing through a GraphQL API and an administrative portal. Blue Acorn iCi calls this Adobe Commerce Core; some enterprises even take it off the public internet entirely, opting to only expose key API endpoints to limit the surface area for problems.

Adobe Commerce Storefront, on the other hand, is a composable storefront “head” that interacts with Adobe Commerce Core through APIs. It leverages Adobe Edge Delivery Services to provide top-notch performance with a first-principles approach to building a modern storefront.

Storefront needs to be paired with a content service to be complete, as storefront itself is only concerned with the templating and presentational concerns of building a website.

Content Management for Storefront

With Adobe Commerce Storefront, content authoring can be handled in any number of ways. If you think about all the impressive capabilities of Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, such as seamless omni-channel authoring with deep personalization features built right in, Adobe Commerce Storefront can be a first step into inviting waters.

But not every business needs full Adobe Experience Manager classic, and indeed, it may be the case that for more nimble and modern enterprises that such a well-established institution of an architecture may not be the right fit.

Adobe Experience Manager Universal Editor provides a middle ground between full-on enterprise-level content authoring while providing a modern and delightful fresh take on content authoring and site building with their drag-and-drop authoring experience. The Blue Acorn iCi team loves Universal Editor because it gives merchants direct control over the look and feel, providing the kind of interactive “what you see is what you get” experience merchants really expect today.

Document-Based Authoring

Document-based authoring takes it all one step further, perhaps even a step too far! At its heart, document-based authoring intends to put content authoring in the tools teams already use, such as SharePoint and Google Drive. Document-based authoring is probably best contextualized as the starting floor for content management with storefront out of the box and allows organizations to get started immediately.

A company’s storefront is represented as a folder of docs and sheets, and contributors can edit them directly. The changes will magically appear live on the storefront. This allows teams to treat a storefront like any other project, using the tools they already know to collaborate and work with without all the hassles with admin panels and page builders.

Why Adobe Commerce Storefront?

Answer: Because it’s the fastest way to serve modern commerce experiences, and the barrier to entry is low.

Adobe Commerce Storefront also supports Adobe Developer App Builder, which promises to reduce the strain on merchants by making overall maintenance far simpler. In time, it will address the current security and total cost of ownership landscape, eliminating deployments and generally making the already top-shelf enterprise offering the most performant and extensible option available, backed by a suite of other killer Adobe Experience Platform offerings, all designed to integrate seamlessly with it.

Beyond all that, if you already have Adobe Commerce, this is a way to do a lot more for less. Unlike Adobe Commerce Platform as a Service offering, Adobe Commerce Storefront development is more streamlined and many of the key functions, like layout and content, are designed to be friendlier to merchants and store owners alike.

Its underlying architecture is also a lot leaner and faster, and it takes over a lot of the resource-heavy work that Adobe Commerce on-prem and cloud servers were doing in the day-to-day, freeing those resources for order processing and serving business needs. It’s a far better foundation for a brand to serve customers at a massive scale.

There are a few things merchants can do to prepare for Adobe Commerce Storefront, and surprisingly, the barrier to entry is super low.

A Better Foundation

Adobe Commerce Storefront’s typical page sizes, compared to Adobe Commerce Luma-based storefronts, are tiny. Some Adobe Commerce Classic payloads can be several megabytes a page! This means that when mobile devices try to access your storefront over 4G, the page loads slowly and oftentimes feels broken and non-responsive.

Heavy traffic Adobe Commerce sites using traditional themes like Luma and Hyva can cost a fortune in bandwidth costs alone. The same traffic, served by Adobe Commerce Storefront, could be a fraction of the cost as typical egression payloads!

Adobe Commerce Storefronts sit in front of customers and Adobe Commerce, meaning that it shields your infrastructure from processing a large order or requests that can be served by edge delivery, freeing resources for what’s really important.

Getting Ahead of The Curve

Adobe provides all sorts of helpful starters to get started, if you have a laptop and enjoy a good coding session head on over to Adobe Commerce Storefront on Adobe Experience League and get it running in 20 minutes if you’re technically inclined. This really can be for everyone, if you’re a Full-Stack CEO then it’s well worth your time. With App Builder for Adobe Commerce, this is an exciting time in an emerging field.

If you can’t dive in yourself, please reach out and let us help! You can start taking advantage of the emerging landscape today with Blue Acorn iCi’s CommerceEdge, an Adobe Partner Accredited Solution that enables us to rapidly take your existing storefront, get it into Adobe Commerce Storefront, and kick off the transformation into this better world.

With CommerceEdge, you can get all the great benefits of any content authoring approach while still keeping your existing Page Builder blocks and pages and reusing them. We make it easy to introduce a Storefront in as little as a few weeks, while not throwing out all the great value you’ve already built in your existing tools. Contact Blue Acorn iCi to learn more.