What is Composable Storefront?
Before we dive into the benefits, it’s probably a good idea to provide some context by recapping what exactly Salesforce Composable Storefront is, for those that are not familiar. Salesforce Composable Storefront is a frontend solution that replaces Salesforce SiteGenesis and Salesforce SFRA architectures. Composable Storefront was originally released under the name “PWA Kit” and is quickly maturing into a solid headless commerce offering from Salesforce. This solution leverages modern technologies such as React to deliver responsive, app-like experiences for Salesforce customers.
If you were to launch Composable Storefront on Salesforce as a standalone implementation, you’d find that the changes that your marketing and merchandising teams wanted to make to the experience would require development resources or time, resulting in reduced business agility and control over your site. This is where composability and Amplience comes in; by combining Amplience’s CMS and DAM product capabilities, your whole team get to experience all the benefits of headless - without the headaches.
So what are those benefits?
The benefits of Salesforce Composable Storefront & Amplience
- Stay in Control
Many headless and composable critics point out that marketers and merchants lose control when a business decides to adopt a headless approach. Changes to the experience that were once simple and fast now require custom code and development resources. This might be true in some instances but this issue can be effectively negated by integrating Amplience into your Salesforce stack. Business users now have Ampliences’ mature interface and set of capabilities enabling them to manage content, assets and experiences without the need for custom code and development.
Developers are not removed from the equation entirely, but they can be moved from the critical path of the business teams’ needs and day-to-day requirements to work on other areas of the stack that hold higher value.
- Performance, Performance, Performance
Composable Storefronts’ modern architecture results in faster and more responsive page load times out of the box. By communicating with APIs directly, your frontend site consumes the backend data using JSON, which is more efficient when used with a modern PWA-based mobile frontend. Older website frameworks like Site Genesis and SFRA use server-side rendering, which is slower to transfer as they’re delivered in larger, whole-page blocks.
These performance gains are accelerated by Amplience’s Dynamic Media and Smart Image capabilities that further optimize on-page assets. Performance improvements directly lead to higher conversion rates and improved search engine rankings. Achieving these performance gains is significantly easier for developers to set up and maintain over SiteGenesis and SFRA stacks.
You can learn more about performance benefits of Salesforce Composable Storefront and Amplience here.
- Future-Proof
The composable approach to your Salesforce solution through Composable Storefront enables your business to adapt over time by incorporating new technologies as requirements change. By taking an API-first approach, you also free your application from channel silos, ensuring you’re ready for whatever is next for you and your customers - whether that’s a native mobile app, in-store experiences, VR/AR, or beyond. Composable Storefront is future-proof in the sense that it can easily evolve with you over time.
- Increase Productivity
Enable your marketing and development teams to work smarter, not harder, by doing more with less through better tools. Whether that’s scheduling and launching more campaigns, targeting more segments, creating richer content, using better-guided selling tools, launching into new markets faster or delivering multi-channel experiences, the list is endless and the sky is the limit. By running a number of frontend applications from the same set of headless APIs, your teams can create once and publish everywhere, saving them time and simplifying the orchestration of the customer experience.
- Reduced Time-to-Market
Another issue critics might point out is that headless implementations typically require extensive resources and time to go live. From our experience helping hundreds of customers, whether on Salesforce or other platforms, this is far from the truth and we’re committed to removing this barrier through a solid ecosystem and partnership model that manifests itself in accelerators, integrations and pre-composed solutions where implementations are measured in weeks or days.
- Recruit and Retain
By leveraging a React-based Composable Storefront and API-first products such as Amplience, retailers and brands will find themselves able to hire from a much larger talent pool of developers, making recruitment easier and potentially cheaper than proprietary SiteGenesis and SFRA developers. In addition to this, modern interfaces and tools that make the day-to-day lives of employees easier in turn improves engagement, job satisfaction and retention.
Ultimately, all of these benefits help accelerate and contribute towards growing your business through increased team agility and better shopping experiences for your customers.
Intrigued and want to know more?
We’re already seeing a growing number of Salesforce customers migrating from SiteGenesis and SFRA to Composable Storefront and Amplience to enjoy these benefits. If you’d like to learn more about Salesforce Composable Storefront and how Amplience can help you go headless on Salesforce without the headaches, we highly recommend you check out our report “Definitive Guide To Composable Storefront And Headless Salesforce Commerce Cloud”.