SAP Commerce & Consumer Industries 2024 Year in Review

[BalajiBalasubramanian]

 

Reflecting on 2024: Another Landmark Year for SAP Commerce Cloud and Consumer Industries!

SAP has had a long and successful history of enabling businesses in consumer industries to navigate complexities and drive innovation.  2024 is no different and in many ways a milestone year!  SAP Commerce Cloud and many products that support Consumer Industries has been on fire, rolling out hundreds of cutting-edge capabilities, all designed to elevate customer experiences, streamline operations and delivering industry specific innovations for our customers.  

Curious? Keep reading to explore all the innovations and milestones we achieved!

SAP Commerce Cloud named Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce for 10th year in a row

For the tenth consecutive year, SAP has proudly been named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce.  But there is more! SAP has also been recognized as a leader by IDC for both B2B and B2C Digital Commerce and honored with the TrustRadius Buyer’s Choice Award. While it’s always wonderful to receive such accolades, our true motivation lies in empowering our customers to drive profitable growth. Be sure to check out our customer stories, organized by industry, to see how businesses have realized financial and operational benefits with SAP Commerce Cloud.

SAP Commerce Cloud - Cyber Week Results

We had another spectacular Cyber Week to kick off the biggest shopping season. SAP Commerce Cloud:

• Powered $12.2B in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), a +49.5% year-over-year (YoY) increase
• Drove +18% increase in average order value and processed +23.4% YoY increased order volume.
• Delivered 59.3% YoY growth in GMV on Black Friday, 71.9% YoY growth in GMV over Cyber Weekend and 49.5% YoY growth in sales per minute We achieved these impressive results with 100% uptime!

Expanding Retail and Fashion Possibilities with S/4HANA

Building on our momentum, the SAP S/4HANA 2408 Cloud Release for Retail and Fashion showcases SAP’s dedication to delivering innovative, value-driven solutions. Focused on simplifying operations and addressing industry-specific challenges, this release empowers businesses to streamline their processes and scale globally.

With features like enhanced returns management and cross-docking optimization, retailers can reduce complexity and accelerate delivery times. Tailored innovations for the fashion industry, such as season determination enhancements, ensure that businesses stay aligned with customer demands. Additionally, the expansion into Switzerland, Portugal, Canada, and Spain extends our best practices to a broader global audience, supporting their journey toward operational excellence.

By integrating innovation, industry expertise, and global reach, SAP continues to redefine what’s possible in retail.

Retail Predictive Planning for a Rapidly Changing World

Fulfilling orders efficiently depends on having the right products available at the right time, and that’s where our Predictive Planning and Inventory Orchestration solutions shine. These tools integrate forecasting and replenishment logic directly into operations, ensuring that if demand shifts, inventory adapts. By tying into the SAP Customer Activity Repository, predictive planning solutions help unify commerce data and demand signals across channels.  Additionally, improved events management streamlines exceptions handling and planning schedules. By integrating predictive planning into daily operations, businesses can respond to demand shifts proactively, ensuring stock availability and reducing the risk of overstock or stockouts. We’re especially grateful to our co-innovation partners who have collaborated with us to achieve shared success and bring these capabilities to life.

Omnichannel Retail - A Foundation of Data and Insights through SAP Customer Activity Repository

SAP Customer Activity Repository, a powerful data, predictive planning, and omnichannel platform, ensures all operational data—from sales transactions and promotions to inventory levels and forecasts—received its regular update. We’ve focused on enhancing performance, adding a new promotion pricing service, and improving analytics across the board. Improvements in unified demand forecasting, and multichannel analytics contribute to a more holistic view of customer behavior and operational performance.

Consumer Products:  Drive Profitable growth through comprehensive Revenue Management

Great operations need to connect seamlessly with financial strategy, and that’s where SAP Revenue Growth Management (RGM)for Consumer-Packaged Goods (CPG) businesses comes into play. CPGs can now:

• Easily define targets and KPIs for all your retail partners, ensuring a clear path to achieving sales objectives.
• Streamlined Collaboration helps to break down organizational silos with seamless, cross-functional collaboration that keeps every stakeholder aligned.
• API-First Integration: Integrate both in-house and partner solutions effortlessly, thanks to an API-first approach that simplifies connectivity and interoperability.
• Efficient Spend-Activity Management: Quickly create, copy, manage, and approve spend activities while generating corresponding pricing conditions, ensuring a fast and accurate promotion cycle.
• Unified Sales Planning: Plan both promoted and non-promoted sales within a single application, making it easier to maintain a holistic view of all your commercial activities.
• Financial Execution with S/4HANA Cloud: Manage on-invoice and off-invoice liabilities directly through S/4HANA Cloud to maintain full financial control and clarity throughout the trade promotion process.

Built on SAP BTP, RGM leverages modern, cloud-native architecture to deliver scalability and flexibility, helping businesses adapt to fast-changing environments.

Because these features blend into existing finance and supply chain processes, decision-makers enjoy a clear, end-to-end picture of how their trade promotions influence the bottom line. Rapid spend-activity management, API-first integrations, and unified sales planning mean there’s no more guessing—just smart, data-driven action.

With RGM, businesses maximize promotion effectiveness, ensuring every dollar spent translates into measurable sales and margin growth.

From Financial Settlement to the Final Mile
After capturing new sales and securing growth, companies must accurately settle contracts, commissions, and payouts. Settlement Management/Condition Contract Management advancements let organizations set up internal commission agreements, track settled amounts and send documents automatically — streamlining the close-out process so teams can focus on strategy instead of paperwork.

Meanwhile, on the operational side, enhanced Last Mile Distribution (LMD) ensures that once goods are picked and packed, they reach customers smoothly. Updates this year brought better batch handling, refined authorization controls, and support for more traditional paper processes when needed. In a world where the last step often defines the customer’s lasting impression, LMD helps deliver on promises made at the start of the order cycle.

Going Global: Trade Management with Intelligence and Insight
For businesses operating across borders, complexity is the norm. Global Trade Management (GTM) integrates logistics, compliance, and financial requirements into a single streamlined process. This year, we focused heavily on analytics and building toward SAP Business AI capabilities. Consistent with the customer centricity of the other product areas, GTM teams continuously listened to customer feedback to inform priorities and future roadmap items. The result will be a more informed, more agile global trade operation—one that’s ready for the challenges of international commerce.

SAP Commerce Cloud: Continuous Innovation and New Capabilities

Throughout 2024, we continued to provide our customers with differentiating and innovative capabilities, enhancing our unified commerce solution. This year, through our Continuous Innovation release updates, we have introduced over 150 new capabilities. These enhancements span the core platform, Composable Storefront, Order Management Services, integration areas, AI tools, partner solutions, and more. We also finalized two new SaaS packaged business capabilities that will launch soon -- SAP Open Payment Framework and Search Service.

Let's get into some of the highlights!

Commerce Cloud Core Platform

We have added major enhancements to the core platform to improve the security and overall reliability.

• Scalable sandboxes and consumption credits allows you to selectively ramp up or dial down specific services within non-production environments. SAP Commerce Cloud, consumption credits are the virtual currency (Capacity Units) that you use to self-scale with your non-production environments.

• Canary deployment takes blue-green deployments a step further by routing a percentage of traffic to the new code version in a parallel production environment for up to 12 hours. This provides added confidence by giving you time to validate and ramp up gradually before going fully live. Canary deployment uses SAP Commerce Cloud, consumption credits.
• Zone redundancy ensures that a disruption in one zone will not jeopardize your production environment. Already available to all at no cost, benefits include added resilience for your data centers, greater reliability for clusters, and increased availability for critical workloads such as search and storefront operations. Zone redundancy has been implemented for Azure SQL databases, the SAP Commerce Cloud application, along with key infrastructure, such as compute and load balancers.
• Premium Disaster Recovery minimizes the data loss and amount of time to be back to regular online operations if a major disruption were to occur. It is now available for self-service purchase in SAP Commerce Cloud through your Consumption Credits.

Commerce Cloud Composable Storefront

We introduced new capabilities to our decoupled headless storefront that exclusively leverages SAP Commerce Cloud REST APIs. The updates include:

• Assisted Service enhancements that provide customer service agents with a quick and efficient customer 360-degree view to provide exceptional service and problem resolution to their customers, and a quicker way to access customer order details.
• B2B improvements that allow your customers to more easily track and edit quotes as well as configure complex Built-To-Order products with improved user experience that shows updated pricing and options in real-time.
• Site security during customer registration with preconfigured support for Google reCAPTCHA v2. This added layer of security prevents brute-force attacks in registration and prevents bots from spamming websites.

Order Management Services
SAP Order Management Services unifies buying and fulfillment channels. The composable suite of cloud-native services enable distributed order management. We added many new features, including the following:

• Workflow to automate the handling of exceptions. If an issue arises during the fulfillment request, the system can re-trigger the fulfillment in some problematic status and apply actions such as re-sourcing or sending a notification to the employee.
• Live insights for on time performance that aggregates all the order data in a single place.

• Workflow loops simplify orchestration by applying sophisticated workflows to an even broader set of order data with significantly fewer steps.
• Branching nodes with a multitude of conditions allows for more control when orchestrating orders with deeper decision capabilities. This provides greater visibility into order fulfillment, allows responses to late customer change requests, and reduces returns by preventing unnecessary shipments.

• SAP Order Management Sourcing and Availability added support for sets and bundles, the ability to review past sourcing information to improve operations in a unified commerce environment, and contextual updates to provide alternate sourcing results.

Comprehensive and Integrated SAP Suite

New integrations across the SAP portfolio optimize commerce operations, improve business workflows, and make sure you are creating seamless and exceptional customer experiences. Integration with SAP S/4HANA provides an undisputed advantage that unifies front and back-end processes to connect demand to supply and deliver engaging experiences across the customer lifecycle.

• SAP S/4HANA Sales integration now provides flexible order adjustment capabilities and customers get automatically notified of order changes that are rejected by your ERP. These provide a single source of truth for orders, streamline order management and customer notification, and simplifies B2B order planning.
• SAP Service Cloud integration improves customer retention and satisfaction by enabling SAP Composable Storefront users to request help and engage with customer service representatives by capturing and managing Service Tickets online.

• SAP CPQ integration allows B2B storefront buyers to access documents with detailed specifications, price information, and terms and conditions leading to a better and more informed B2B purchasing experience.
• Customer Data integration allows for a 360-degree view of the customer. This provides you with the customer insights needed to deliver highly personalized content and promotions.
• Synchronous integration between SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Order Management Services allows for faster and more efficient order processing, real-time order visibility and reduced overall operational costs.

For an in-depth look at the business advantages of using SAP Customer Experience solutions with SAP ERP, read the paper, Analyzing the Economic Benefits of Using AI-Powered SAP CX Solutions Natively Connected to SAP ERP.

Differentiated AI Capabilities through CX AI Toolkit

Artificial Intelligence/Generative AI was the hot topic this year and we delivered many new features that enhance the customer experience during product discovery and save your business users time through automated processes and workflows.

• “Ask the product” feature allows your customers to ask specific product-related questions directly on the storefront and get the answers they are looking for through AI-generated replies based on product data managed in the backend. This could be anything from the fabric or cleaning instructions for clothing, to the color and brightness specifications of a light bulb, to the fit and sizing information of a shoe. Any information you have about a product can be made available.

• Visual Search now goes beyond the retail industry cover all industries. Visual Search improves product discovery by delivering quick and accurate search results based on AI image detection. Let’s say you have an image of a nice dress that you are searching for. Simply upload it and let AI give you recommendations of either that exact dress or similar dresses that you might like. Product discovery has never been easier.
• Product Image Designer lets you automatically create captivating new product images from simple text descriptions. The Background Editor allows you to transform or remove existing product image backgrounds, staying on-brand and boosting engagement. Imagine launching a new home décor product. How efficient would it be to have a background of a nice living room generated automatically from a text prompt, just as it would look like with a professional photo shoot? This is exactly the type of use case the Image Designer enables.

• SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation is a cloud-native Business AI tool specially designed for manufacturers and distributors dealing with complex products. SAP Intelligent Product Recommendation uses historical data, paired with machine learning, to suggest the most suitable standard or customizable products, increasing sales and conversions.

Open Payment Framework (coming in Q1 2025)

SAP Commerce Cloud, open payment framework, provides a central payment "hub", where key Payment Service Providers, including Stripe, Adyen, and Worldpay have already been pre-integrated, so you do not need to worry about manual integrations anymore.

Organizations can easily adopt this plug-and-play solution, reducing integration complexity. The framework is extensible and headless, enabling independent operation of front and back ends, catering to diverse channel needs for global businesses, and adding innovative solutions seamlessly.

SAP Commerce Cloud, open payment framework, covers common payment requirements and end-to-end payment processes across authorization, capture, refunds, and re-authorization while automatically staying current with growing security and compliance standards. It also ensures customers have the freedom to pick their preferred payment method, which enhances the checkout experience.

Search Service (coming in Q1 2025)

At SAP, our goal is to provide our customers with all the flexible search and merchandising tools they need to enable intelligent product discovery, drive sales and increase conversions. And by modernizing our architecture ourselves, we are adhering to the same recommendations that we provide to our customers, that the move to independent cloud services managed by SAP is the best way forward to achieve a lower TCO, less development efforts and easier maintenance.

A key component of this strategy is our soon to be launched Search Service. It provides comprehensive search and merchandising features, including flexible search indexing & scoring, facets/synonyms/stemming/spelling checking capabilities with word suggestions, product variant grouping, and visual search bar configuration. It is provided as a SaaS service with 99.95% availability, a flexible API, automatic upgrades and out-of-the-box integration with SAP Commerce Cloud. It is ready for global expansion with multi-currency & multi-language support.​

And in combination with Intelligent Selling Services, we enable Intelligent Search, delivering highly relevant results to your customers with recent and trending search suggestions and using AI to boost the product results by individual interest and intent.​

SAP Recommerce
SAP Recommerce drives revenue and sustainability by capturing the second-hand online market for your products. We added many new enhancements this year to help manage the trade-ins.

• Configurable product attributes: Admin users can create up to 15 customer-specific product attributes for trade-in items, so the application closely matches your business needs and displays the correct product details and attributes to customers on the storefront.
• Item IDs: Workbench users can assign a distinct barcode or unique ID to a trade-in item. Users can view a page listing all trade-in items and filter by item’s barcode or unique ID value.
• Sustainability data: We now provide clear visibility of sustainability data and impact for business users and customers with admins being able to import and view sustainability data for each SKU and search for products or metrics in the data.
• Configurable workflows: We improved the usability and management of trade-in products through intuitive business tools and workflows. Admins can create custom workflows to suit specific programs, such as “clean only”, “clean and repair”, “repair only”. When the workbench user selects a condition indicator, the application generates the associated workflow steps, from “check-in” to “ready to restock”.

Telco and Utilities Accelerator
We bring more enhancements to this industry-specific capability to help organizations in the telco and utilities industries grow their revenue and transform faster.

• Subscription services information. Customers can get a comprehensive understanding of their subscription services, for both fixed and personalized selections. Customers can also easily track modifications to their service contract selections, including pricing updates for greater transparency.
• Support for utilities retail journeys from simple products to complex bundles.
• New design of digital B2C energy sales in Telco and Utilities Accelerator Composable Storefront.
• Improved integration with SAP S/4HANA for sales orders (utilities only)

Partner Solutions
Our growing partner ecosystem on the SAP Store adds to the already robust offering SAP Commerce Cloud through solution extensions.

• Oneview Unified Commerce Platform extends SAP Order Management Services into the physical store to maximize profitability and improve customer outcomes. Oneview Unified Commerce Platform provides shopping convenience by supporting all in-store fulfillment types for web-based orders, and associate-optimized workflows allow for efficient picking and packing of orders and preparing them for customer pickup or direct shipment to the customer.
• FrontNow is a virtual AI advisor that boosts customer engagement by providing your shoppers with personalized interactions. The AI advisor represents your brand in engaging, one-on-one conversations, and supports 85 languages for tailor-made shopping and service experiences.
• ChannelEngine harnesses AI to optimize management across 950+ online sales channels and international marketplaces. By combining the strengths of SAP Order Management Services and ChannelEngine, you can operate commerce unbounded. You get centralized shopper order processing and access to rich insights into consumer demand, sales performance, and market trends.

This is just a snapshot of the many features we have launched this year. For comprehensive details, please refer to our documentation. 

Upcoming Events
Stay connected and learn more about the latest innovations by joining our upcoming webcasts:

• SAP Commerce Cloud Q4 2024 Tech-Focused Update: January 14, 2025
• SAP Commerce Cloud Q4 2024 Release Recap: January 22, 2025.

As we close this remarkable year, we wish you happy holidays and look forward to delivering even more exciting features in 2025!

Please share your feedback in a comment and follow SAP Commerce Cloud on SAP Community to connect and engage in the new year with fellow industry peers and e-commerce experts!

Looking Ahead: Confidence in 2025 and Beyond
The innovations delivered in 2024, from smarter order management to the latest S/4HANA release, demonstrate SAP’s unwavering commitment to helping businesses thrive in an ever-changing world. As we head into 2025, our focus remains on delivering features that drive value, ensure scalability, and create seamless customer experiences.

Together, we look forward to shaping the future of commerce and consumer industries!

Happy holidays and here’s to a fantastic year ahead!