SAP Commerce Cloud Q4 ‘23 Release Highlights

[BalajiBalasubramanian]

2023 was a big year for SAP Commerce Cloud and our customers. We recently had another record-setting Black Friday/Cyber Weekend, and SAP was once again named a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Commerce and in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise B2B Digital Commerce Applications.

We had our first full year of Continuous Innovation release updates. We delivered 147 new capabilities across core platform, Composable Storefront, Intelligent Selling Services, Integration areas while two new major product introductions for SAP Recommerce and SAP Order Management Services.  These new innovations cover the Intelligent CX themes introduced at SAP Sapphire that are the pillars of how we help our customers drive profitable growth. Highlights include:

• SAP Order Management Services unifies buying and fulfillment channels. SAP Order Management Services is a composable suite of cloud native services to enable distributed order management. The solution empowers organizations to seamlessly integrate all owned or third-party purchasing channels with fulfillment channels. This ensures consistent order experiences, a unified view of inventory, and valuable insights across all touchpoints while seamlessly integrating with logistics and finance. The 4 key composable business capabilities of SAP Order Management Services are:
  • SAP Order Management Foundation
  • SAP Order Management Sourcing and Availability
  • SAP Omnichannel Sales Transfer and Audit
  • SAP Intelligent Returns Management 

• SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing Service provides a consistent price and promotion experience across all channels.
  SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing is a cloud native composable pricing and promotion engine offering a centralized pricing calculation service to take your pricing strategy to the next level at an unparalleled scale in online channels or in-store channel. 
• SAP CX AI Toolkit for Commerce to enable you leverage insights and infuse Generative AI by optimizing catalogs and product discovery processes.  This will boost productivity, personalize shopping experiences and ultimately drive higher conversions and profitable growth
• SAP Commerce Cloud, Composable Storefront is on a continuous innovation cadence with  frequent updates.  Composable Storefront is a lean, headless storefront that exclusively leverages SAP Commerce Cloud REST APIs.  Apart from ongoing functional capabilities that are released, Composable Storefront libraries are updated continuously with a roll forward approach that enables customers to remain secure and compliant. 
• SAP Recommerce drives sustainability and circular revenue streams.SAP Recommerce allows you to take back, manage, and resell preowned inventory. The solution helps you accelerate the shift from a linear to a circular business model, extending customer lifetime value, and promoting more-sustainable consumption.
• End-to-end integrations for connected experiences.
  Integrations across the SAP portfolio provide greater value for your investments and enhance the overall experience. Gain greater transparency with real-time order updates from S/4HANA, drive better purchasing experiences and engagement with Customer Data Platform and CPQ, and leverage commerce data for targeted marketing campaigns across B2B and B2C with the Emarsys Commerce Plug-in.
• Industry-specific capabilities leverage SAP’s vast industry knowledge to get to market quickly.
  Transform faster with industry-specific capabilities, such as SAP Recommerce and SAP Order Management Services for retail and consumer industries, payment option flexibility and relevant product recommendations during the contract change journey for telecommunications and utilities industries, self-service portal for customers to view loan information and service tickets for the financial services industry. These industry-specific capabilities allow for a more seamless experience and unlocks your competitive edge with agility and adaptability. Improve your business by giving the best experience to your customers and delivering outcomes that matter.
• A growing best-of-breed partner ecosystem extends capabilities.
  Complement the most feature-rich, scalable, and secure commerce platform with a highly curated, pre-integrated and certified best-of-breed partner ecosystem. We continue to expand our partner ecosystem, available on SAP Store, to support transforming companies who want to opt for best-of-breed solutions for specific parts of commerce.

This blog highlights this and other top features that have been released in the last 3 months for SAP Commerce Cloud. Please view the webcast replay to learn more about our latest innovations.

Also, learn more about the retail innovations from the SAP Customer Experience portfolio by viewing the recent National Retail Federation (NRF) highlights.

Industry-Tailored

Transform retail fulfillment with SAP Order Management Services

As mentioned above, SAP Order Management Services (SAP OMS) helps unify buying and fulfillment channels for a seamless buying experience. We’ve updated the solution further with enhancements for retailers and B2C customers.

Improve Time to Resolution and Customer Satisfaction with Deep Monitoring Capabilities for Order Specialists

SAP Order Management Foundation (OMF) provides omnichannel order orchestration​ along with optimization tools such as visual workflow process design and order performance analysis. ​We have enhanced the Commerce / OMF integration to ensure business continuity and unlock the latest feature set.  The new version of the integration includes end-to-end process across the lifecycle of an order, across SAP Commerce, SAP OMF and SAP Order Management for Sourcing and Availability. 

We have enhanced the flexible order orchestration processes with a visual drag-and-drop interface that now also includes deep monitoring capabilities aimed to drive increased customer satisfaction. Transparency on order monitoring for orchestration flows has been enhanced for order specialists to rapidly track down exceptions improving time-to-resolution.  The additional information can help improve future order capture to fulfillment by providing insights on where the friction points appear in the order lifecycle.

Monitoring for Flow executions

Lastly, we have introduced enhanced transparency for those orders that have been cancelled late in the fulfillment process, usually due to fulfillment challenges that typically require manual intervention.

Omnichannel Sourcing and Availability Based on Central Inventory Respository 

SAP Order Management for Sourcing and Availability (OMSA) helps retailers simplify sourcing decisions and execute related fulfillment strategies by enabling centralized, AI-powered outcome-based business strategies that leverage global, real-time inventory availability. Key capabilities include:

• Show availability on Product Detail Page
• Check availability of product when adding product to the cart
• Check availability when product quantity is changed in cart
• Check availability of products during checkout
• Create (temporary) reservation, when delivery address is maintained in checkout
• Update reservation after order has been placed
• Confirm reservation based on order confirmation from S/4HANA

Central omnichannel availability on Product Detail Page

Simulate and test your sourcing strategies

Increase Conversions and Personalized Offers from Coupon Promotions

SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing Service (OPPS) helps attract new customers, increase sales and revenue, foster customer loyalty, and enhance brand awareness with seamless journeys from coupon promotions. SAP OPPS can create personalized experiences and increase conversions from segmentation and audience building to promotion execution on the Commerce storefront.

We have added support for single code coupon-based promotions in the integration of SAP Commerce Cloud with SAP OPPS. Use segment/audience data from SAP Customer Data Platform (SAP CDP) to drive personalization in SAP Commerce Cloud and determine promotions in SAP OPPS.

Deliver Personalized Promotion Pricing and Content for Shoppers

Provide consistent shopper experiences across store POS and online channels by leveraging the new integrations with our omnichannel pricing and promotion engine to SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement, SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Customer Data Platform.

Create content rich journeys that can start with an email and stay on brand and on message from awareness to conversion on all interaction channels.  We have also now added audience aware coupon-based promotions in the flow between SAP Commerce Cloud to the SAP Omnichannel Promotion Pricing Service to ensure that incentives are redeemed by the intended group, while avoiding fraudulent usage. Category managers and marketers can collaborate on audience specific increased conversions online and in-store without having to worry about time consuming data replication or duplicated maintenance of content, price, and promotion data across many systems.

Connected

Provide Invoices to your Buyers with an Integrated SAP Experience

B2B Buyers now have a new way to access their invoice information from your sites.  On top of being able to see a list of past invoices in the B2B Account Summary section, buyers can now see the invoice related to an order on the order detail page.  B2B Buyers can download the invoice as a PDF, which is also linked in SAP S/4HANA providing an accurate and consistent B2B experience no matter the touchpoint.

Buyer invoices and download

Simplify Your Networking Architecture and Increase Security Through Integrated Azure Private Link Support

SAP provides the option for customers to configure the Azure Private Link service and endpoints from within the self-service portal for SAP Commerce Cloud. This approach reduces latency and increases throughput compared to leveraging the traditional VPN-based approach when working with solutions on Azure, SAP or other platforms. This also ensures regulatory compliance by preventing sensitive data from traversing the public Internet, which also increases security.

Azure Private Link to easily connect all the Azure instances across your landscapeInsightful

Augment Productivity with Generative AI

SAP CX AI Toolkit enhances customer engagement and increases sales by delivering personalized experiences driven by Generative AI.  This highly anticipated solution provides the ability to enhance productivity, improve data analysis, and provide tools aiding with personalization.

We provide the following capabilities and will evolve them over time. For Generative AI, SAP ensures that no customer data is sent to third-party vendors to train foundation models. A core pillar of our AI strategy is trusted and responsible AI.  SAP’s approach to ensuring quality and safety, data protection and privacy, and protecting against biases helps projects move from POC to production in no time.

Intelligent Catalog Enrichment

AI Product Tagging unlocks the full potential of your products by harnessing the power of AI to extract and enrich your product tags. Give your merchandising a boost and take your catalog to new heights.

• Leverage product images and descriptions to automatically detect attributes, reducing the manual effort to populate the classification catalog used for search, filtering, and merchandising activities (e.g., dress size, color, style, etc.)
• Proactive AI-generated attribute value recommendations for suggested product attributes.
• Reduce negative product reviews to lack of product information richness or inaccurate product details due to human error.

Tailor Your Product Experiences to Boost Conversions

AI Product Descriptions transforms your customer experience with personalized product descriptions that enrich your catalog data.

• Deliver dynamic product content that resonates with shoppers by catering to factors like regional differences in language
• Write sales and marketing ready product descriptions by leveraging existing product catalog data or supplier provided product descriptions
• Supercharge product time-to-market with bulk AI updates support

AI product attribute recommendations

Visual Search

Visual Search improves product discovery by delivering quick and accurate search results based on AI image detection that truly enhances the user experience.

• Search for products in the catalog with a user-uploaded image, improving product discovery.
• Shorten shoppers' path-to-purchase leveraging visual search to quickly offer results on the products they need compared to traditional text searches.
• Headless ready to be embedded at any touchpoint such as smart glasses or AR headsets.

Visual search

Generate Rich Marketing Content

AI Tools can produce high-quality marketing content by leveraging your commerce data for specific job functions.

• Generate a blog post or social media post using product details from SAP Commerce Cloud
• Generate product banner texts by selecting products from SAP Commerce Cloud, providing custom instructions for guidance, overlaying preset selectable messaging tones, and finally choosing one that best fits the desired brand narrative.

Generate a social media post using existing product content

Adaptive

Provide Live Assisted Service with Contextual Customer Data

Assisted Service Module 360 for Composable Storefront provides a 360-degree view of your customers, their histories, and needs from a single pane.  Customer Support Agents can quickly view customer information, including current session cart information, billing and delivery address, saved payment methods, recently changed items such as saved carts and orders, support tickets and product reviews, and available coupons and promotions. This holistic view makes interactions more personalized and improves first-call resolution ratio, saving time and providing more effective solutions by anticipating customer needs.

Assisted Service Module 360 for Composable Storefront

Unleash New Revenue Potential Through Bundling

Bundles API and Order/Quote API Enhancements for Bundles enable merchants to create and offer product bundles in a decoupled storefront. You can easily create groups of products that you believe customers would typically want to buy together.         

• Create attractive offerings to improve the AOV with bundles and packages that consist of tangible products, services, or contract items
• Increase cross-sell opportunities by driving greater awareness of products
• Offer bundles at a unique price point, and merchandise it distinctly from products for higher visibility

Product bundles

Composability and a Vast Partner Ecosystem Empower You to Extend Commerce Capabilities

Partner additions to the SAP Store bring innovation and cutting-edge solutions to our ecosystem, enhancing your digital experiences. We will highlight Booxi, an appointment scheduling app for retail that connects online and physical stores for an improved customer experience and promotes increased store foot-traffic.

• Booxi elevates your customer experience with an appointment scheduling app for retail that includes back-office tools to manage appointment availability in stores, services, staffing and resources, and fine tune booking rules. It is available on the web, tablet and mobile apps for appointment management, with simple integration to clienteling apps and 3rd party calendars, and user-friendly customer interfaces to book appointments and receive reminders.

Booxi

 For more details on the above release features, check out the following resources:

• Q4 2023 SAP Commerce Cloud Release Readiness Kit
• Performance Optimization Best Practices
• SAP Commerce Cloud update cycle
• SAP Commerce Cloud Release Navigator single access point to release content

SAP Help Portal

• SAP Commerce Cloud What’s New

Composable Commerce

• SAP Report: Achieving Agility in Digital Commerce: Guidance to Help Organizational Leaders Future-Pr...

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