Building Modern SAP Customer Experiences with Composable Commerce

In a world of constantly evolving customer expectations, outdated systems are the number one thing that prevent retailers from growing. Businesses today are under enormous pressure to deliver seamless, personalised and dynamic customer experiences. And legacy systems, designed for a different era, are ill-equipped to handle the fast-paced demands of omnichannel commerce. 

Over two-thirds of businesses are still trapped in outdated commerce systems. The need to modernise has never been more urgent. But some drag their heels, put off by the perceived complexity and disruption it will cause.

What if you could strip away the inefficiencies, supercharge your capabilities and put the customer experience back at the heart of your strategy? And modernise your legacy system without disrupting operations? This is what SAP-powered composable architectures do.

Composable commerce offers a straightforward path to modernisation by allowing businesses to replace outdated components with best-of-breed solutions, without swapping out the system in its entirety, giving them flexibility without the headache of starting from scratch.

Composable architectures powered by SAP provide seamless integration with existing ERP systems. This allows businesses to leverage their current infrastructure while adding flexible, cutting-edge technologies. By handling complex backend processes like inventory, pricing and customer data, you can scale and innovate without disrupting operations or compromising performance.

This isn’t just about technological change - it's about prioritising customer experiences in a way that legacy systems simply cannot.

Legacy systems leave you stuck in the slow lane 

The thing about legacy systems is that they’re like quicksand; the more you try to innovate, the deeper you sink into the cycle of inefficiencies. Product managers hate them because every new feature takes months to develop, every innovation adds layers of complexity and every decision is met with a brick wall of technical debt.

These systems are built around backend operations, not user needs, leading to outdated architecture and disjointed integrations that choke innovation. Competitors move faster, and customers won’t wait while you scramble to get your house in order. 

Winparts, a leading car parts retailer, was facing this dilemma. They could no longer support their 30% year-on-year growth with an inflexible legacy system riddled with spaghetti code. 

Realising modernisation was essential, Winparts made the strategic pivot to SAP-powered composable architecture, allowing them to integrate best-of-breed technologies like Storyblok and Elastic while retaining the speed and agility to grow.

Modernise at your own pace with composable commerce

With composable commerce, businesses can modernise incrementally. They can integrate specialised solutions as-and-when, without disrupting performance or being hamstrung by monolithic architectures.

At its core, composable commerce decouples the front-end user experience from back-end processes. This move allows you to adopt a “plug-and-play” mentality, using APIs to connect various best-in-class components that suit your specific needs.

For Winparts, this meant adopting SAP Commerce Cloud for backend operations, alongside Storyblok for content management, Elastic for search, and Mollie for payments. Each component was selected because it was the best fit for the task at hand.

More importantly, they can be replaced or upgraded independently as the business continues to evolve. This modularity is one of the key advantages of composable commerce - nothing is static, and nothing is locked in.

Beyond swapping out components, composability revolutionises how you deliver customer experiences. For example, Winparts implemented A/B testing and rapid iterations, allowing them to experiment and make improvements based on real-time data, something that was impossible to do with their legacy system. 

That’s the kind of agility you need when the market moves fast, and customer preferences change on a dime.

Leveraging SAP for scalability

SAP Commerce Cloud plays a crucial role in enabling composable commerce architectures, especially for businesses managing complex product offerings and extensive customer data. 

• It integrates seamlessly with ERP systems for smooth operation and scalability
• It supports B2B and B2C, handling diverse needs and complex buying processes
• It manages multiple hierarchies, product configurations and variants for diverse product lines
• Its advanced targeting tools enable highly personalised content based on customer insights
• It's fully extensible, allowing businesses to create bespoke and unique functionalities

What’s really unique about SAP is how it allows you to scale your business without adding complexity or breaking your infrastructure. This is critical for companies like Winparts, who needed a system that could support their expansion into new markets and territories.

SAP Commerce Cloud helps manage product catalogues with multi-language, multi-market and hierarchical structures, ensuring that every aspect of the customer experience is localised and personalised. For Winparts, who serve multiple countries, each with its own language and specific market needs, this feature empowers them to tailor experiences to every market without reinventing the wheel every time.

Winparts’ use of SAP Commerce Cloud helped them to process over two million products and customer data points, integrate 40 systems and ensure that their website performance remained high throughout the transition.

The takeaway? SAP serves more than just a backend tool; it supports scalability, helping your systems manage increased complexity as your business grows without compromising stability. 

The future of composable commerce

So, what’s next with composable commerce? 

AI-driven personalisation is already taking off, enabling businesses to deliver hyper-targeted content and product recommendations based on customer behaviour and preferences. Winparts is already exploring AI to further enhance the customer experience, using tools like image recognition to help customers identify car parts by simply pointing their phone at the product.

As AI continues to evolve, the future of ecommerce will be shaped by even more sophisticated tools for personalisation and automation. And composable commerce offers the flexibility to integrate these tools as they emerge, keeping your business at the cutting edge of innovation. 

In the end, modernising your legacy commerce system isn’t just about swapping out old for new. It’s about rethinking how you deliver value to your customers and how your technology can empower your business to scale and innovate. 

Companies like Winparts are leading the charge, proving that with composable commerce, you can turn complexity into opportunity.