[00:00:00] Hi everybody. Welcome to this episode of Commerce Today. I'm really excited. Another fun springtime episode. Hopefully the lights stay on. I was actually planning on recording this one outside. Had to move inside because we've got some crazy storms here in Dallas. But not gonna let that keep me from bringing you the latest from the world of e-commerce especially.

I'm excited to dive much deeper into Adobe's new. Adobe Commerce is a cloud service and I wanted to go deeper into it, not just because it's an exciting new thing. It's a new new toy to play with for those of us in the e-commerce world. But because I've seen a lot of misinformation and assumptions out there, even some pretty big names in the e-commerce industry, they basically said, ah, it's Magento or Adobe Commerce just with a one click installer. And it's not, it is not that at all. And I think a lot of people are missing out on understanding exactly what this product is because they're dismissing it so quickly. So there is not a lot of information published about it, but I did go through every single session from Adobe [00:01:00] Summit and some of the partner sessions where they've really outlined how this product works and came up with 20 pages of notes.

And I. Don't usually like to use notes for the podcast, but I'm actually going to refer to these from time to time just because there's more in this product than I can even keep in my head right now. Diving right in Adobe Commerce is a cloud service is the one of two new Adobe commerce related products that were announced at Adobe Summit this year, just a few weeks ago.

It is a SaaS, so it is a software as a service. It is not a pass. It is not an on-premise piece of software. So this is very new for the Adobe commerce world. Those of you that have been around the Magento world may be thinking, oh, but we've had this before. We had Magento go. This is nothing like Magento go and diving right in.

So it is multi-tenant SaaS. Adobe has committed to it being completely versionless. So all updates, patches, new features are gonna roll out automatically to all of the users. So you don't have any of the maintenance and upgrade cost or frustration that you might [00:02:00] have with a pass or an on-premise product.

It is headless and composable. This is where e-commerce is going. I was actually talking to another e-commerce industry expert this morning and we agreed that if your platform isn't composable, it may not be around much longer. Like this is just what merchants expect. This is the state of the art about how e-commerce projects ought to be implemented in 2025 and beyond.

And if you're saying what is composable? We have a lot of. Commerce today, episodes going back probably about 18 months or almost two years, talking about composable commerce and kind of the composable mindset versus the monolithic mindset. So I will try to link to some of those in the show notes if I can remember.

But otherwise, just search for commerce today in composable and I'm sure Google will get you there. And the headless piece is interesting they are also, as we'll talk about in a minute, building all of this around Adobe's edge delivery services. Which is one of those features that they brought from the enterprise level down into the SaaS to make it [00:03:00] accessible to basically everybody.

But beyond edge delivery and edge delivery storefront, if you want to use a different storefront or front end, you can, because it's a headless setup. So that's pretty cool. I mentioned edge delivery storefront. This is something that's been available in the Adobe commerce world for over a year now, and it didn't see as much attention as I thought it would and I really expected it to get more attention because the big thing about Edge Delivery storefront is it gives you typically a 99 on Google Lighthouse and great core web vitals.

The performance is basically as fast as any website can be these days, and to have that on an e-commerce site, which. Typically, as we all know, e-commerce sites are nowhere near as fast as static sites tend to be, but edge delivery storefront powered sites are. One of these days I might actually sit down and write up how much it would cost to purchase all of these services separately, like before this announcement versus, what you're looking at as far as investing into a Adobe commerce as a cloud [00:04:00] service.

I'm still floored just doing the math in my head at all of these. Fairly expensive enterprise grade features and functionality that they have brought into Adobe Commerce as a cloud service. So this is this is definitely, I've mentioned before this is Adobe shot at Shopify. This is Adobe shot at the entire market.

It's composable, it's fast. It's using some of these amazing enterprise technologies and generative AI technologies that Adobe has been leading the way with. On the content side, it's pulling in things from, even literally Photoshop, like they basically went through the entire Adobe product suite.

And said, what would you need to have a best in class e-commerce experience? All right, let's put all of that into Adobe Commerce as a cloud service and make it available to merchants of basically any size. But moving right along. Mentioned the Adobe. Integrations, the other Adobe services. So there's actually a built in digital asset manager.

You don't have to go out and buy a separate dam and it uses Adobe experience manager assets, which again, something [00:05:00] that previously you would have to buy separately. This does SMART imaging. This does dynamic media. One of the favorite, my favorite things about this was actually a presentation from Adobe Summit 2024.

Where they showed that by using Adobe Firefly, which is their, one of their generative AI technologies, you could take, say you had a backpack and you have the product image of your backpack, and you say, I just have one product image. Best practice says I need four or five. I need some lifestyle images.

And you can go out there and you can actually see a demo where within this dam using Firefly, you can say, all put a water bottle in the side pouch of that backpack and now, show a person wearing it, using it while they're on a hike and show it in these different situations. And not only, there's a lot of tools out there these days that can use generative AI to make cool images for you, but this all happens within your commerce backend.

So you're not having to go to two or three different websites or apps. You're literally in the place where you're editing the product and you can say. Create these images for me. It gets added into the digital asset manager. It can [00:06:00] even create AR and 3D content for you. So go back. Oh, even longer in Commerce Today, history.

We talked some time ago about AR and about how one of the barriers to entry with augmented reality is the fact that you need 3D product images and you need this really high level and high fidelity product data and imagery that just a lot of brands don't have. From your existing images, Adobe Commerce is a cloud service can actually generate those for you.

So I mentioned Firefly through the Digital asset manager, but also Adobe Express is built into this system. So again, super easy to manage that product content, but also create that product content. On the Firefly side, it can also actually create your product descriptions and maybe you don't wanna go that far.

I know that. Using generative AI to completely create your product descriptions still can get a little sketchy. But one amazing thing it can do is let's say you have the exact same product data from the manufacturer that all your competitors have, but your brand has a [00:07:00] specific style tone and voice.

You can actually go in and use these tools that are built into Adobe commerce as a cloud service and say, rewrite this product description in my brand style, tone and voice. And now you have a completely unique product description, matches your brand. Google's gonna love it. Your customers are gonna love it.

And again, you're not having to go to two or three different apps. You don't have a chat GPT subscription and window off on the side. All of this is able to take place directly in the admin interface. Also you might have seen over the past year, two, three, four, if you follow Adobe. They've been launching a lot of microservices, so there has been a live search service.

There's been catalog services, just a lot of different services. Now you know why all of those come together in Adobe Commerce as a cloud service. So all those merchandising services, the live search product recommendations, dynamic category pages, all of those are included and built in. So you're getting all those functionalities.

Something kinda interesting Adobe has shared is that some brands that are using those specific [00:08:00] microservices, especially around the AI piece, are seeing anything from a 15 to 50% increase in click-throughs. So obviously those AI recommendations are really helping drive more traffic now in the category of things Adobe has been releasing over the past few years.

But not everyone knew exactly why. Developer at builder and API mesh the app builder system is I like to describe it as Adobe's answer to low code and no code apps and integrations. So if you need to build some sort of customization or functionality into your Adobe Commerce as a cloud service store or even to your existing Adobe Commerce Pass.

You can go out there and you can use App Builder. It's completely serverless, it's very simple to use. And an interesting thing is Adobe actually partnered with a number of different companies that were known as best in class for doing certain integrations between Adobe Commerce and other platforms.

So things like Dynamics nav P 21, all those fun ERPs to integrate with. [00:09:00] And they have released app builder apps for free into the app builder marketplace that Adobe has pretested and vetted to basically say, Hey, if you want to go integrate Epicor P 21 into your Adobe Commerce as a cloud service system, it's basically one click install with App Builder.

That is just such a powerful system. And then API mesh, I almost want to do a whole separate podcast on where I can really geek out. But basically API mesh is a way that you can. Extend and enhance other APIs. So let's say you have again, an ERP and it has an API, especially if it has a GraphQL, API, and it's 80% of what you need.

But there's a few transformations you need to do on top of that, API before you process that data. You can do that with API mesh. So it's just a, basically an A API orchestration layer. What all of this means for the less technical people out there is you no longer have. A server running custom code that you're having to maintain, that you're having to update, that you're having to make sure [00:10:00] doesn't break when Adobe updates.

All of this is done. Through App Builder and through API mesh completely separate from your website. And that also just has so many benefits. We talked a few episodes ago about how if you're using one of those brittle old ERP connectors, that's built directly in as an extension and it breaks, it can break checkout, it can break search, it can break any part of your website, not a lot of fun if you're using App Builder, since that's completely separate from your website.

It has zero impact on the features, functionality, or performance of your website. So it's a pretty cool technology that I think a lot of non-technical people haven't really figured out the value of yet, but there's a lot there. Now, the other thing that's included in this, of course, is e-commerce. So all of the B2C functionality, all of the B2B functionality, everything that Adobe Commerce is known for is also included in Adobe commerce as a cloud service.

It's pretty big. It's a pretty big deal, and I think more people need to be getting excited about it and digging into it. So [00:11:00] a few of the things that really stand out to me, obviously not having to do patches. They've gotten really good about having a very clear patch schedule for Adobe. We know when the patches are coming out, typically at least a year in advance, we can plan for it.

And if you're following the best practices, then. Patching and updating your Adobe Commerce store isn't that BA isn't that big of a deal, but there's a lot of stores out there that were built by people that didn't quite follow the best practices. And for those sites, upgrades and patches are painful.

They are just, time consuming and painful. They even can get a little scary. The site can be a little brittle, and so by. Changing the way the platform is run by making it a SaaS and by moving the customizations in the app builder into the API mesh into a GraphQL API, it basically eliminates the need for those upgrades and patches, but also makes any customizations that are done on your site, they have to follow best practices.[00:12:00] 

And this is a big change. And I know there's some people that aren't gonna like it. And it honestly reminds me of when Adobe Commerce Cloud or then Magento Commerce Cloud was first released. And I'm gonna. Get a little technical here, but hopefully not too much. But there are people that were frustrated because with Magento and Adobe, especially the on-premise version, before there was a pass or the cloud version, you got full access to the code.

So as a developer, you knew you shouldn't edit the core code. You should actually go out and create a separate module to build your customization. But there were plenty of developers that said. Oh, that's hard. That takes time. And you know what I, I, the fixed price project, I quoted the client this much money, I'm gonna lose money if I spend any more time on this project.

So unfortunately, there were developers out there that would edit the core. Then every time you upgrade, all those changes go away. They just disappear and you have to do 'em again and again. And it's just, it's terrible. There's a reason you're not supposed to do it. When Magento Commerce Cloud was released, they made it physically impossible for [00:13:00] anyone to edit the core code.

That increased the stability, scalability, lowered the headaches around upgrades. That helped a lot. But there were a lot of developers when it first released that said, oh, this is terrible. I just, I don't like it. It's no good. And what they didn't wanna say to their clients is, I don't like it because it doesn't allow me to take the shortcuts that in the end cost my clients more money.

And so I'm excited that Adobe Commerce as a cloud service put some of these guardrails around these best practices and basically forces developers to follow them. Again, it's gonna be a learning curve. There's gonna be some growing pains for some of those developers. But everything I'm seeing is Adobe is providing a lot of extra support and documentation and help to get everyone up to speed on this new way.

They've honestly been doing that for what, a year, two years now. When they first announced at Builder, they've been doing so much to try to get developers up to speed on it. So the next kind of thing that I'm super excited about is just the performance and speed. We've done a lot with Adobe commerce sites over the [00:14:00] years to make them as fast as possible.

Hyvä, which I've mentioned before, which is an amazing front end system for Magento and Adobe Commerce, and it's spelled HYVA with two dots over the a. If you're wondering what Hyvä is definitely recommend you check it out. It is an incredibly performant storefront. But Adobe has actually taken it even a step further with the new Adobe commerce as a cloud service.

They are bundling in, like I mentioned, those edge delivery services. This makes the sites just literally as fast as they can possibly be. So in a day and age where. SEO cares about performance. Users care about performance, everybody Performance is so important and there's so many case studies that have come out of these clients that were using edge delivery services, even with the existing Adobe commerce implementations where they're making literally millions of dollars more just because of how much faster their side is.

And before, again, that was behind a wall where if you weren't a big enterprise brand that had the budget for it, you weren't getting [00:15:00] edge delivery services. And now literally anybody that signs up for Adobe commerce is a cloud service, gets that scalability. So the scalability on this, because of those microservices, the catalog micro, they have actually.

Done. Some work on that with existing clients that are on the existing cloud implementation of Adobe Commerce, where it's ingesting up to 10,000 products per minute and 50,000 price changes per minute. I. Again, that's a level of scalability that no other SaaS has, but because Adobe did the work behind the scenes in advance, built out these microservices based on their work with the other additions of Adobe commerce and Magento, they're able to release a SaaS that it's this, again, I keep saying it, but it's this enterprise level of performance that literally anybody's gonna be able to take advantage of.

Advanced B2B functionality. I won't go into all of that because that is basically the exact same advanced B2B functionality already built in Adobe commerce. So if you go out, watch some of my old podcast episodes about Adobe Commerce B2B, some [00:16:00] of the demos that Adobe has, you can see all of that. But pretty much anything and everything, like I was meeting with a B2B brand just earlier this week and I said we need this, we need that, we need this.

And each thing I'm like. That's built into Adobe Commerce. You don't need to pay me or another agency to implement it, like that's just stock functionality and that's gonna be stock functionality in the Adobe Commerce Cloud service. Now what I haven't talked a lot about, I geek out on the technical side of it.

I know there's a lot of you out there that geek out on the conversion rate optimization, the design, the other aspects of Adobe's portfolio. There is some cool stuff there too for y'all. Adobe Sensei and pieces of Adobe Target are built in to Adobe Commerce as a cloud service. So it actually allows you.

To do some incredible personalizations and incredible dynamic content that before you weren't easily able to do or you had to buy those separate services for. I mentioned the generative AI for content that's actually being launched as the [00:17:00] Adobe Product Assistant and it's really cool. I definitely recommend you go check it out.

Something that I'm surprised every SAS doesn't have, and I'm sure the race is on now. Is a new site optimizer AI agent, and what that does is actually go through and scan your site, look for performance issues, look for user experience issues, give you recommendations and say, this is what you need to fix some of the things that can actually fix for you.

And it'll tell you if you fix this is the ROII expect you to receive. This is how it will improve your traffic or conversion rates. And so basically your site is using an AI agent to constantly monitor and make sure that it's as fast and has the best user experience possible. So again, it's blurring the lines where AI is coming for more and more jobs.

I think there's some. Some agencies out there that are a little nervous about that feature. But I think again, every platform needs to have that. I always like to tell our clients that I don't want you to pay me to do the [00:18:00] boring everyday stuff that an AI could do, or that honestly should just be built in your platform.

I want you to pay me for the really cool cutting edge new features we can build together that are just focused on your exact business and your use case. And they've done so much with this cloud service to basically. Eliminate the need for an agency to do a lot of that basic work. It really does free up your budget to do a lot more interesting things to drive your business forward.

I mentioned the dam. So having a digital asset manager built in, again, used to a lot of people that I worked with just didn't have one, or they went out and they had to purchase one separately for sometimes a substantial amount of money. So having that built in is powerful. Now they do wanna make this as developer friendly as possible.

So new environments, like if you are setting up a new environment to work on a new Adobe Commerce as a cloud service project, they can be onboarded in under five minutes. And instance, provisioning takes less than two minutes. So again, this isn't what people [00:19:00] were saying about how they thought it was.

Magento Go 2.0 or just a fancy installer around Magento. This is a whole new approach to hosting an a Adobe Commerce site to creating an Adobe Commerce site. And then they've done so much through App Builder and through the Adobe marketplace. I already mentioned Go out and look. Now it is a little confusing right now.

There are two marketplaces. There's the marketplace for Magento and Adobe Commerce extensions, and there's the marketplace for app builder. Go look at the Adobe app builder marketplace and you'll be floored at how many free integrations and apps are already out there. And this is something that, even Adobe Commerce when it launched, or Adobe Commerce Cloud, it didn't have this because a lot of those integrations cost money and some of them had very hefty monthly fees on them.

These are free. And so again, you do the total cost of ownership of say, Shopify Plus versus Adobe Commerce as a cloud service. And I just don't see how [00:20:00] Shopify wins. Like I think Shopify is either gonna have to come out with a whole lot of new features really fast, or more likely drop their prices because I just don't think they're gonna win in a head-to-head TCO battle against this new service.

And I'm curious, I think we're gonna see a lot of fud, fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Being spouted out in the marketplace about how, oh no, it's just, it's just the same old Magento in a cloud interface. It's nothing new. Don't look at it. But then if you actually look at it and you do the actual comparison you're gonna see that Shopify doesn't have a lot in its column versus kind of the pros and the TCO that you're gonna see on Adobe Commerce as a cloud service.

So I honestly hope. Shopify doesn't go the FUD route. I hope they dig in and I hope they improve their platform and or lower their pricing because I think that would be better for all e-commerce merchants. Like I mentioned before, having two different best in class options is great. Like the way that for [00:21:00] so long, if you wanted a inexpensive SaaS, your only option really was Shopify.

There's big commerce, but when you look at the market share, your only option was Shopify. And I think that stagnated the innovation, especially what was available to smaller merchants, just it got stagnant, it got boring, it got not that great. And now this is gonna light a fire under Shopify and we're gonna see some great improvements really, in both platforms.

And I think it's gonna be a really interesting competition between Shopify and Adobe. So I have a lot more I can tell you, I think we got through about four pages of notes and I even have some interesting comparisons to BigCommerce and Shopify and some use case specific items, but I think I'll wrap it up here.

Luckily the power has stayed on this whole time, so hopefully these storms are done for a little while. And I will be back next week with another episode of Commerce Today. I didn't make the, this 19 pages of notes really to distribute. But if you are curious about Adobe Commerce as a cloud service, [00:22:00] find me on LinkedIn.

I'm Joshua Warren. I have a creativity gold background behind my head. Find me on LinkedIn, shoot me a dm. Say you saw this episode. Let me know what you think. I'm always looking for feedback and I'll see if I can get like a cleaned up version of these notes that I can share with you so that you have a little bit more information while we're waiting for the Adobe machine to produce what I'm sure are gonna be some great white papers, case studies, and other documentation around Adobe Commerce as a cloud service. So thanks as always for watching and listening and definitely share the podcast with others if you don't mind. And let me know if I can help you in any way in your e-commerce journey.

Thanks.