For Merchants

What is Adobe Commerce Optimizer?

Improve site speed, stability, and conversion rates for eCommerce merchants—without the heavy development.

✅ What is Adobe Commerce Optimizer?

Adobe Commerce Optimizer is an "overlay" that brings excellent performance to the top-of-funnel pages while avoiding changing business-critical pages. Adobe's catalog system ingests catalog data from any API-enabled platform (but especially Adobe Commerce, SAP, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or NetSuite) and leverages AI to assist in transforming and rendering content for visitors. The result is a pathway to modernization while exponentially reducing platform migration costs.

🛠️ What problems does Adobe Commerce Optimizer solve?

Traditional eCommerce websites typically bundle the visitor experience, admin area, and business logic into one package. While functional, this approach has drawbacks:

Slow site performance

The same server processes business logic and the frontend—and those systems are often bloated with unnecessary changes and poorly-implemented code.

Adobe Commerce Optimizer:

Leverages the new Edge Delivery Services system to render content.
Using Document Authoring (Google Docs, Office 365, or Adobe's Document Authoring) to deploy dynamic content rapidly.
Bypassing the original eCommerce platform to quickly deliver all search, lists, and product pages. No waiting on slow search results.
Analytics platform to ensure website metrics do not regress with time.

Small changes that result in disastrous outages

A "simple" frontend change can cause system-wide outages—the result of a large "blast radius".

Adobe Commerce Optimizer:

A separate frontend website (composable/headless) that firewalls business logic.
No complex frameworks to learn, making it easier for internal teams to manage a website.

Inability to tailor to customers

In a normal eCommerce experience, each visitor is a number, but you know a human being is on the other side of that screen. How do you tune their experience to their needs?

AI-Powered personalization dynamically responds to user behavior to adjust search results, product recommendations, and even category product listings.
Generative AI for images and content makes deploying unique product images and collateral easy.
Leverage the whole Adobe suite to market your customers better. Optimizer is now connected, and in a big way.

Extreme expense to maintain or upgrade

Keeping the system up to date or installing a new theme to improve the experience is expensive.

This updates only the top-of-funnel pages (home, category, product, and content). The expensive areas, such as business logic, checkout, and customer account, remain on the original eCommerce platform.
Any API-enabled eCommerce platform is compatible.
A unified frontend for private equity operating multiple eCommerce storefronts, without the effort of replatforming.

💨 How Adobe Commerce Optimizer brings a new spin.

Adobe Commerce Optimizer is not your typical "headless" storefront intricately tied to an eCommerce platform.

Instead, they have pioneered a "composable catalog data model", which is jargon for a data processor, which serves as the connector to these other eCommerce systems. This connector pulls real-time data, formats it according to your requirements, and stores it for the visitor experience to request it.

What's especially unique about Optimizer is that it doesn't take over your entire website. It only covers SEO-impacted pages on your website: the home page, content pages, product pages, and category pages. These are often the lowest cost areas of an eCommerce system to rebuild but with the highest SEO coverage.

🛠️ Optimizer's suite of tools

As the graphic above shows, Optimizer is not just a storefront; it's a system that automatically transforms your content.

What's in the box?

Storefront (the customer experience): a set of Commerce-enabled drop-in components. You can use these anywhere—they don't have to be on Adobe-powered websites.
Catalog Data Transformer: a web interface to assemble data from 3rd-party systems. While Adobe focuses on eCommerce platforms, developers can use this to load data from almost any source imaginable.
Edge Delivery Services: Adobe's new content hosting system. This provides the gateway to tools like Adobe's Document Authoring, Google Docs, Office 365, or Adobe Experience Manager.
AEM Document Asset Management: a tool to host, optimize, and edit images.

🤝 How does Adobe Commerce Optimizer interact with the existing eCommerce platform?

Adobe Commerce Optimizer replaces your customer experience—mostly. Visitors will land on Optimizer's website, not your current eCommerce platform.

Instead, your eCommerce platform will remain intact but be moved to a subdomain.

Optimizer will serve these pages:

Home page
Content pages
Categories
Products

Your current eCommerce platform will serve these pages from a separate subdomain (e.g. store.example.com):

Cart
Checkout
Customer account

Optimizer then connects back to your eCommerce platform to provide continuity for shopping carts and user accounts.

Why should I care about Adobe Commerce Optimizer?

If you're thrilled with your page speed, SEO, content publishing capabilities, and the roadmap of your current eCommerce platform, you shouldn't care.

In our experience, this constitutes very few eCommerce merchants.

What would you think of having a world-class system to present your catalog and content—while avoiding the massive bill associated with re-platforming? That's the Commerce Optimizer value proposition.

What platforms work with Adobe Commerce Optimizer?

You can use Optimizer with any API-enabled platform (though not all integrations have been built yet). This includes:

SAP
SalesForce Commerce Cloud
Shopify
commercetools
BigCommerce
Or literally any other system.

How does Adobe Commerce Optimizer affect existing Magento 2 or Adobe Commerce merchants?

There are no immediate impacts to you.

While this is Adobe's roadmap to a new, robust, Software-as-a-Service eCommerce solution, they are explicit that it does not deprecate the current open-source methodologies.

However, this could be an ideal opportunity if you're struggling with slow page speeds, frustrating content development, and poor Search Engine Optimization. None of your existing infrastructure has to change. Instead, you can start the migration process to this new methodology by upgrading the most impactful pages on your website... using Optimizer. The work on these pages won't be touched when you make the final leap to SaaS.

Better yet, SwiftOtter has invested in a Combiner tool to allow you to deploy one page using this new technology. You'll be surprised how quick and easy it is.

How is Commerce Optimizer implemented?

Connector Verification: Ensure there's a connector from your eCommerce platform to Optimizer. While custom connectors can be built, using pre-built ones significantly reduces migration costs.
Experience Review: We analyze your current website's content, category, and product pages and compare them with the new frontend experience. You can maintain your existing look and feel or use this opportunity to refresh your website's design.
Implementation: We implement Commerce Optimizer while keeping your existing platform (SalesForce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, BigCommerce, etc.). We ensure pages are kept at the same URL or leverage redirects. The design is meticulously implemented.

Do you want your storefront optimized?

We would love the opportunity to help you evaluate whether or not Adobe Commerce Optimizer is a good fit for you. We believe in a consultative approach, looking at the pros and cons of this and other approaches—all to arrive at a solution that will last many otter's lifetimes.