The e-commerce growth rate has made customers want seamless shopping experiences with all the channels included. Businesses, therefore, need to ensure they choose the right front-end technology so that their investments can stand forever.
In this article, we evaluate the two leading options – SAP Spartacus and traditional front ends to help you determine the best fit for your organization’s needs and goals. We explore their key capabilities and use cases to aid you in making an informed decision.
SAP Spartacus vs. Traditional Frontends: An Overview
The front end is the layer that handles the look, feel and navigation of an online store. It enables interactions and displays stored information to customers.
Traditional frontends are monolithic platforms developed in-house using proprietary technologies like jQuery, AngularJS etc. whereas, SAP Spartacus is SAP’s main open-source progressive web app (PWA) based frontend for Commerce Cloud builds.
Traditional Frontends
Traditional frontends offer high degrees of customization as they are built from scratch using in-house resources. However, maintaining such platforms is resource-intensive and they lack standardization across implementations. Any new features or fixes require extensive coding and testing. Moreover, selecting technologies becomes crucial as some may become obsolete over time, necessitating rewrites. Compatibility with new headless APIs also needs custom integration work. These factors drive up the total cost of ownership in the long run.
SAP Spartacus
SAP Spartacus is a pre-built PWA storefront that offers standardization, out-of-the-box features and regular updates/ fixes through its open governance model. It supports integrated headless commerce and can consume any Commerce Cloud backend service. Being an open-source PWA, Spartacus delivers an optimal customer experience across devices with benefits like faster loads, offline support and push notifications. It future-proofs investments and shields businesses from technology obsolescence through its extensible and modular architecture.
Key Capabilities
Both options deliver omnichannel shopping but differ in key capabilities like customization, maintenance, integration and future-proofing. While traditional fronts provide deep customization via in-depth coding, Spartacus focuses on standardizing best practices. Spartacus significantly reduces maintenance overhead through automated fixes and removes technology change risks. Its integrated headless commerce also eases migrations to new commerce services.
The Right Fit Depends on Needs
Whether a traditional or Spartacus front-end is better depends on an organization’s unique context and goals. Traditional fronts are ideal if extreme flexibilities are needed. Spartacus suits businesses aiming to standardize while keeping options open for future changes. It especially benefits those adopting headless commerce or migrating to the Commerce Cloud. For new implementations, Spartacus removes the heavy lifting of building a PWA from scratch.
Traditional Frontend Use Cases
Traditional fronts are best suited for brands requiring:
- Highly customized and differentiated shopping experiences
- Frequent UI/visual changes driven by marketing teams
- Flexible integrations with various non-SAP backends
- Legacy monolithic Commerce implementations
Their programming flexibility allows the expression of creative visions that may not easily fit into standardized frameworks. Custom teams also gel well with such tightly integrated, homegrown solutions. However, total costs rise substantially over time.
SAP Spartacus Use Cases
Spartacus excels for organizations wanting to:
- Lower long-term maintenance costs of their frontends
- Accept standardized frontends while allowing space for tweaks
- Adopt emerging Commerce Cloud headless services seamlessly
- Future-proof investments against technology obsolescence
- Align frontend development with open-source best practices
It regularly upgrades future-proof investments by incorporating the latest standards. Migration to new commerce backends or headless scenarios is also simpler. Teams with constraints on customization budgets especially benefit from its standardization.
Comparing Technical Attributes
On technical grounds, Spartacus differs from conventional MVC architecture by following a service-oriented approach. It encapsulates each concern as an autonomous module for increased reusability and testability. Spartacus supports the integration of UI components through Angular and RxJS observables. Both out-of-the-box and customized implementations are configured using JSON model files while traditional fronts are usually custom-coded monoliths following proprietary architectures.
Traditional Frontend Development
Developing traditional fronts is a complex undertaking requiring:
- Select appropriate technologies like jQuery, Angular, etc.
- Architecting the overall application structure
- Coding all UI components, pages, and services from scratch
- Configuring server-side integrations and data flows
- Managing extensive test and deployment workflows
- Ongoing maintenance of in-house codebase
Budgets must accommodate significantly higher initial development costs and long-term support overheads. Expertise localization also becomes critical for such tightly coupled, bespoke solutions.
Spartacus Storefront Development
Spartacus simplifies frontend development through:
- Model-driven JSON configuration of common storefront structures
- Reusable Angular-based component library for UI building blocks
- Headless integration services for abstraction from backends
- Automated builds, configurations and hosting for cloud deployments
- Open-source community support and maintenance
The pre-existing sample storefronts provide a strong head start as customizations are coded as angular modules/components. In addition, the initial costs are lower while upgrades come through regular releases. Expertise is easier to source given its standardization.
Standardization Benefits of Spartacus
By standardizing frontend conventions and practices, Spartacus helps organizations reap several advantages over the long term:
- Simplified onboarding of new resources as expertise is transferable across implementations built on the same platform. This eases the scaling of development teams.
- Automated testing and linting ensure code quality and catch issues early. Large codebases are thus easier to manage with fewer bugs.
- Semantic versioning and dependency declarations through package.json facilitate painless upgrades by minimizing unintended side effects.
- Shared solutions to common storefront problems through its open-source community save effort as compared to re-inventing wheels in-house.
- Consistent digital brand experiences are delivered across sites using identical component libraries and configurations.
- Enterprise shops benefit from robust product support available through SAP for both out of box and custom storefronts.
Choosing Between Options
It is ideal to evaluate criteria like customization needs, ecosystem standardization, maintenance costs, integration scenarios and technology roadmaps to align with your wider digital transformation goals.
Traditional fronts suit unique design visions but become harder to change over time while Spartacus strikes a balance for most B2C use cases needing some flexibility on standardized platforms. It facilitates both the evolutionary refining of existing solutions and revolutionizing systems through modern headless architectures.
Conclusion
Traditional homemade frontends are best suited for mission-critical custom implementations but become expensive to operate at scale. Whereas, SAP Spartacus balances flexibility and future-proofing through standardization delivered via open-source speed. Though not intended for unlimited bespoke variations, its tooling simplifies development and shields investments against obsolescence. For most mid-large retailers, Spartacus delivers an optimal balance, especially when adopting SAP Commerce Cloud backends and headless architectures of the future. Careful evaluation of objectives can help choose the right fit.
