In SAP Commerce Cloud, the Web Content Management System (WCMS) is responsible for managing and delivering the content displayed on storefronts.
The purpose of the WCMS in SAP Commerce Cloud is to enable businesses to create, manage, and personalize the content presented to their customers within a rich and engaging user experience.
Therefore, we introduce Laura, the WCMS Manager. She will showcase all these tasks during our training.
As a business user, Laura doesn't need to know all the technical details involved in creating a webstore in SAP Commerce Cloud. However, web content managers must be aware of the overall architecture and general responsibilities of the parts that make up a store. This also helps them to communicate with other stakeholders, like developers.
Introducing the WCMS Relevant Architecture
Let's take a birds-eye view of the relevant architecture for web content management in SAP Commerce Cloud in the following video:
As you learned in the video, the high-level architecture typically involves the following elements:
The Architecture and Its Components
The Base Store represents the abstraction of the whole store in just one entity to centralize store-relevant configurations like currencies, connected warehouses, and delivery countries/regions. It is linked to all physical stores, so-called Points of Service (for example, in different cities) and to one or more digital storefronts, the CMS Sites. The Base Store is also associated with the Product Catalog to provide product details to the digital and physical stores. All in all, the Base Store is the lynchpin of the presentation layer.
Web Content Manager Laura works with CMS Sites. Each of these refers to Content Catalogs to find requested pages and their components. It also refers to Product Catalogs for product details needed by web components like a product carousel. The CMS Site provides the content and product information that SAP Commerce Cloud, composable storefront requests and finally presents to the user.
Catalog Comparison
To avoid confusion, let's review the similarities and differences between Content and Product Catalogs:
| Content Catalog | Product Catalog |
|---|---|
| Staged and online versions contain structure and elements of the website presented to customers (pages, templates, components). | Staged and online versions contain products and categories structured hierarchically. |
| Component is the basic entity. | Product is the basic entity. |
| Managed with SmartEdit. | Managed with the Product Cockpit in Backoffice. |
| Some content pages display data from the product catalog (for example, Product List and Product Details pages. | |
| Some individual components refer to products in the Product Catalog (for example, Product Carousel). |
Accessing the Storefront
Users and customers can access SAP Commerce Cloud by using the composable storefront, built on state-of-the-art technology. This feels like using a responsive app with improved performance and usability instead of having a "classical" web app known for long reloading cycles.
The content for composable storefront pages, such as logos, links, banners, or static pages, is fetched from the SAP Commerce Cloud WCMS. Modifications to page content are done by Laura, mostly through SmartEdit, the main WCMS tool.
Multi-Country Site Support
Multi-Country Site Support allows Laura to manage sites that consist of multiple content catalogs which use content inheritance. Thus, pages and components can be reused from a top-level parent catalog to lower-level country and regional content catalogs.
For example, Laura might reuse content of an EU top-level parent catalog for different country/region-specific content catalogs, like for Germany and France.
Laura uses SmartEdit with Multi-Country Site Support to manage the content of sites with multiple content catalogs which are set up in a hierarchy. This allows her to maintain a consistent look and feel across all Web sites while customizing content catalogs for different regions and languages, and saves her time and effort during setup.
Content Personalization and Media Storage
Laura can also personalize content directly in the WCMS. With the added help of optional integrated tools like SAP Emarsys or intelligent selling services for SAP Commerce Cloud, she could enhance the user experience even further, for example with campaign and trend management.
WCMS can also handle media like images, audio files, and videos stored in different locations. When licensed, it is also possible to leverage an integrated DAM (Digital Asset Management system) for storage and management.