Salesforce Commerce Cloud today is the enterprise eCommerce platform Salesforce acquired in 2016 when it bought Demandware. Back then, Demandware was seen as one of the strongest cloud-native commerce platforms on the market. It offered enterprise brands the ability to scale quickly without worrying about infrastructure, hosting, or core system maintenance. That alone set it apart in a world still dominated by on-prem or heavily customized platforms. The key advantage? All the incumbents all believed that the cloud was stupid and no one would want their credit cards going through there.

But Demandware wasn’t perfect. In fact it was a polished up version of Intershop, a performance enhanced old East German technology (like anabolic steroids) that scrubbed up very nicely as a modern cloud platform. It was rigid in certain areas, lacked flexibility around CMS and search, and required a significant investment in custom development to keep pace with modern front-end expectations. But that's hindsight talking. Demandware was cool AF. Since the acquisition, Salesforce has not really done much with it. It was gradually rebranded and restructured under the Commerce Cloud name. But for technical reasons that have something to do with 20 year old servers, the DNA of Demandware is still dominant. And with the abandonment of commerce on core announced recently by Salesforce, that isn't going to change until Salesforce buys commercetools, which they should. That's for another day.

If Commerce Cloud today were a car it would be a Porsche. The Porsche was also a reworking of a solid German product - the VW Beetle. It was prettier, fundamentally similar but superficially very different. Over the years Porsche has gone from sexy, to vulgar and symbolic of show-off wealth, back to quietly sexy again today. The car has stayed the same as the world moved on around it. But its very lack of change is what makes it valuable now. Much of what Porsche has done to try and branch out from their origins as a very specific looking sports car has failed. (Though the Cayenne is apparently very successful). But eventually something brilliantly (okay solidly, Germanically) )engineered like a Porsche, and like Demandware (Intershop) can come back around to being acknowledged as relevant and sexy despite its age.

At its core, SFCC is fundamentally boring. That's a good thing. Brain surgeons, airline pilots and ecommerce platforms do not benefit from being bad boys. It is still a SaaS-based commerce engine. It handles catalog management, promotions, pricing, inventory, checkout, and all the operational fundamentals you’d expect from an enterprise commerce platform.

What’s changed is how flexible and modern it now seems, how well it is constructed for the modern era of commerce, for businesses looking to build richer digital experiences, especially those ready to move toward a composable or headless architecture.

The world has finally caught up to the potential of Demandware: SFCC is no longer restricted to being a solid managed commerce backend. It's a core commerce engine that easily fits into a larger ecosystem of API-first tools.

One of the clearest examples of SFCC’s evolution is how its front-end strategy has changed over time. Or how, like Martin Peters, Demandware was 10 years ahead of its time.

Early Demandware sites were usually built using SiteGenesis, a legacy, server-rendered architecture with tightly coupled templates and creaky tooling. SiteGenesis was fast for its time, but became a maintenance headache for modern teams trying to move quickly.

Salesforce addressed this with the launch of SFRA (Storefront Reference Architecture), a more modular and maintainable codebase. SFRA introduced better support for responsive design (oh yes, remember when that was an actual thing), reusable components, and a somewhat cleaner dev experience. It brought the platform closer to what modern teams of 2018 expected from enterprise front-end frameworks.

However, SFRA is still tightly coupled to the platform. And in the last few years, a growing number of retailers have outgrown that constraint. And the modern technology stack of ecommerce is now oriented to allowing best of breed vendors to integrate into the ecommerce engines and take responsibility for some operations off their hands and into the hands of technologists who do those specific things well.

That’s where composable storefronts come in. Salesforce responded to the demand for greater flexibility by launching PWA Kit, which became Composable Storefront, an officially supported headless framework built on modern JavaScript tooling. It allows retailers to build their frontend using tools like React and Next.js, deploy it on Vercel or similar platforms, and still connect to Salesforce’s robust commerce backend through APIs and the Salesforce Commerce SDK. The APIs were the key. Quietly SFCC had always had them but their engineering community didn't really choose to use them. They needed an upgrade (hello SCAPI, - SFCC's East German OCAPI on (west) German MACH alliance steroids)

This shift allows for better performance, better developer experience, and better control for internal teams with emphasis on those who want to manage and evolve their storefront without relying on third parties for every update.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has stayed relevant because of its stability, scalability, and ability to support complex enterprise use cases. It’s a proven fit for multi-brand, multi-region retailers with thousands of SKUs and global teams. The platform handles complexity better than most competitors, and the underlying logic is battle-tested at scale.

That said, it’s not without challenges. CMS capabilities are still limited natively, which is why most composable builds integrate platforms like Contentstack or Amplience. On-site search also often needs to be replaced or enhanced with more advanced providers fairly soon after the start of the composable journey. SFCC are investing in trying to make their offerings better in these areas. But they won't succeed in doing much more than making them good enough for their smaller customers.

Pricing has historically been a sticking point as well. Demandware-era license fees made sense when all-in-one monoliths were the norm. In the modern, composable era, many teams expect to pay for what they use and optimize TCO by selecting specialized vendors. Salesforce has made strides to adjust how Commerce Cloud is packaged and priced, but for some brands, the economics still require scrutiny. The unspoken truth though is that if you are overpaying for SFCC in 2025 that is on you. This is a much more realistic environment and if you say Shopify three times you can get their pricing attention for your renewal.

Still, the core platform continues to improve, especially in its support for APIs, headless builds, and integrations with Salesforce’s broader product ecosystem.

Not every platform can handle the operational complexity large enterprises throw at it. SFCC can.

Whether you're running multiple brands, managing global pricing logic, or syncing inventory across dozens of fulfillment centers, SFCC gives you the control and reliability needed to make that work. The addition of headless and composable options allows modern teams to get creative on the front-end while maintaining a stable backend foundation.

And unlike younger platforms that are still maturing, Salesforce Commerce Cloud is deeply vetted by large enterprises. It has the documentation, governance, and infrastructure support needed to pass security reviews and integrate with systems already used across IT, finance, and marketing.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud has come a long way since the Demandware days. It’s no longer just a managed backend for templated storefronts. It’s evolving into a flexible foundation for composable architectures, with room to plug in modern tools and scale globally.

For teams who need stability but don’t want to sacrifice flexibility, SFCC remains one of the few options that can support both. But to unlock its full potential, the architecture around it — including frontend, CMS, and integrations — needs to reflect modern composable thinking. And to get that, you need a partner that really lives this stuff. 64labs is far and away the leader in composable on SFCC. If you aren't being asked to bring us into conversations about your composable roadmap in some form someone isn't doing their job.

Thinking about building a composable storefront on Salesforce Commerce Cloud? We’ve helped some of the biggest names do it right. Let’s talk.