AI Enabled Storefront
SFCC Storefront Next
Faster performance, smoother integrations, and a front-end built to last. Our approach helps brands stay flexible and ahead of change.
Proven expertise in Composable
64labs built the first SFCC PWA at Duluth and have launched 10 enterprise-grade Composable Storefronts since.
Go faster, reap the rewards
We are commited to replatforming, migrating and launching multi-site storefronts in 16-26 weeks
Performance-Obsessed
Lightning-fast storefronts are empowered by built-in testing at every level. From pull requests to builds we drive speed and ROI.
Proficiency in Headless CMS
The CMS part of your build is a critical driver of business value. But the partner you choose is as important as the CMS.
Saving months of Development time with the 64labs Accelerator
The 64labs Accelerator provides a ready-to-use foundation for your Storefront Next build, featuring prebuilt UX patterns, state management, and essential commerce flows. It includes connectors for CMS, search, and payments, along with a reference architecture and infrastructure templates that integrate seamlessly into your stack. This approach reduces unknowns and rework, compressing a typical 9-month launch timeline into just 4-5 months.
The Process
Our Proven Path to Composable Commerce Success
Explore our step-by-step process — from Sprint Ø to Launch. And see how 64labs brings complex ecommerce builds to life with efficiency, clarity, and proven results.
Technologies matter
We carefully select technologies to use in Composable Storefront to ensure top-notch scalability, performance and future-proofness
Not Sure Where to Start?
Find Out If You’re Ready for Composable
Before investing in Composable Replatforming, it’s crucial to understand how your tech stack, workflows, and team will adapt. Our free Composable Readiness Assessment gives you a clear roadmap — minimizing risk and accelerating delivery.
FAQ
Everything You Need to Know About SFCC Composable Storefront
Yes. 64labs alone has built 12 sites now for major e-commerce brands. It works well. It's fast. We've built out NextJS sites too. They work. They are fast.
The question really is whether the partners and teams trying to implement composable are waiting for Salesforce to solve every use case for them before they feel comfortable building composable sites. It's harder than getting some certifications and throwing the work over the wall to a disciplined but unimaginative offshore team.
Composable will always set challenges for engineers and functional architects. Salesforce is a great platform because it's so flexible. But that comes at the price of complexity and you have to know what you are doing to engineer composable solutions on Salesforce.
No. There is no logical reason to do a hybrid launch of composable storefront. It is not technically easier - in fact it is harder and more complex than a full composable build particularly for larger customers. If you are multi-realm, multi-country, don't even think about hybrid.
In ROI terms it seems logical - this is where the customers are in the upper funnel, right. But in reality customers will switch from PWA to SiteGen multiple times on a journey to purchase and every time they do you are reloading a page, bridging a session and giving a customer a moment to wonder if they really want to keep going.
And even if that all works, you have to find the energy to finish the job and do Checkout within a year or so. Don't do it!
Yes. And no.
Yes post-launch. No during the implementation phase.
If you have multiple advanced-level React developers with years of experience in composable builds then your team could be a capable partner to 64labs in the critical phases of the project. But (statistically) you probably don't. So normally we engage your lead developer or architect for the first 12 weeks of a project. They get to see everything we do. But that guy is learning more than contributing. Their job is going to be to help us train the rest of the gang in the final “Build to Launch” phase of the project.
If the bulk of your team are full-stack SFCC developers who have played around with React and don't really know what they don't know, you should be identifying those who will in future focus on the front-end and those who will focus on the back-end. With some training from 64labs, and participation in the latter stages of the project, your best full-stack SFCC guys can handle steady-state on your new composable build. And frankly the back-end guys will be doing pretty much what they have always done but with a realistic opportunity to find time to pay off a ton of technical debt.
Large enough to deliver as fast as humanly possible and small enough to keep people from slowing each other down.
Our development team typically consists of a Technical Architect, 2-3 Front-end developers, 1 SFCC Full Stack Developer and 2 QA engineers supported by Business Analyst, Project Manager, and Designer.
However, the team structure may change depending on the project phase -- we're not charging clients for idle time. For example, you don't need as many people on Sprint Ø or Launch phase, so we tailor the team composition depending on what the project needs more in any given moment.
We start even before the project kicks off.
First of all, the base all 64labs projects start from — our Composable Accelerator — is end-to-end tested on multiple levels, and has several quality control layers built in: from linters, and PR-level testing though shift-left practices, automated testing on pre-merge, and then manual and automated UI and Integration testing suites on staging environments.
As the development advances, we are adding more levels of testing including all custom features and integrations, as well as dataLayer, SEO, and Accessibility testing.
Second, every 64labs team has multiple builds under their belt. Everyone on your project has seen the challenges you will face and dealt with (most of) them.
Third, we bring soft skills too. From the management of meetings and sprints, to the checkins with internal stakeholders, 64labs takes responsibility for getting the information and support the project needs. If we make mistakes we solve them, we don;t write up change orders. If we think we can help your team succeed we will do it, never mind what the SOW says is our role and yours.
You don’t just get production-ready code -- performance-optimized, covered with automated testing, and supported by a scalable design system your team can own - you get a live storefront, launched by a team with deep knowledge of Salesforce’s Managed Runtime infrastructure and committed to the commercial success of the project. 64labs is known as a launch company, which means we stay with you through go-live. Whether it’s a “big bang” release or a phased traffic-split cutover, we ensure your composable storefront isn’t just built, it’s successfully launched and delivering value from day one.
Moving to a composable architecture unlocks several key benefits across performance, flexibility, and scalability:
- Faster Performance – Modern composable storefronts are lighter and more optimized than monolithic setups, resulting in faster load times and smoother customer experiences. The older your Salesforce build, the more benefits you are likely to reap here.The ROI for your project lives here. Better performance = lower bounce = greater conversions = more revenue.
- Agility & Flexibility – You can swap in best-of-breed tools (CMS, search, personalization, etc.) without being tied to a single vendor’s limitations or relying on a cartridge built by someone else five years ago. You get to work with specialist vendors and implement their technology for your specific needs. You also get the IT and Merchant team out of each other’s docket. That frees a lot of time on both sides.
- Omnichannel Readiness – Content and commerce experiences can be delivered consistently across web, mobile, apps, in-store devices, and future channels.
- Marketer Empowerment – A headless CMS gives business users a more intuitive, user-friendly way to create and publish content without relying heavily on developers.
- Future-Proof Foundation – With composable, you can evolve your stack incrementally as new technologies emerge, avoiding disruptive “big bang” replatforms.
In short, going composable positions your digital commerce experience for greater speed, adaptability, and long-term resilience.
No, you don’t need to migrate to SFRA before adopting a composable approach. While SFRA provides a more modern foundation compared to SiteGenesis, going composable is not dependent on it. At 64labs, we assess your current SFCC setup and “under-the-hood” architecture to determine the best path forward. In many cases, we can layer a composable storefront on top of your existing environment without requiring a full SFRA upgrade first.
That said, if you’re still on SiteGenesis, we’ll highlight any limitations that could impact speed, flexibility, or long-term maintainability - and advise on what scale of changes you should make to enable the composable roadmap. But this is rarely a barrier to your project.
Usually, no. A Composable storefront decouples the front end, so you can keep SFCC as your system of record and integrate via SCAPI/OCAPI while we modernize the experience layer first.
Our approach
- Start incremental: Stand up the composable storefront and custom SCAPI endpoints if needed; integrate with your existing SFCC services and data.
- Harden what exists: With live experience under your belt, add caching, edge/CDN strategies, and optimize key flows (catalog, cart, checkout) over time.
- Evolve selectively: Revisit backend pieces post-project only where there’s clear ROI - eg, any remaining brittle customizations, performance bottlenecks, gaps in APIs, or where external services (search, CMS, PIM, pricing, personalization) deliver additional value.
- Use a “strangler” pattern: Replace or carve out services one by one without a risky “big bang” rewrite.
When a backend change is worth it
- Critical flows can’t meet performance/SLA targets
- Heavy Business Manager customizations block agility
- Data model or integration debt slows every change
- You’re adopting best-of-breed tools that need cleaner APIs
Bottom line: switch the storefront first, prove value fast, and only rebuild backend components that you can see are holding you back.
We recommend keeping UX/UI changes limited during the composable storefront build. Large redesigns can slow down the process and make it harder to clearly measure the architectural and performance improvements from the shift to composable.
That said, we do encourage making smaller, high-value updates - such as applying best practices or tackling long-standing business requests - that won’t disrupt the build. This approach ensures you get the benefits of composable quickly, while still addressing meaningful UX/UI enhancements. The key here is the ability of a design and project team to put a bargain together that recognizes and tackles urgent needs and quick valuable wins, but accepts that the new technology makes the more prosaic upgrades to a design much simpler post-launch.
Yes. A composable storefront can be rolled out gradually using A/B or phased approaches. Many teams start by exposing a percentage of traffic (for example, 5% or 10%) to the new storefront while the majority of users continue on the legacy SFCC experience. This allows you to monitor performance, validate integrations, and collect user feedback before scaling further.
With this approach, you can:
- Compare performance (speed, conversion, engagement) between legacy and composable experiences.
- Mitigate risk by rolling out incrementally rather than all at once.
- Refine the experience based on real customer behavior before full adoption.
This approach requires CDN based routing that can perform real-time routing decisions.
No. Our accelerator is a starting framework built from best practices and experience across all our past projects. It gives us a fast launch point so we can focus quickly on your customizations and third-party integrations.
The code is entirely yours - you own it outright. There are no monthly or yearly licensing fees, and you can upgrade or extend it at any time to support your roadmap and business needs.
Some teams like to keep us around as experts in the new technology on one of our Momentum offerings. But most of our customers are excited to take the helm of their new stack and the upgrades they might want to make are in their hands. In any event, we are always available to help when asked.
Going headless delivers clear advantages for business and marketing teams:
- Revenue – Through lower bounce, higher engagement, improved conversions and add-to-carts, your composable project can be paid off and returning on your investment within 3 months.
- Faster Campaign Execution – Marketers can create, schedule, and publish content without waiting on development cycles, reducing time-to-market.
- Greater Flexibility – Content is managed once and published everywhere - across web, mobile, apps, and emerging channels—without duplicating effort.
- Improved Personalization – Headless architectures integrate easily with best-of-breed tools for personalization, targeting, and A/B testing, giving teams more control over the customer journey.
- Scalability – As your business grows or channels expand, your content delivery scales without rework or disruption.
- Future-Proofing – You’re no longer locked into a single vendor’s roadmap - marketing can adopt new tools and channels as they emerge.
In short, headless empowers your marketing team with more agility, independence, and consistency - so they can deliver better experiences, faster. And it generates incremental revenue, which in the end is the whole point of everything we do.
SEO remains a top priority during the transition. When we implement a headless storefront, we:
- Retain all existing URL structures so your current rankings and backlinks stay intact.
- Apply up-to-date structured data and schema markup to ensure search engines can index and interpret your site correctly.
- Collaborate closely with your team or SEO agency to align on strategy and make the handoff smooth.
This approach minimizes SEO risk while giving you the long-term performance and flexibility benefits of a composable storefront.
Accuracy of your analytics setup is a core part of our process. During the project we:
- Discover (Sprint Ø) – Document your current analytics structure so we have a clear baseline.
- Pixels & Tracking – Review and update all pixels to the latest versions, ensuring proper configuration
- Collaboration – Work directly with your team or agency on the setup and any needed adjustments.
- Implementation – Develop and integrate the required code, tags, data layer, and pixels as part of the build.
- QA & UAT – Validate the entire implementation in quality assurance and user acceptance testing alongside your team.
This structured approach ensures your analytics remain accurate, reliable, and aligned with your business needs throughout the transition.
Based on our experience, the challenges usually aren’t with the technology itself but with how the transition is managed. The most common issues include:
- Leadership focus – Teams sometimes treat replatforming as an opportunity to redesign or add features. Successful projects keep leadership aligned on the primary goal: launching composable first and building on that foundation.
- Third-party integrations – Dependencies on external vendors can cause delays if they’re not responsive or prepared to support composable setups.
- Parallel requests – Internal teams often request unrelated changes during replatforming, which can create scope creep and slow progress.
- Competing priorities – Large internal projects or dependencies may block the composable initiative if not planned around.
- Skills gap – A lack of engineering resources with React and composable expertise can make execution harder, because it creates unnecessary defensiveness among the team.
At 64labs, we surface these risks early in the Sprint Ø phase so they can be addressed before they become blockers.
We’re not here to replace a successful incumbent. We also know you don’t want to pay your SI to learn composable from scratch or repeat mistakes others have already made. Instead, 64labs’ role is to accelerate their success:
- Early phases – We move quickly and autonomously, implementing our accelerator and handling the initial architectural setup. But the process is transparent and open to your SI to observe and assist.
- Collaboration – We often work side by side with your SI, helping them get up to speed on composable concepts and the hidden complexities of the architecture.
- Knowledge transfer – As the project progresses, we train your SI team, assign them work, and provide peer reviews and pull requests to build confidence.
- Enablement – We aim to train at least one lead FE engineer who can serve as an internal trainer for others going forward.
- Flexibility – Every client relationship is a little different, and we adapt our engagement model to your specific needs.
This approach ensures your SI stays engaged and grows in composable expertise, while you get the speed and confidence of our proven accelerator and experience.
No. Our approach minimizes risk to your production environment. We use your existing backend and extend it only where necessary through custom SCAPI endpoints. These endpoints and supporting code can be rolled out to staging and production safely, without impacting your live site or current workflows.
This means your production environment remains stable, while we introduce the integrations and capabilities needed for a composable storefront.
No, in most cases you don’t need to purchase or set up an additional Realm. We build the composable storefront on top of your existing SFCC backend, extending it where needed through custom SCAPI endpoints. This approach allows new code to be deployed to staging and production environments without disrupting your live site or requiring extra Realm licenses.
If there are unique circumstances that suggest a second Realm would be beneficial (for example, large-scale parallel development or complex regional rollouts), we’ll flag that early in the assessment and advise accordingly.
Perspectives worth sharing
5 min read
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June 23, 2026
Storefront Next is an AI-First Commerce Architecture
There is a version of the AI conversation that has become painfully familiar in enterprise commerce. Teams say they are "using AI." Developers mention Claude Code. Someone demos a copy generator. A few hours get saved here and there. Meanwhile, CIOs and CTOs look at the org chart, look at the budget, and ask the only question that matters: if AI is real, why are the benefits mostly showing up as a better day for staff instead of a better business for the enterprise?
That is the right question. And it is exactly why Storefront Next on Salesforce matters.
The argument for Storefront Next is not that it gives your team a shinier storefront framework. The argument is that Salesforce is finally putting an AI-first commerce architecture on the table, one that can change how the stack is assembled, how work is divided, how much manual tuning is required, and where automation can compound over time.
For technical leaders, that distinction matters. AI that helps an individual contributor write code faster is useful. AI that changes the architecture so the enterprise can reduce complexity, automate repetitive commerce work, and create a cleaner path to measurable operating leverage is strategic.
The real problem: AI has been too personal, not operational
Most enterprise teams are seeing narrow AI gains. Developers use copilots. Analysts summarize documents faster. Merchandisers generate a few drafts instead of writing from scratch. Those are legitimate improvements, but they are local improvements. They help individuals. They do not automatically rewire the system the business runs on.
That is why so many executives are underwhelmed. If the only visible effect of AI is that smart people can do the same job a little faster, then the enterprise has not captured much value. The headcount line stays the same. Delivery models stay the same. Support models stay the same. Vendor sprawl stays the same. The organization ends up paying for AI, talking about AI, and still operating largely the same way.
That is not transformation. That is productivity theater.
Storefront Next changes the argument
Storefront Next is a full-stack React framework for B2C Commerce that combines server-side rendering with client-side navigation in a managed Salesforce architecture. Salesforce is positioning it as an AI-first storefront and has tied that positioning directly to faster implementation, AI-powered developer tooling, and simpler launch patterns.
That matters because architecture determines how far AI can go.
An inconsistent, over-customized commerce stack is hard for humans to maintain and hard for AI tools to reason about. A more opinionated, convention-driven stack is easier to scaffold, easier to extend, easier to support, and easier to automate. That means Storefront Next is not just another frontend option. It is a better substrate for AI-enabled delivery and AI-enabled operations.
This is the part technical executives should care about. The value is not only in what AI does today. The value is in choosing a platform shape that will allow more of tomorrow's build, support, merchandising, and optimization work to be delegated to AI systems with less friction.
Cimulate is the bigger story than most teams realize
Salesforce's acquisition of Cimulate is one of the clearest signals that this is not a superficial AI story. Cimulate combines real shopper behavior with simulated shopper journeys to infer intent and improve search, discovery, and recommendations in ways that go beyond traditional keyword and rules-based systems.
That should get the attention of any CIO or CTO who has watched teams spend years tuning search synonyms, patching low-conversion discovery flows, and layering manual merchandising rules on top of brittle relevance models. Cimulate's approach is built around understanding intent through both real and synthetic commerce behavior, which means the engine gets stronger not only from what happened, but from what likely could happen across millions of modeled sessions.
That is enterprise value.
Why? Because discovery is one of the most labor-intensive and under-optimized layers in commerce. Teams pour human time into relevance tuning, catalog shaping, landing page curation, campaign setup, and recommendation logic. If Salesforce can productize Cimulate inside the Storefront Next and Agentforce Commerce motion, that opens the door to automating a category of work that has historically required constant expert intervention.
That is the shift skeptical leaders should focus on. This is not AI as a sidecar. This is AI moving toward ownership of an economically meaningful layer of commerce operations.
The architecture is the real signal
Put those two moves together, the AI-first storefront and an intent-aware discovery engine, and the pattern is clear. Salesforce is not bolting AI onto the edges of commerce. It is reshaping the substrate so that more of the work can eventually be automated rather than hand-tuned.
For technical leaders, that reframes the evaluation. The question is no longer whether AI is useful. It is whether your architecture is built to let AI compound. Choosing a platform shape that AI systems can reason about, extend, and operate is the first real decision, and it is the one that determines how much value everything after it can capture.
5 min read
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June 9, 2026
Connections 2026: AI Stopped Being a Promise and Started Showing Up to Work
There's a version of every Salesforce conference that feels like a product catalogue in keynote form, with big themes, bigger promises, and a gap between the stage narrative and the actual code shipping. Connections 2026 in Chicago was not that event. For the first time, the AI story felt less like aspiration and had a whiff of execution to it. The question wasn't whether Salesforce was committed to the agentic future. The question was whether the audience had to energy to go back home and actually do something.
For those of us in commerce, the headline under the headline was this: Storefront Next went GA. And that matters more than most people outside the SFCC ecosystem will appreciate.
Storefront Next: The Foundation Underneath Everything
Salesforce had been telegraphing Storefront Next for months as a next-generation framework built on React Server Components, React Router 7, and TypeScript, with tighter Business Manager integration and managed hosting via MRT. It was always positioned as more than a PWA Kit replacement. It's a platform reset. And at Connections 2026, that reset became real.
Why does anyone need a platform reset right now? What Storefront Next actually represents is a codebase architecture that makes AI tooling work earlier in the project lifecycle. When Salesforce talks about AI-assisted development, they're not talking about a chatbot strapped to your IDE. They're talking about a framework that's tightly coupled enough, standards-based enough, that AI can understand, extend, and generate within it with genuine coherence. SFRA sites can be super fast. They can have CMS and Search plugged in to great effect. But they are not AI-friendly. Storefront Next is. That's not incidental. It's the point.
Our own team has been deep in this since last year: running a PoC, building out a starter, asking hard questions about how you extend cleanly without drifting from upstream. The early read is that the Commerce Apps extension model represents a genuine improvement in how integrations get built. The Page Designer investment, which Salesforce is clearly serious about, couples tightly here too, shifting how content experiences get delivered in ways we're still fully digesting.
At Connections, this was the foundation everything else was built on. The AI-assisted merchant workflows, the agentic campaign management, the Guided Shopping experiences, all of it flows more naturally through a storefront architecture that wasn't designed in 2015. Storefront Next is the plumbing, and the plumbing finally got replaced.
AI in Practice, Not Just in Pitch
What struck most observers at Connections 2026 was not the ambition (that's been consistent for two years), but the specificity. The sessions felt less like vision decks and more like implementation guides. One analyst noted that if Connections 2025 was about AI assistance, 2026 was about AI autonomy:Salesforce leaning hard into the Agentic Enterprise, where agents don't just generate content or summarize data, but take action across the marketing and commerce stack. Sure, I would have thought last year. This year they came with case studies. Maybe it’s trade show slop? But there was energy behind it.
I agree with that framing. Jon Reed at Diginomica covered the Generative Engine Optimization thread, which took up significant floor time, optimising content and products for AI discovery, showing up across the internet, not just brand-owned channels. It was a smart session and Reed covered it thoroughly. Though I'd gently push back on the implication that GEO should be the primary commerce headline of CNX 2026. For the platform builders in the room, the commerce infrastructure story (and specifically the Storefront Next-plus-Agentforce architecture) was the more lasting signal. GEO is a vital question to ask: how will people find us if Google aren’t sending them and they don’t actually need a website to buy stuff. But the agentic commerce platform is the foundational tool that allows a lot of those folks in Chicago to start answering that question.
The Slack Moment
Let's talk about Slack, because the square footage alone told a story.
Salesforce gave Slack a keynote presence and show floor space at Connections 2026 that made one thing unmistakably clear: this is not a collaboration tool they acquired and manage at arm's length. Slack is being positioned, actively and visibly, as the agentic OS for the enterprise. Core Salesforce apps including Agentforce Sales, IT and HR Service, and Tableau Next now surface directly in Slack conversations. The vision is a single conversational workspace where humans and AI agents collaborate in the same interface, with CRM and all other data embedded and actionable in real time via 3p apps. I’m completely on board with this idea. Humans and Agents need to connect somewhere (for now!). The messaging platform is best place for it to happen. And Slack ought to win here. It helps too that even in Microsoft shops we work with the dev team uses Slack. So this may be a parallel sale to Teams rather than a replacement. The sale will be made in IT and with their endorsement to the rest of the business. Teams will just be the meetings part.
If you've been watching Slack's positioning carefully, this isn't surprising. Salesforce has been calling it the "agentic enterprise operating system" for months. But there's a difference between a booth at Agentforce World Tour and a show floor centerpiece in Chicago. At Connections, it was at the middle of everything. For enterprise buyers evaluating whether Salesforce is serious about this architecture, that kind of investment in physical presence and keynote time is not accidental. It's a declaration.
For SFCC practitioners, the relevance is direct: the merchant workflow future that our 64labs product team have been sketching out (where an Easter campaign gets planned, built, measured, and adjusted across multiple teams without six FTEs and four weeks of elapsed time) lives in something like this. Slack is the winner.
The Contentful Question: Wait, or Don't?
Then there's Contentful. Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Contentful on June 1, 2026. The analysis is largely positive: Contentful closes the CMS slot in Headless 360 that had previously been left open, and the integration story for Agentforce deployments becomes considerably cleaner when your content management layer is owned by the same platform.
It may be a bit of a nothing burger for Commerce Cloud. A kneejerk question for any commerce buyer evaluating a new SFCC build right now is: should I wait? If Contentful becomes native to the Salesforce platform, won't the integration be smoother in twelve months than today?
Maybe. But Commerce is not Salesforce’s priority. The deal won’t close until September. The integration into Agentforce beyond commerce will take priority. Contentful already works in Storefront Next if you need it to. The integration question used to be a stronger argument for hesitation than it is now. The development complexity calculus has shifted materially with Storefront Next. The extension model is cleaner. AI-assisted development with a standards-based codebase means implementation velocity is meaningfully faster than it was eighteen months ago. The carrying cost of waiting (in roadmap delay, in continued technical debt on SFRA, in missing the Agentforce capabilities that are already GA) is real.
So the answer isn't wait. The answer is to plan intelligently: choose Contentful if you love it for what it is. But don’t delay Storefront Next or imagine that there isn't still a good reason to pick Contentstack or Amplience or Builder et al. There are. So the best time to be implementing Contentful in SFCC is probably two years from now. I’m not sure the purchase changes much in ecommerce until 2028.
The Through-Line
What Connections 2026 made clear is that Salesforce has arrived at the point they've been building toward for several years. The AI isn't decorative anymore though some presentations still very much need the disclaimer slide. Storefront Next provides the foundation for AI to actually function in commerce. Slack is the interface layer they're betting on at enterprise scale. And the Contentful acquisition, whatever its timeline, closes the last obvious gap in Salesforce’s “composable monolith” story.
The enthusiasm in Chicago wasn't the performative kind you sometimes sense at these events, the kind where everyone's excited because everyone else is excited. It was the quieter, more durable kind: practitioners who came in skeptical, left with viable case studies and a clearer sense of what the roadmap actually holds. That's the version of a Salesforce conference that goes beyond nabbing cuddly toys for your kids and actually having something to think about on the plane home.
5 min read
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May 29, 2026
Storefront Next and the End of Expensive SFCC Ownership
For years, Salesforce Commerce Cloud has had a cost problem; and it was never just licensing.
The real cost lived in the ecosystem around it: custom templating languages, hard-to-find specialists, slow iteration cycles, and a persistent dependency on external partners for even modest changes. Teams didn’t just pay for SFCC, they paid to operate it.
Storefront Next changes that equation in a fundamental way.
By moving to a modern, standard frontend stack - React, composable architecture, familiar tooling - you eliminate one of the biggest hidden taxes in the system: specialization. No more hunting for niche ISML experts. No more translating between modern frontend thinking and legacy templating constraints. You can hire from the broader market, use proven patterns, and move at the speed your team is actually capable of.
That alone lowers total cost of ownership. But it’s just the starting point.
What really changes is how companies choose to operate.
Two Paths To Tread
Once the barrier of “expensive to change” disappears, companies will likely split into two operational camps.
The first group will optimize for steady state. They want the site to run cleanly, predictably, and with minimal intervention. Their goal is a near-zero backlog, a very small team, and a system that largely takes care of itself. Updates are incremental. Automation handles the routine. Human involvement is reserved for exceptions.
For these teams, Storefront Next is about cost control. It allows them to finally run SFCC themselves as a stable, low-maintenance platform instead of an ongoing project.
The second group sees the opposite opportunity. If the cost of change drops, why not do more?
More experimentation. More landing pages. More personalization. More campaigns. More integration across systems. The same team, or an even smaller one, can now produce significantly more output because they are no longer constrained by platform friction.
This is where Storefront Next can be more about growth than cost.
And of course in practice, most companies should do both.
Stabilize, Then Expand
This is the pattern we recommend for dealing with the confusing world of AI. Don’t be carried away in the hurly burly of innovation. Go up the learning curve in stages. Iterate and learn over time. Keep moving forward but don’t go faster than your organization (probably still quite slow) can handle.
First, get to a solid steady state. Reduce the noise around support. Eliminate the backlog. Automate the obvious operational work. Bring the cost of “keeping the lights on” as close to zero as possible. This is a business process question as well as a development and marketing one. Do what you do better and quicker and more automatically. Stop doing things that humans require but machines don’t - about 50% of the meetings you do each day?
Then take that recovered time and reinvest it.
Not into rebuilding what you already have or adding fancy so called AI-native tools - but into extracting more value from the stack you’re already paying for.
That means connecting the pieces of your stack that have historically operated in silos:
CMS feeding landing page generation
Personalization driving dynamic content decisions
Search influencing merchandising and discovery
Campaign tooling tied directly into experience delivery
Individually, these systems are powerful. Connected, they become multipliers. (You already knew all this but there wasn’t time or mental energy to actually achieve the achievable)
And once connected, all these newly exploited existing systems become candidates for automation. Without spending an extra penny on an AI enablement platform.
Automation Before AI
There’s a misconception that AI transformation starts with buying an AI product.
It doesn’t. It mustn’t.
It starts with getting your stack into a state where it can actually support automation. Clean data flows. Defined workflows. Clear system boundaries. Reliable integrations.
If you automate your current workflows and your current workflows are designed around human frailties then you will just have automated mediocrity. What a waste. Get the most out of what you already have. Organize yourselves to be efficient, and let automation take care of as much of the resulting work burden as “humanly” possible.
Only then does AI have something to work with.
What happens next is not a switch you flip, it’s a gradual process. You automate pieces of the workflow. Then you introduce AI to optimize, generate, or orchestrate within those workflows. Over time, more of what was previously human-gated becomes system-driven.
But none of that works if your frontend is slow, rigid, or dependent on scarce skills.
This is where Storefront Next quietly becomes strategic.
Why SFCC Becomes More Valuable
SFCC has always been flexible. That was never the issue.
The issue was that most teams couldn’t fully use that flexibility. The cost of implementation, the friction of the frontend, and the dependency on specialized skills meant that much of the platform’s capability remained theoretical.
Storefront Next changes that.
When teams can actually build, iterate, and integrate without friction, SFCC’s flexibility turns into a real advantage. It becomes the center of a composable, connected, and increasingly automated commerce stack.
And importantly, it becomes a platform that can evolve.
Not through large, expensive replatforming efforts, but through continuous, incremental improvement.
That’s the shift.
Lower cost of ownership is the entry point. Operational leverage is the outcome. And long-term adaptability is the real payoff.
If you’re already on SFCC, the decision is straightforward. The question isn’t whether Storefront Next is worth it - it’s whether you want to keep paying for constraints that no longer need to exist.