Listen in as Ben Lorenz, Andrea Evans, and Paul Briscoe of Human Element discuss the newly released Adobe Storefront. What is it and what does it mean for Adobe Commerce (Magento) users?
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Full Episode Transcript
Ben Lorenz: Welcome, Human Elementors. Today is an exciting day for doing this podcast. Adobe has announced their storefront application and how they’re changing their architecture for building Adobe Commerce applications, and so today we wanted to have a quick conversation about it with you. Maybe first let’s just introduce each other and talk about what we do at Human Element and then let’s dive into all that is Adobe Storefront. I’m Ben Lorenz, I’m one of the managing partners of Human Element. I’ve been here since the start and I have the pleasure of working with Andrea and Paul. Andrea, you want to go?
Andrea Evans: Sure, I’m Andrea Evans, I work with our consultative team so digital marketing and strategy and QA. I wear a lot of different hats. I’ve been working in the Mangento/Adobe world for almost 11 years now, so I’m interested to see what this next turn takes.
Paul Briscoe: And I am Paul Briscoe. I’m the Director of Technology at Human Element. And I work with our development teams and clients to build Adobe Commerce websites and to create integrations with various systems. We’ve been doing that for many years at this point.
Ben Lorenz: And so we are sort of like many systems integrators have been in the Magento world since before it was Adobe and we followed it into the Adobe sphere. And now Adobe is sort of, you know, taking the Magento slash Adobe Commerce system to a new level by, you know, announcing this enhancement called the storefront. And they’ve sort of hinted at these things over the years about how to do development in this particular pattern. And now they’re officially sort of putting this out into the world and talking to their customers about what this means. Paul, maybe could you sort of in layman’s terms explain what Adobe Storefront is and who it’s for?
Paul Briscoe: Sure. So Adobe Storefront is a headless application that you can install that will use AEM to author and publish content. But also it can be connected to an Adobe Commerce backend so that you can get information that you have in your Magento or Adobe Commerce system, like customers, product catalogs, carts, quotes. It allows you to integrate your headless shopping experience with Magento Commerce in a way that wasn’t previously possible.
Ben Lorenz: Yeah. Now, it also introduces sort of people who have been traditionally just on the monolithic Adobe Commerce sort of platform to the CMS platform
Paul Briscoe: of AEM. Right? Yes, they are connecting the dots there. Yes.
Ben Lorenz: Yeah. And so what are our first impressions? You know, we’ve kicked the tires a little bit. We’ve set it up. You know, I think Adobe made a claim that it could be set up in 20 minutes or so. That was not true for us, even though we’re fairly experienced. But we did get it set up. And, you know, it wasn’t 20 minutes, but it wasn’t a full day either. It was, you know, we could get it.
Paul Briscoe: Yeah. Just setting up the demo site and kind of like walking through it. I think my first impressions are that it’s lightweight, which I think is good. And Adobe, I can tell, has spent a lot of time trying to put some tools in place to allow you to preview and publish content with the Sidekick Chrome extension that they have. If when you walk through the setup docs, they’re kind of giving you two options to kind of manage that content. One is with Google Drive, one is with SharePoint. And then you can also do it, I’m assuming through the AEM UI itself. But if you’re just trying to get started to check it out, those are the driver or SharePoint are the ways that you want to go. Once you set it up and you get everything kind of running, you know, after having some hiccups, one kind of thing that you need to make sure that you do is the content needs to get converted from the DOCX or XLS files into Drive and Sheets if you’re using the Drive content. So that was one thing to note. But outside of that, I think that once it’s actually running, it was pretty smooth. Like actually creating a customer or navigating to one of the content pages to get a category page. Like it was fast. It was pretty snappy. Getting things added into the card and getting into checkout. That was also pretty quick. So that I think was also not so bad. One of the questions that kind of came up though is, is this just a thought that I had when I was running through it? Is this just a transition spot where they want to get you to kind of tease what it could be like, knowing that most merchants aren’t probably going to be keen on managing their content through Google Drive or SharePoint, I would think. It seems like there’s a lot of possibility for error in those cases. If you’re sharing those content pages with people in your organization and they’re not really sure what to do with that or they’re accidentally making content changes, that could turn into a mess rather quickly, I would think. That was my first thought. that opens you up into the world of do I need to get into AEM to manage this content in a better way?
Ben Lorenz: Andrea, I kind of want to get your take on this. So this storefront system is largely targeted. Well, it is targeted towards customers that are on Adobe Commerce Cloud. So it’s got to be in that environment to take advantage of it. You know, from a market position standpoint, there’s still a lot of people that host Adobe Commerce on their own in a third-party hosting system that’s not Adobe Commerce Cloud. How does this sort of impact those people?
Andrea Evans: Yeah, I think initially we’re going to see some pressure from Adobe Commerce on-prem or separately hosted customers to move to cloud. But I think at this point, Adobe isn’t indicating that they’re actually going to force that. But I also foresee Adobe not wanting to support front ends like Luma anymore and shifting everybody over the storefront. So they’re not saying they’re going to do that at this point. But I think we’ve even heard from some of our hosting partners that they’re seeing some of their Adobe Commerce hosted environments getting pushed towards commerce cloud that gets them in the environment for Adobe to take advantage of other Adobe tools like EEM and other components that way.
Ben Lorenz: And maybe this is more of a technical question or either one of you could answer this, but we work with a lot of Adobe Commerce customers that have a fair bit of customization in their applications. So in that context, in order to migrate to this storefront concept, what happens with those customizations? How do they carry over? Like, what do they have to do?
Paul Briscoe: So I think it’s important to note that Adobe Storefront is a completely separate application from Magento or Adobe Commerce. Like they are, when you talk about themes that are, they’re traditionally built inside of Adobe Commerce, they’re, you know, possibly Luma based off of the blank theme. And they’re using Magento’s built-in layout and design and theming configurations. So when you go to Storefront, while it is using, it’s a pure JavaScript front end. So you’re not working inside of Magento anymore. You’re working inside of a separate application. And all of the requests for information that you’re making to Adobe are getting made over API calls using GraphQL. So that is important to note because any customizations and extensions that you may have built into your Magento site specifically for integrations, you’re going to have to ensure that you have GraphQL coverage for all of the things that your customizations would do, but that needs to be able to work over like an API. Things like customizations that you would have made inside of your theme that you would have potentially made like a front-end block for or customizations in a theme. You’ll have to rethink the way that you are doing those customizations inside of the storefront. So in some ways it’s good because it allows you to start over clean and kind of let go of some of the baggage and the technical debt that you may have been carrying over from year to year and really rethink what a modern commerce application looks like inside of a storefront. So in that case, it’s good. But we know that lots of these sites have been maintained for years and years, have a lot of development and a lot of budget invested into them. And so we’re looking at reinvestment into the storefront to take advantage of some of these new capabilities.
Andrea Evans: I think that’s especially true for our B2B merchants. They haven’t built in UI components for B2B shared catalogs, that sort of thing. So all of that would need to be developed in the storefront. Those components aren’t there today.
Ben Lorenz: To zoom out a little bit, though, this is not a release candidate at this point. you know and Adobe is like pushing us to sort of investigate this, kick the tires on it that kind of thing but we’re not at release candidate status yet right
Andrea Evans: I was gonna say I think for potentially a B2C looking for an easier lift on the commerce side,I think it could be, I think B2B any level of complexity. I don’t think I’m ready for that. I do think it’s still rather young, I wouldn’t want to be the first adopter of it yeah
Paul Briscoe: You kind of have that play out a little bit if we look back a few years and how kind of like a studio came about and was advocated for and then kind of fell off the map like I i think the the one differentiating piece here is that we know at least that the technologies that they’re using are not new so I think it it requires less like traditional Magento knowledge to try to build the storefront application than it does to create a Magento or Adobe Commerce theme or customization So in that way, it kind of opens up your need for resources to build and maintain your application to a bunch of other groups of people.
Ben Lorenz: Yeah. From a market context, you know, it’s my read on this that Adobe is going this direction. One, to sort of shore up security around the application and having the ability to sort of apply blanket security patches to the system in a way that’s more similar to a SaaS-based application. Right. So global security policies, global security patches, that kind of thing can be deployed quickly and it doesn’t impact the overall application. And so from a market standpoint, I see why Adobe wants to do this. I think there’s some other things that Adobe sees as well that opens the door towards, you know, people selecting AEM as a CMS platform for their, you know, their application, or maybe using some other Adobe tools that fit nicely with these things. Are you guys seeing that as the sort of market context for why they’re doing this?
Paul Briscoe: I could see a benefit from that. I mean, like with some of the struggles that Magento has had in the past with security, this new architecture would allow you to lock down the Magento front end because there wouldn’t need to be one anymore. And you could control with firewall rules access to the APIs coming directly from only one source. And so you could know that your Magento instance was secure because no one really is going to be able to access it, except for the people that you say can access it. If there’s no public access anymore, there’s no potential for people to try to attack it in the same way that they would have been able to in the past. I mean, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your application could be 100% secure. Like, they’re still going to have to be careful when developers that are on the ground are writing their code and developing with best practices. But I think it definitely eliminates some surface area for attack, for sure.
Ben Lorenz: I think, you know, on the other side of that sort of equation, you know, the Adobe Commerce and Magento platforms have been known for, like, being able to be highly customized and adapted to a business, right, which we do a lot. We’ve done a lot of that, you know. And so I see the need for them to modernize how this works. And I think this does get them there. Do you think this still will serve that highly customized market in the same way? I mean, we see companies like VTACs, for example, that are all API based or, you know, other applications that sort of like are at this sort of development point already where they have this, you know, high API coverage. Is Adobe just joining the tidal wave of this or is this materially a good lift for them?
Andrea Evans: Are you asking, are they leading or are they catching up?
Ben Lorenz: That’s a good question. Because I think they’re catching up.
Andrea Evans: Like, I think that one of the biggest criticisms that I’ve heard on the Adobe Commerce and Magento fronts is the cost of maintaining that platform. Yeah, highly customizable, but upgrades and security patches come with a pretty heavy cost every year. And that’s an important part of maintaining your, maintaining the security of your platform. So, you know, Shopify, Vitex, they have this kind of figured out on that front. And so they’re, I think they’re trying to get to the point where they’re much more customizable. And whereas Magento Adobe has that figured out, and now they need to get that maintaining the cost over time on these tools needs to be. need to close that gap for them. So I think that’s their playing catch up on that particular front.
Ben Lorenz: Yeah, I think, you know, if I were talking about other e-commerce platforms too, I’d stick Shopware and big commerce in that same conversation where they’ve made a pretty big effort to have this API coverage throughout the application where Adobe has, since the purchase of Magento, has not quite caught up with that. And now they’re doing that, you know?
Paul Briscoe: I mean, Shopware specifically, I can see they have like an API first kind of development methodology, I believe. Like even like in their admin itself is a single page application that exercises their own APIs. So I think as Adobe has kind of started into development for Magento over the last couple of years, like they’re playing catch up on trying to get API coverage for all those things so that they can do this. But it also likes the simplicity in some ways of storefront and how lightweight it is. I mean, there is a lot of opportunity for customization of that application for your own needs. But the thing that I wonder about, like when you when you bring Shopify, for example, into the conversation and Shopware into the conversation and you see the ease at which you can kind of go into the admin and search for marketplace extensions and install them and configure them all kind of with a button click and not have your store break or not have like strange uh side effects as a result of that like how as far as like where do you see magento and Adobe still kind of needing to catch up like what does that still look like for them in this new storefront architecture because you would still I think if you’re trying to customize the the back end needing to install uh plugins in the same traditional way unless you’re starting to look at like migrating into some of the app builder updates that are happening as well so there’s there’s like still some highly customizable things and some complex things that make it not as as as maybe marketer friendly on the back end to get things up and running as it is some other platforms
Ben Lorenz: Yeah I mean we’ve had some very quick wins with platforms like Shopify and Shopware. It’s very easy to kind of get those app stores like things one click install and the thing works right out of the box. I think that if Adobe gets it there we’re going to see some real traction. Let’s zoom out for a second and so what is this? What does this mean for Adobe Commerce customers? Like you have an application that’s customized, it’s sitting at a third party host. What are these brass tacks? What does it mean? Do you know? I’ll let Andrea take it.
Andrea Evans: I think right now it’s a wait and see. I think you need to start thinking about and start watching for your particular needs being met with the storefront if they’re going to be met with the storefront. And so this might mean that you’re starting to make plans for migration to storefront, or you’re starting to make plans for replatforming entirely. But I don’t think it’s time to make that call. This is very new. So I think it’s a wait, see what are they doing, what changes are going to come next. Because I feel like they made a run at something similar with PWA And so they’re making another run. And this, I think, has a lot more potential and it’s looking promising, but it’s not ready for primetime yet.
Ben Lorenz: Yeah. And then for systems integrators, Paul, like, where does this put us in terms of like skill sets that need to change, you know, awareness of how this works, you know, what happens from an SIS perspective? Like, what should we be looking for?
Paul Briscoe: Well, the one thing that it definitely reminds me of is when we had to migrate all of our all of our client sites from Magento 1 to Magento 2. And in the beginning, there was a very steep learning curve. And it was difficult for a lot of people to kind of like make that jump. But in a similar way, when we were talking about, you know, that transition from Magento one to Magento two, like there are definitely some things like Andrea mentioned that you need to do planning, cataloging all of the, the customizations that you have, looking at which ones are API based, which ones are, are front end based and kind of trying to think about what’s necessary and what’s not. And, and maybe trying to use this as an opportunity to, to rethink some of your business operations to see how they can fit into other workflows. As far as like skill sets go, you know, because Magento Commerce or Adobe Commerce is still in the background, you’re going to need, you know, a traditional Magento developer to be able to maintain those applications, to deploy those applications, and still be making changes on the back end for things like, you know, adding fields to sales orders and customizing relationships between customers and companies. That stuff all needs to be done, but it needs to be looked at a little bit more in terms of the data relationship between those things and making sure that everything that you do is accessible over APIs.
Ben Lorenz: And then I think that’s a really good point and a differentiator between like say Shopify plus and Adobe Commerce where you will be able to do that type of thing in the future but maybe that is a bit more of a challenge in the Shopify world you know some of our customers are pretty heavy B2B sort of power users right that we have to do a lot of heavy lifting and so you’ll still need that Magento backend support but you’ll also need this JavaScript front end kind of user, right?
Paul Briscoe: Yeah. I mean, because there’s definitely the scenario out there where if you place an order in Storefront, does it call the same events or books that it does on Adobe Commerce? Will you need to rewrite your ERP integrations, potentially? So it’s like questions like that that can have a large impact on an organization’s business,
Ben Lorenz: I think. So you have done the setup and followed Adobe’s instructions on how to do it. You know, just what’s your hot take so far, like, as you’ve gone through it? Well,
Paul Briscoe: I think that if I were to do it again, I could maybe do it in 20 minutes. But you should probably look at dedicating like a few hours to try to make sure that you get that right, because there are some hiccups along the way. But generally speaking, you know, some of the documentation and screenshots are a little bit out of date from what is actually out there when you go to do some of the configuration. But overall, it kind of followed along pretty well. And yeah, a little longer than 20 minutes.
Andrea Evans: Would you say it was easier than the first time you set up Magento 2?
Ben Lorenz: Yes, I would
Andrea Evans: Actually.
Ben Lorenz: Memories. Yeah. Well, let’s wrap this up. I think that this has just been a bit of a primer for some of the questions our customers are asking us. And some of the questions, frankly, our team is asking us about this. I mean, you know, our development team and the rest of the company has their heads down in active development, you know, and it’s very difficult when an organization the size of Adobe comes in and says, hey, we’re going to do some things differently. It’s like, not only are we continuing on with work, we’re trying to figure out all this new stuff that is, you know, being sold to the end users. And so I think this is a good primer, I guess, to just sort of understand, you know, at a high level what we’re getting into and maybe where it’s headed. But, you know, I think there’s positives in this and I think there’s going to be some challenges for both customers and systems integrators. Do you guys have any closing thoughts before we bounce out of here? For me, I think,
Paul Briscoe: You know, from a developer perspective, from an SI perspective, I think that the toolkit of web developers is ever evolving. And I think that if we stand still and only kind of like focus on the things that we’re always heads down on, then we’re going to get left behind a little bit. So we need to be able to adapt. We need to be able to pick up new technologies and we need to be open to change. And I think that that’s something that represents change in Adobe Commerce. And, you know, sometimes change is good.
Ben Lorenz: Andrea, you want to take us home?
Andrea Evans: Sure. I think that Adobe has been trying to head in this direction for a while. And so while the announcement seems kind of a bit of a surprise, it’s, I think if we look at it, really not because they’ve been trying to get all of their systems or get Adobe e-commerce onto everybody onto cloud and integrated within their kind of ecosystem of suite of software. So I think that, you know, they’re wanting this round of headless, going headless to work out for them. And I think, like I said, it has a lot of potential, but it’s too soon to say, like, what the plan is to migrate at this point.
Ben Lorenz: Awesome. Well, if you made it this far, we appreciate you spending some time with us. Give the post a like and share it with your friends. And we hope to answer any of your questions that you send our way. And we’ll holler at you soon.