Here’s a wild thought experiment: Imagine what your content experience would be like without the meat of your offering (the commerce) to follow it through. A customer might enjoy your content, and might love your brand—but they’d have nowhere to go from there.
Now, imagine what your commerce experience would be like without your content to support it. It would be like a clothing magazine…with only serial numbers and nothing else.
Okay, we’re not saying this is what’s happening to your AEM ecommerce content without the AEM Adobe Commerce integration (formerly known as the AEM Magento Integration).
But it makes you think—if content and commerce only benefit from one another, then why not improve the connection between the two by linking your content engine to your commerce engine?
And in this case, with AEM and Adobe Commerce both being Adobe products, the connection between the two could be easier (and more beneficial) than you think!
Benefits of Connecting AEM with Adobe Commerce
While we can certainly manufacture collaboration between content and commerce by managing those platforms separately, it makes a lot more sense (and saves a lot more time) to open the lines of communication automatically by integrating the two.
This is the main benefit of integrating AEM with Adobe Commerce—unity between two interconnected systems that need each other to produce scale. But we won’t leave things there.
Here’s how brands specifically benefit from integrating AEM and Adobe Commerce:
- Boost the speed of scale: Reinforcing a more seamless relationship between your ecommerce system and your content helps smoothen the customer journey and improve the rate of conversion, helping you scale faster.
- Seamless omnichannel publishing: Having your product catalogs and all your digital experiences running on the same wavelength ensures that whenever something changes on the ecommerce front, your content won’t be left behind.
- Broad-scale personalization and differentiation: Bringing your ecommerce system into your content personalization game far improves the speed at which your customers find or reconnect with what they were looking for, getting them to check out sooner.
- Extended ecommerce analytics: AEM’s built-in integrations with powerful analytics tools (Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Customer Journey Analytics, etc.) help elaborate more on your ecommerce data, building a stronger understanding of your customers.
- Unified brand presence: Integration enables your content system and your ecommerce system to both draw assets from one central DAM within AEM, ensuring your brand is consistent across all experiences.
Moreover, here’s a look at how developers benefit from AEM and Adobe Commerce integration:
- Nothing lost in translation: AEM and Adobe Commerce both feature core components and architectures that function similarly in design and best practices, making it easy for developers to translate their knowledge of each into an integrated environment.
- Unified Platform: Having your content management and ecommerce management processes happen all in one place reduces the opportunity for disjointment between the two systems.
- Easy access to the same content: Developers no longer need to toggle between asset repositories looking for what they need. With Adobe Commerce and AEM integrated, both can draw assets from AEM’s DAM.
Easier Maintenance: Integration significantly cuts down on the time spent navigating between and managing the two platforms individually. Instead, ecommerce and content systems can be managed in one place.
Integrate Adobe AEM and Adobe Commerce Step-by-Step
We’re not going to tell you that AEM and Adobe Commerce integration is as simple as clicking a few buttons, because that just wouldn’t be true. But, at a high level, the list of steps to integration isn’t an overwhelming one.
We won’t get into the nitty-gritty here (we’d be speaking pure code at that point!), but we’ll shine a light on the basic steps you’ll need to cover to link your platforms and bring Adobe Commerce data into AEM.
1. Install and Configure Adobe Commerce Independently
For your integration between AEM and Adobe Commerce to be successful, you should invest the time to set up Adobe Commerce fully and correctly as a platform independent of your AEM instance.
A successful Adobe Commerce setup should follow certain best practices and will require the assistance of a highly skilled tech team, or a specialized implementation team. This is to ensure that the platform is future-proofed for success in its own right, and for seamless AEM integration success in the future.
And, even if setting up Adobe Commerce is a process you’ve already gone through, it’s worth double-checking your setup for efficacy with your tech experts first before you begin integrating it with AEM.
2. Set up the CIF Extension and Core Components within AEM
To start setting up the link between AEM and Adobe Commerce, you’ll need to add the AEM Commerce Integration Framework (CIF) extension and CIF Core Components package.
If you’re using an on-premise version of AEM (6.4 or newer versions) these will need to be installed from Adobe. However, if you’re using AEM as a Cloud Service, the CIF extension and core components should already be built-in, and there are no additional steps needed to add them.
3. Configure the Commerce Integration Framework
With the CIF extension and Core Components equipped, you can now use them to configure the connection between AEM and Adobe Commerce.
The communication between the two platforms happens using a public (not private) GraphQL endpoint URL. Without getting too into the weeds for our purposes, this endpoint URL can be set up as an environment variable either through Cloud Manager or through Adobe I/O CLI.
4. Configure Data Synchronization
Once your AEM instance and Adobe Commerce Instance are speaking to each other through the CIF connection, you’ll need to set some ground rules about the data you want to sync between the two.
You might find it pertinent to sync all of your catalog from Adobe Commerce, or there may certainly be cases where you’d only want to sync a partial catalog. This is what you’ll be looking to define.
You’ll also need to instruct AEM on how often it should sync this data over from Adobe Commerce using scheduled jobs.
5. Map Your Adobe Commerce Data into AEM
Deciding what you’ll synchronize over from Adobe Commerce is just the first step to full connection. The next, of course, is ensuring that data transfers over accurately by mapping it.
Some fields within Adobe Commerce will inevitably be termed differently than those in AEM, and simply connecting the two doesn’t assume anything about how this data matches between the platforms. So, you’ll need to decide how things like your product details, categories, etc. in Adobe Commerce map to certain fields within your AEM content metadata. This full process will happen within the CIF.
6. Test and Refine
Last but not least, you’ll need to test the integration between the two platforms, observe how data is synchronizing and mapping, and make adjustments as necessary to improve the seamlessness of their connection.
This isn’t a step to take shortcuts on, trust us. To avoid more complicated issues down the line, it’s best to stress test your mapping logic from various angles to get a feel for how accurately data maps into AEM.
Key Challenges of Integration
While using AEM and Adobe Commerce together significantly simplifies cooperation between content and commerce and enables faster scale, it can certainly come with its own set of challenges.
Not all integration instances can be straightforward. As we all know, complex business needs require complex solutions. And sometimes, there’s simply no way around that.
For example, integration can become all the more complicated with instances that employ integration between AEM and other 3rd party systems, like PIM or ERP. Some key problems that crop up with these integrations stem from synchronizing and mapping data and accommodating custom components.
Here’s how Markus Haack has illustrated such scenarios on Adobe Tech Blog.
That doesn’t mean you need to give up on being able to integrate your AEM and Adobe Commerce instances, by any means.
You just need the right experts for the job, who have extensive experience in setting up this specific integration in varying complexities. And you don’t need to burden your tech team with this responsibility—that’s what skilled Adobe implementation teams, like ours at Axamit, can do for you.
In Summary
For ecommerce brands using AEM, and those strongly considering migration to AEM, integrating your content side of things with Adobe Commerce comes with a long list of long-term benefits.
Not only do you gain the benefit of brand unity between both platforms, but you also greatly improve your ability to personalize and differentiate your experiences for your users—both of which accelerate your ability to scale.
And while the process of integrating the two platforms does require skilled technical expertise from development teams, it’s a lot simpler than it might otherwise be thanks to Adobe’s CIF, and the similar core component structure between AEM and Adobe Commerce.
So, when will you decide to bring your content and commerce engines together and create a brand to be reckoned with?
