The

leader

in

multi-site

Composable

Storefronts

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top-tier

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six

months

SFCC in 2025: Enterprise Stability Meets Composable Flexibility

Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) has evolved from its Demandware roots into a modern enterprise platform capable of powering fully composable, headless storefronts. Today, leading brands pair SFCC’s robust backend with modern front-end frameworks like Next.js and Vercel and headless CMS platforms such as Contentstack or Amplience to unlock faster performance, better developer agility, and richer customer experiences.

64Labs is the global leader in composable SFCC builds, delivering projects for enterprise retailers such as Horizon Hobby, Moncler, Sweaty Betty, and Duluth Trading all with measurable performance and revenue gains.

A Quick History of SFCC

Salesforce acquired Demandware in 2016, gaining one of the most mature cloud-native commerce platforms on the market. At a time when competitors still relied on on-prem or heavily customised systems, Demandware offered scalability without infrastructure headaches.

While its CMS and search were limited in those early years, its stability, global readiness, and proven operational model made it the Porsche of eCommerce platforms - engineered for performance, enduring in design, and able to stay relevant as the world caught up.

What Salesforce Commerce Cloud Is Today

At its core, SFCC remains a stable, scalable SaaS commerce engine. It handles:

• Product catalog and pricing logic
• Promotions and inventory management
• Complex checkout workflows
• Multi-brand and multi-region orchestration

The real shift in recent years? SFCC now fits seamlessly into composable architectures, enabling brands to swap in best-of-breed tools while retaining a bulletproof commerce core.

From SiteGenesis to SFRA to Composable

• SiteGenesis – Legacy server-rendered architecture, fast for its time but inflexible and hard to maintain.
• SFRA (Storefront Reference Architecture) – Introduced modularity, responsive design, and cleaner code for the monolithic era.
• Composable Storefront – Built on modern JavaScript tooling with PWA Kit, SCAPI, and API-first integration, allowing front-ends on React or Next.js to be deployed on platforms like Vercel.

This evolution lets enterprise teams:

• Improve site performance dramatically
• Control their own front-end release cycles
• Integrate modern tools like Algolia for search or headless CMS for content

Why Composable SFCC Works for Enterprise Brands

Salesforce Commerce Cloud shines when:

• Running multi-brand portfolios with shared components
• Managing global pricing, tax, and inventory logic
• Integrating with complex ERP, CRM, and marketing stacks
• Passing stringent enterprise security and compliance requirements

When paired with a composable approach, SFCC gives brands backend stability and frontend freedom - the best of both worlds.

The Limits and How to Overcome Them

SFCC’s native CMS and search still lag behind best-in-class options. That’s why most of our composable builds integrate platforms like Amplience or Contentstack for content, and tools like Algolia for search.
Pricing can be a sticking point, but in 2025, negotiation flexibility is far greater - especially if you have the right partner guiding your roadmap.

Final Thoughts

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.

The Big Question Everyone Asks

If you're leading digital at a large retailer or a multi-brand group, this has probably come up already: "How fast do we get a return on a composable build?"

Fair question. Composable projects do require upfront investment. They need time, budget, and executive attention. But the payoff isn’t just in the tech you launch. It's in the legacy systems and workflows you leave behind.

The value shows up when your teams stop waiting for dev queues, start shipping faster, and no longer rely on expensive workarounds to do basic things.

A composable storefront doesn't just pay off the build. It clears the debt that’s been building inside your stack for years.

Where the ROI Actually Comes From

Most people frame ROI too narrowly. They ask if composable saves money compared to what they’re already doing. And if it makes money if all they do is change the front-end framework. It does both. But the better question is whether it clears the friction that keeps your teams from doing their best work.

Here’s where the real value tends to land:

✅ Faster time to market Marketing and merch teams push campaigns, content, and experiments without waiting for staging, QA, or a dev sprint to open up.

✅ More autonomy across teams No more Jira tickets for basic content updates. A well-structured CMS lets non-technical teams work directly inside the experience. This autonomy stretches right through to some elements of structure like menus.

✅ Less tech debt When you replace rigid templates and legacy CMSs with modular systems, maintenance gets lighter and upgrades stop being emergencies.

✅ Better customer experience Faster front-ends and personalized flows drive stronger engagement (+20-40%) and better conversion (~+20% on mobile). That has real revenue impact.

✅ No wasted license spend Composable means using the tools you actually need. You’re not paying for a suite full of features no one uses. This somewhat relies on your ability to negotiate good deals from new vendors and better deals from your platform. But composable opens this door and all of these guys want your business a great deal.

What Actually Drives ROI

Not every composable build hits its targets. The architecture helps, but the outcome depends on the process.

Don't start at the starting line Many accelerators other SIs brag about are just reskinned versions of the composable storefront sample storefront from Salesforce. They are essentially worthless. The 64labs accelerator is an integrated set of code, process, and embedded expertise where key decisions have been made based on experience, where full-feature integrations have been pre-built with the vendor overseeing, where there is a way to getting the site done quickly that we stand behind in our contracts. With 64labs you start a 100m race 40m from the finish.

Pick the right partners Composable tools only deliver if they play well together. That’s why we work directly with partners like Contentstack, Amplience, Algolia, Vercel, Adyen and Dynamic Yield to build fast and smooth. But your key partner is your engineering partner. There are some other good partners out there. But no one has the experience and focus on composable of 64labs.

Enable internal teams We don’t just ship the site. We do a handover right. Your team gets documentation, training, and structured onboarding. They have helped build parts of the site. They retain access to our top people post-launch even without a contract. If they can manage the platform without us, we’ve done it right. If you want us to stick around and keep the momentum of the build going - and there can be a strong case for that for some retailers upgrading in other areas of the enterprise stack (ERP, OMS, WMS) whose team cannot own the architecture right away - 64labs can hold the fort and improve the weaponry while that work gets done.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Legacy platforms come with hidden costs. Every delayed release, every workaround, every missed campaign window adds up.

If your team is stuck supporting brittle code, locked into slow cycles, or limited in personalization, the price isn’t just technical. It’s operational debt. And it compounds every quarter. And AI is not going to slow that baby down.

Composable cuts that cycle. It unlocks execution speed and lets your teams push ideas out into the world instead of waiting for backlog relief.

Final Thought

If your business has complexity—multiple brands, regions, or fast-moving teams - composable is not optional. It's the structure that lets digital teams actually run.

And if you're on Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the backend is already strong. Composable is how you level up the front-end to match.

Done right, it doesn’t just pay for itself. It gives your team the flexibility they’ve been asking for and the momentum your business needs.

Let’s Talk. Want to see what ROI from composable could look like for your storefront? Contact us here.

Your Digital Team is Better Than Your Tech Stack

Marketers and merchandisers in enterprise retail are often stuck in a weird paradox: they have powerful ideas, agile teams, and massive goals, but a tech stack that moves like it's 2012. If launching a promo takes 3 JIRA tickets and 2 weeks of dev time, you're not just behind, you're bleeding money.

Enter composable commerce: a modular, API-first approach to building digital storefronts. While it sounds like a developer’s dream (and it is), the biggest wins actually show up for marketers and merchants.

Here’s how.

1. You Can Get Sh*t Done Fast

Composable means your frontend is decoupled from your backend. So when merch or marketing wants to:

• Launch a campaign,

• Update a product carousel,

• Swap out homepage banners for seasonal offers,

• Build a landing page for that influencer collab…

...they can do it without dev involvement (or with minimal support). Teams can use low-code/no-code tools integrated into the stack (like CMSs or visual merch tools) to make changes in hours, not weeks. And dev teams, before you get too upset, these guys have been using tag managers and personalization tools behind your back to do things they shouldn't for about 10 years now. This is better-safer-transparenter than that.

🚀 Result: Faster go-to-market, more A/B testing, more wins.

2. Personalization and Segmentation Actually Work

Legacy monoliths often treat personalization like a bolt-on feature, not a core capability. Composable stacks let you plug in best-in-class personalization engines (we have hard-core expertise in or Dynamic Yield) that actually talk to your content and commerce layers in real-time.

Marketers can then:

• Target based on customer behavior, not just segments

• Trigger experiences dynamically

• Swap components (not entire pages)

Now, it better be built correctly by a partner who knows what they are doing. (cough). And that partner better be in the weeds with your team on what it has to do where (double cough). And you better be willing to out some work into making it work rather than think it automagically improves conversions (whooping cough). But a composable architecture does unlock all this.

📈 Result: Better CX, higher conversion rates, more data to refine.

3. You Own the Brand Experience, Not the Platform

Composable gives you control over your frontend experience. Sure you have, like templates with like Bootstrap n stuff that you can play with. But repeat after me - ISML is DISML. With composable you are a world of React and Typescript and kittens. You get to control how the site looks, feels, and behaves instead of being locked into the templates someone thought were state of the art back in 2014.

This means your brand team can:

• Tell a story that actually feels premium

• Maintain consistency across channels

• Create immersive content experiences

…without getting a “that’s not possible with our CMS” reply from IT.

🎨 Result: Experience-driven commerce, not catalog-driven commerce.

4. Operational Flexibility = Less Burnout

Move fast and break stuff they say. Yeah, great advice for a 20 year old building an app no one wil likely ever have to use. We don;t get that luxury. Marketers and merchandisers are constantly caught between "move fast" and "absolutely don’t break stuff." Composable gives us a middle ground:

• You can make changes and roll something back within about 10 seconds.

• Repair or update to one part of the site does not have to impact another. And you will have built testing and QA workflows to automatically make sure that is the case. Or at least you will if you use 64labs (cough - sorry I can;t quite get rid of this).

• You can schedule campaigns without syncing 5 different systems. Decide on your preferred workflow, how the various elements need to work together. And build that. Composable is made to compose.

• You can preview content as it will actually appear — not just in staging environments that look nothing like the real site.

🧘‍♀️ Result: Less stress, more autonomy, more velocity, more control.

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5. No More Big Bang

Worried about an old school Big Bang launch of composable? Don't be. You can put a full composable site out to a subset of users for as long as you want before you have to commit ? Don’t be. Most enterprise teams go with a split launch - maybe 5% of users to start. They iron out any kinks. Then when they realize how much the ROI will be if they switch over like right now, they switch.

You can go incremental of course.

You can plug in a headless CMS (like Contenstack or Amplience), run it headlessly within your legacy stack for a while, and prove ROI before ripping anything out. Or un composable with a new CMS in one region for six months to give yourselves some experience of both before rolling out globally.

🛠️ Result: Low risk, high reward — easy to minimize risk and you keep IT on your side.

In a world where campaigns move at the speed of culture and conversion windows last minutes, composable lets marketers and merchandisers do what they do best: create, launch, measure, and optimize without waiting for devs, approvals, or outdated systems to catch up.