The clock is ticking for SAP Commerce cloud customers still running on the legacy Accelerator storefront. With end of support scheduled for Q3 2027, it might feel like there’s plenty of time. In reality, starting early matters. If you’re waiting until the deadline looms to start planning, you’re setting yourself up for rushed decisions and unnecessary stress. The path forward requires strategic thinking, careful planning, and a clear roadmap that aligns with your business goals.
Understanding the Timeline
Here’s the breakdown for SAP Accelerator’s end of life:
- Q2 2027: SAP releases its final version of Commerce Cloud with Accelerator support
- Q3 2027: First release without Accelerator (there will be the usual 6 months support schedule)
- Q3 2028: Complete End of Support
2027 might seem far away, but the timeline for planning, storefront evaluation, technical preparation, and migration is much tighter than it appears. Organizations that begin their transition planning sooner rather than later will have the luxury of thoughtful decision making. Those who wait will find themselves scrambling.
End of Support Shouldn’t Be the Only Reason
Of course, the end of support deadline is a good reason to transition, but treating this transition as something you must do misses the bigger opportunity. The Accelerator’s legacy MVC architecture was built for a different era of ecommerce. The gap between what it offers and what modern commerce platforms can deliver has been widening.
A strategic transition unlocks:
- Innovation velocity: modern architectures enable faster feature deployment and experimentation
- Scalability: cloud-native solutions that grow with your business without the traditional infrastructure constraints
- Flexibility: the ability to swap components, integrate new services, and adapt to market changes without massive rewrites
Weighing Your Storefront Options
SAP Commerce Cloud customers have three primary paths forward, each with their own tradeoffs.
1. Composable Storefront (Spartacus)
SAP’s official headless storefront option typically comes included in your existing licensing, making it the lowest-cost option on paper.
What works well:
- No additional license fees beyond your current SAP investment
- Deep integration with SAP Commerce Cloud out of the box
- Leverages existing infrastructure and vendor relationship
What to consider:
- Requires substantial development effort to customize and deploy
- Built on Angular, which has a smaller developer talent pool compared to React or Vue
- More tightly coupled to SAP’s ecosystem, potentially limiting future flexibility
- Not a turnkey solution, you’re still building and maintaining your own implementation
Best for: Organizations with strong internal development teams, existing Angular expertise, and a preference for keeping everything in-house.
2. Custom Storefront Build
Building a bespoke frontend from scratch offers maximum flexibility and control.
What works well:
- Infinite customization possibilities
- Complete ownership of your tech stack
- Freedom to optimize every aspect of performance and user experience
What to consider:
- Requires a mature organization with seasoned development and devOps teams
- Full liability for all security patches, framework updates, and dependency management
- Complete responsibility for infrastructure, scaling, monitoring, and logging
- Ongoing maintenance burden that compounds over time
- Cloud costs scale with traffic, and frontend performance issues translate directly to infrastructure expenses
Best for: Large enterprises with significant technical prowess, a clear long-term vision, and the want to own the entire stack.
3. Front-end as a Service (FaaS)
Managed frontend solutions like Alokai represent a middle path, combining pre-built components with customization capabilities while outsourcing the infrastructure and maintenance burden.
What works well:
- Comprehensive service including hosting, monitoring, logging, and performance optimization
- Hybrid approach- out-of-the-box features with room for customization
- Significantly lower implementation costs and faster time-to-market compared to custom builds
- Vendor handles maintenance and updates
- Supports popular frameworks with large developer talent pools
- Purpose-built cloud infrastructure optimized specifically for ecommerce
- Middleware layer enables easy integration capabilities
What to consider:
- Introduces dependency on a third-party vendor
- Less flexibility than a fully custom build
- Requires trust in the vendor’s roadmap and stability
Best for: Organizations seeking a balance between speed-to-market, cost efficiency, and professional support without sacrificing customization capabilities.
Planning Your Transition
Once you’ve evaluated your storefront options, the next question is how much change can your organization handle? Don’t try to change everything at once. Switching your storefront, CMS, and search platform simultaneously creates compounding change management challenges. You can replace everything at once (higher risk, best for smaller deployments) or take a phased approach starting with a specific product line or smaller region. For multi-market operations, start with your smallest, least risky region and reuse the core codebase for subsequent rollouts.
Whichever storefront you choose, you’ll still need to repackage your SAP Commerce backend into an API-first architecture. This approach, while necessary, also has an added benefit of setting your organization up nicely for future AI agents, voice commerce, and integrations that are on the horizon.
Start by educating stakeholders on the timeline, assessing your current customizations, and defining what changes now versus later. Talk to different vendors and start thinking about your API strategy. Since planning and vendor selection can take months before any code is written, getting started early gives you more options and reduces last minute pressure.
The Path Ahead
The SAP Accelerator end of support is coming regardless of whether you’re ready or not. Organizations that start planning now will have time to evaluate options, build business cases, and execute thoughtfully. Those who wait will face compressed timelines and limited choices. The difference comes down to when you start.
Looking to learn more about transitioning from SAP Accelerator to a modern composable storefront? Contact us.
Access the full on-demand webinar and learn how SAP Commerce Cloud users can transition to headless and boost performance.
Transcript:
00:00
The first option is the composable storefront that SAP has also known as Spartacus. This is a bit of a default option. It typically comes within your licensing. You already have the infrastructure. You don’t have to pay for anything additional there, but you still have to build it. So, I think that’s something people don’t always think about, is you don’t just turn it on and it works. All of these have developments that has to occur throughout the lifecycle.
00:29
The other piece here is that while it is SAP commerce’s composable storefront, that also means that it is going to be more tightly coupled and also a bit more opinionated as far as how it works with the SAP commerce backend. So, if you’re looking to decouple and you’re looking to maybe not be as locked in with the SAP commerce stack from that side, then you might be looking at a custom storefront.
01:00
A custom storefront is almost the exact opposite as far as pros and cons, right? It is going to be highly flexible, infinitely flexible. However, you have to be a very mature organization. So, it’s going to come with you taking on all liability for all patches, all updates for React, Angular, Vue. Whatever you use, you are fully responsible for that stack.
01:35
You also are maintaining its infrastructure, how you scale it, your monitoring, your logging. People sometimes forget when they’re selecting that option that it’s not just where you host it. You also need to add all of those pieces that come with either a front end as a service or the SAP composable storefront.
01:53
So the third one here is the frontend as a service. So, this is Alokai’s offering, where it comes with that hosting, logging, monitoring. There are many more capabilities that come with it, and I’m sure we’ll get into some of those in just a little bit.
02:11
And then that fourth option is you stay on the accelerator storefront. If you stay on the accelerator storefront, there’s still dev work. If you’re thinking we could just stick on it and we don’t have to do anything, you still have to pull it into your package. You’re still fully liable. Not only that, but you’re also cutting off possible innovation for your specific company. So it’s something that, you know, we do entertain it when there’s, you know, maybe an ERP or e-procurement that requires an older browser stack, right? So you might have some other legacy architecture pieces that force that fourth option, but that’s almost like a last option. And only if you absolutely have to.