Learnings from Adobe Summit 2025: Shaping the Future of Adobe Commerce
Adobe Summit 2025 brought a wave of important announcements that signal a major evolution in the Adobe ecosystem. A standout moment was the unveiling of new product offerings for Adobe Commerce, specifically the Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service and Adobe Commerce Optimizer. These solutions reveal new architecture and ways to deploy your commerce experiences and integrate Adobe Commerce more closely with the broader Adobe Experience Cloud ecosystem, particularly through integration with Edge Delivery Services, AEM and Personalization, as well as new agentic AI capabilities.
These new solutions promise to help businesses develop, deploy and scale faster, empowered with Adobe’s personalization and AI capabilities – but how will businesses best utilize them?
A Shift Toward SaaS
One of the most significant announcements was Adobe Commerce’s transition to a fully software as a service (SaaS)-based model with the Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service (ACCS). This marks a major shift in how enterprises will deploy and manage their eCommerce platforms and is a long-awaited product that promises to elevate technical architectures and raise the business proposition of Adobe Commerce. Bundled with Adobe’s Edge Delivery Services and App Builder, this new setup brings the benefits of composable architecture and eases the deployment and management of solutions.
It is well-known that existing platform as a service (PaaS) or on-prem deployment approaches require significant investment in system maintenance, which ACCS aims to optimize.
Key benefits of the new SaaS model:
- Cloud-Native Architecture: Under the hood of ACCS, Adobe Commerce will be enabled using a cloud-native and scalable technology stack. This will help businesses more easily establish and deploy new environments, validate new features, rollout new brands or markets or develop proofs of concept (PoCs).
- Versionless Architecture: No-more investment in maintenance and upgrades and patch releases. Updates are applied automatically in the background in ACCS, ensuring systems stay current without manual intervention.
- Enterprise-Grade Scalability: Support for up to 250 million SKUs makes it suitable for large-scale businesses with diverse product catalogs or multiple brand sites. With new Merchandising Catalog Services, ACCS promises top-notch performance even for the biggest and most complex use cases, without any additional configuration or customization — a task that was previously difficult to accomplish.
These approaches could help make it easier for businesses to focus on growth and customer experience while Adobe manages the underlying platform and technology complexity. Combined together, these actions are making Adobe Commerce upgrade processes faster and less painful, even with preexisting architecture.
In fact, we’ve anticipated this transition. Our recent Adobe Commerce implementations follow a SaaS-ready architecture — leveraging Edge Delivery Services and headless frameworks to implement a state-of-the-art frontend experience, deliver exceptional customer journeys and relieve pressure and dependence on developers. We also limit core code customization by using Catalog Service to establish fast API responses for the product catalog and use App Builder for customization, admin panel extensions and integrations with other systems.
That means that using best practices available now, clients will be able to adopt new capabilities with minimal technical disruption in the future.
Adobe Commerce Storefront & Storefront Builder
During Summit, Adobe also introduced a new Adobe Commerce Storefront and Storefront Builder —a modern headless Storefront environment that combines:
- Edge Delivery Services (EDS)
- Product Visuals powered by AEM Assets
- Composable UI elements (i.e., drop-ins)
- Adobe Developer App Builder
Using EDS, your storefront implementation can achieve the state-of-the-art performance, and using document-based authoring and universal editor capabilities, you can enable improved content management and integration with AI agents. Another advantage is that Adobe Commerce drop-ins can be utilized that do not require a custom or complex JavaScript (JS) framework or even specific JS skills, instead using vanilla JS and utilizing a micro-frontend framework for each drop-in. Additionally, integration with Adobe Assets provides enterprises the ability to utilize asset management and variation generation using AEM Assets.
By using EDS and pre-built commerce drop-ins, Adobe Commerce storefronts can be implemented that achieve fantastic scores on performance, accessibility and SEO without complex frameworks.
Enable a Personalized & Performant Storefront with Your Existing Commerce Engine
Another exciting release is Adobe Commerce Optimizer (ACO). Typically, when enterprises want next-level customer experiences and personalization for their existing eCommerce storefront, it requires a complete commerce upgrade — and a significant investment. With ACO, enterprises can improve merchandising and content management, performance, accessibility and SEO ratings, all while enabling a storefront with personalization capabilities, at a lower cost.
Core features include:
- Adobe Commerce Storefront: Using edge computing, pages load faster, helping improve SEO rankings, reduce bounce rates and support mobile performance.
- AI-Driven Insights with Site Optimizer Agent: Built-in analytics help identify user behavior trends and enable real-time personalization strategies.
- AEM Assets Integration: Asset management is enhanced and Adobe AI can be utilized in assets processing.
- App Builder Development Environment: Storefronts can be customized with your own custom logic, without changing anything else in your eCommerce engine.
Adobe Commerce Optimizer is not aiming to replace an entire commerce setup but rather improve key aspects of a storefront, like key pages, content management, catalogs and merchandising. In fact, a hybrid setup is still possible, in which other pages and capabilities can be still served by legacy systems. Adobe also plans to release pre-built connectors for other commerce platforms, making ACO implementation easier and smoother.
What Does This Mean for Existing Clients?
A common question among current Adobe Commerce users is whether a migration to the new SaaS model is required. The answer? No immediate migration is necessary.
Adobe has confirmed it will continue to support the existing PaaS model for current clients. However, businesses looking to future-proof their architecture should begin exploring the benefits of a SaaS model — particularly as new features become available exclusively in the cloud-native version.
For clients running on-prem or SaaS solutions, enabling Adobe Commerce Optimizer as a first step in migrating to the new SaaS mode will help improve user experiences, content, catalogs and overall website performance and SEO metrics. Then, after moving customization capabilities from Adobe Commerce Core to App Builder, enterprises can switch to ACCS.
Looking Ahead
As expectations for personalized customer experiences continue to rise, cloud-native and composable commerce platforms will play a central role in delivering fast, flexible and personalized digital experiences. Adobe’s shift toward SaaS reflects a broader industry trend and is likely to influence the direction of digital commerce across sectors, as other companies develop their own solutions to help enterprise customers stay competitive with products that are easier to scale and maintain.
