Adobe Teasing New Commerce Offerings: I'm Not Eating the Cheese
Adobe's commerce efforts have been wandering in the desert for years. They tried to sell people on the whole "PWA Headless" thing several years back, which blew up in most client's faces. You would have needed an elite system integrator to do it right, and from my industry conversations mostly that did not exist.
The industry is looking for that Shopify alternative.
Salesforce keeps laying off people and changing leadership -- plus obvious they are truly trying to sell you Data Cloud more than anything (which you need to run their agents), with a few feints and dabbles in other areas.
BigCommerce has a new leadership and approach, but they are not going to challenge Shopify in B2C... they have trained their guns on B2B.
Adobe has the Magento legacy which has a lot of merchants STILL on it (remember when I said people don't want to replatform?) they don't want to lose.
They are testing a new front-end - Adobe Commerce Optimizer - which I think is what they are really trying to sell. After all, it's Adobe and they have their whole Creative Suite. I would put my money here if anything.
They are also releasing in 2025 essentially an instant provisioned cloud (Adobe Cloud as a Service - ACCS?) for users who don't want to provision their own Magento.
I think of it like this Wordpress hosts (WPEngine etc) which handle everything for you. Magento has tried to do this more times than I can count. At least a couple.
One of their system integrator partners released an odd Youtube video based on an email they sent, and Adobe also released a horrific obviously AI-generated podcast which forces you to listen to two excited AI people talking to each other like rabid goats. About the strangest product release tease I have ever seen.
The front-end Commerce Optimizer it's whatever... it's Adobe so you have to pay attention. I just hope people aren't being sold a bill of goods.
The platform, I would steer far away from. Adobe in this market is damned if they do and damned if they don't.
If they don't change much, which is what is happening here, it's just the same thing managed for you. In that case, it's like a tree falling in the woods. It will be for the people who are locked in and Adobe-committed and have few options.
If they change a lot, then they have the same Magento 1 -> 2 problem all over again. Screw over their user base, and for many people it was easier to replatform that to upgrade.
With a managed offering like this, customizations are a huge question. If you have customized your install to a great degree (which is most people at this point), my guess is that this transition becomes quite difficult.
If you haven't, you might use this transition period as yet another replatform off-ramp. In June 2025, we will know more but when the tree falls in the woods then, we might at least be able to use our binoculars and see what color the tree is.
