The ultimate guide to Adobe AEM and Magento integration

The key to a successful eCommerce business is not just a great shopping experience but delivering a unified experience. Consumers expect companies to understand behavior and tailor interactions to their needs and preferences. To keep content and commerce together, Adobe has developed a unique yet powerful Adobe AEM and Magento integration.

But how does integrating Adobe Commerce and Adobe Experience Manager promote business growth? In today’s competitive ecosystem, companies need to focus on not just improving their shopping experiences across channels, but also develop an effective CMS strategy for digital marketing. By integrating Adobe AEM and Adobe Commerce results in a perfect harmony that allows these platforms to work independently and together, translating to improved user experiences for businesses and consumers.

Let’s dive deep into how this combined solutioning works and why to integrate AEM and Adobe Commerce and deliver tailor-made online solutions.

AEM & Adobe Commerce: An introduction

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a content management and digital asset management system that allows businesses to create, deliver, and manage content across multiple digital touchpoints.

On the contrary, Adobe Commerce, earlier known as Magento Commerce, is a popular omnichannel eCommerce platform for B2B, B2C, and D2C industrial genres to offer personalized solutions to shoppers globally. Both are products of Adobe Experience Cloud and therefore, seamlessly integrated with each other and other Adobe products such as Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target.

Why should you integrate AEM and Adobe Commerce?

The powerful Adobe AEM Magento integration empowers businesses to rebuild rich customer profiles and deliver personalized, relevant and timely content, extending seamless and consistent user experiences across channels. Here are some of the benefits of Adobe AEM Magento integration:

#1: Coupling two powerful Adobe products for consistent CX

Usually, in large enterprises, different teams are responsible for eCommerce development and content creation, development, and optimization. Coupling Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Commerce results in a rich storefront experience with Page Builder and PWA Studio. As the marketing team can optimize and update content by leveraging components like product teaser and product carousel, they can easily create experience pages via the no-coding drag-and-drop features and even reuse components to develop other product sections.

This way, you can have a content team focussed on publishing while your developers can work on PWAs to offer a consistent experience throughout. No longer has your marketing team rely on standard development processes to deploy content or implement A/B testing on their eCommerce solutions, accelerating speed-to-market and providing complete autonomy.

#2: A simple and easy-to-use frontend with a powerful backend

When it comes to listing powerful CMS solutions, Adobe Experience Manager has built its name in the market. For merchants that had to rely on traditional ways of managing frontend customer experience, Adobe AEM is a fresh wave of faster and simplistic innovation. By integrating Adobe Experience Manager and Adobe Commerce, you develop a single platform for both brand and commerce experience with omnichannel capabilities. Adobe AEM takes care of your product listing and product detail pages, publishing content via serverless systems with the push of a button.

This ease and efficiency empowers marketers to implement real-time updates who otherwise had to depend on the development team for product content management.

#3: Personalizing experiences for each shopper

In an era when personalization has become a critical undertaking and valuable asset for enterprises, Adobe AEM allows marketers to refine content based on user browning history and profile. This means, shoppers can now view content based on their needs and preferences, in their language for products they like or wish to buy. As editing product pages is only a matter of minutes using Adobe Experience Manager, you can implement personalization easily and efficiently.

#4: Improved asset management and reusability

When running eCommerce sites, developers are often overwhelmed with the amount of media available. In terms of storing data, the built-in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Digital Asset Management (DAM) system allows the effortless storage and management of assets without worrying about storage space. In fact, you can even add metadata and tags to your files to simplify asset management and find them quickly.

As mentioned before, with Magento integration with AEM, you can reuse content and components across multiple pages. Adobe AEM employs the CIF (commerce integration framework), which contains all the front-end components used to create carousels, listing pages, product pages, and so on. You can reuse these components across different Adobe Commerce implementations. This facilitates repurposing of content to speed time-to-market and ensure experience consistency.

#5 Built-in Adobe Experience Cloud analytics tools

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is built-in integrated with many other tools like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Audience Manager, and Adobe Campaign. For merchants who wish to use these products with their Adobe Commerce system, their built-in integration with AEM makes them easy to add and configure, accelerating their development and iteration process. This way you can track behavior across every step of the user journey and offer tailored customer experiences across channels.

How to integrate Adobe AEM and Adobe Commerce?

To ensure a seamless Magento integration with AEM, Adobe recommends the use of Commerce Integration Framework (CIF). The CIF extension allows AEM to directly access the commerce instance consisting of all the data via GraphQL APIs.

As a cloud service, AEM CIF connector comes in-built and only integration with Adobe Commerce is required. However, in case you’re using AEM as on-premises, you might have to download the AEM CIF connector from the software distribution portal to leverage product pickers, product assets view, and product consoles as provided in the package and improve the authoring experience.

Features of Commerce Integration Framework (CIF) :

1. Enables deeper integration with Adobe Commerce and thus enhances the AEM experience.
2. AEM CIF core components setup can be used with minimal or no modifications.
3. AEM CIF Core Components contain reusable elements that combine AEM components rendered server-side with React commerce components rendered client-side to offer dynamic experiences.

Let’s discuss CIF’s architecture and components, which helps integrate AEM and Adobe Commerce.