Time’s up: Migrate from SAP to modern commerce now and future-proof your business

For many enterprises, SAP Commerce has long been a cornerstone of their digital commerce strategy. But today, SAP customers face a critical inflection point. With the vendor pulling the plug on SAP Hybris (on-premise) and ending mainstream maintenance on July 31, 2026, organizations are being pushed to make a near-term platform decision that will significantly impact their commerce capabilities and cost structure for years to come. 

The vendor positions SAP Commerce Cloud as the natural successor. Despite years of investment and rebranding, analysts and system integrators continue to highlight a fundamental issue: SAP Commerce Cloud remains monolithic at its core, creating structural limits to agility, innovation, customization and ROI.

Let’s explore why enterprises are increasingly moving away from SAP — regardless of the version — and adopting modular, composable commerce, such as that provided by commercetools. 

After July 2026, customers remaining on SAP Commerce on-premise will no longer receive regular security patches, updates or mainstream support. Industry advisories increasingly frame this as a strategic, not technical, decision, warning of rising security risk, growing technical debt and accelerating obsolescence for organizations that delay action.

While SAP Commerce Cloud promises cloud delivery and a more modularized solution at the edges, Gartner recently pointed out that, “Despite the decoupled Spartacus storefront and SaaS components, the commerce core retains a largely monolithic architecture, which may limit agility compared with more modular competitors.”

In practice, SAP Commerce Cloud is deployed as a single-tenant, versioned platform with assigned node roles and tightly coupled services that create several challenges for enterprises:

• Changes often require platform-wide coordination, slowing delivery.

• Customizations increase upgrade complexity and cost.

• Innovation remains tied to SAP’s release cycles, not business priorities.

• Constant and costly replatforming efforts are associated with rounds of version upgrades.

As a result, enterprises report difficulty iterating quickly without introducing downtime, disruption or technical debt — especially in global, multi-brand environments.

Beyond architecture, SAP customers increasingly scrutinize the total cost of ownership (TCO).

SAP’s pricing model is frequently described as complex and opaque, with costs driven by:

• High recurring license and subscription fees.

• Bundled functionality that limits selective adoption.

• Mandatory migrations (for example, alignment with the vendor’s ERP solution, S/4 HANA).

• Ongoing (and usually, forced) upgrades, maintenance and professional services expenses.

That said, Commerce Cloud migrations (and SAP-driven digital transformations) are typically multi-phase programs requiring extensive process redesign and inventory rationalization to control costs. Critical industry voices go further, describing these migrations as potential “budget nightmares” due to unanticipated licensing, customization and partner dependency costs.

For instance, a recent survey revealed that 60% of organizations report deviations in budget, schedule and result quality with SAP S/4 HANA migrations. What’s more, transformations take on average 30% longer than planned. With SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP S/4 HANA as part of the same technology stack for many companies, this is indicative of the broader risk and overrun patterns in SAP programs. 

The monolithic legacy architecture also increases reliance on specialized, high-cost developers, further inflating operational spend and diverting budget away from customer-facing innovation.

SAP is a Leader in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce, reflecting its enterprise reach, global scale and support for complex business models. However, leadership in footprint does not automatically translate into leadership in innovation speed.

Companies should be aware of several caution areas relevant to commerce modernization:

• Add-on personalization requires additional licenses.

• Innovation increasingly lands cloud-first, accelerating obsolescence in legacy deployments.

Suite dependence amplifies lock-in and slows experimentation.

As commerce moves toward AI-driven and agentic experiences, SAP’s progress remains constrained:

• Frontend shopping agents are largely advisory, not autonomous.

• Agent capabilities are deeply embedded in the SAP ecosystem, limiting composability.

• There is limited evidence of protocol-level interoperability with emerging external agent ecosystems.

Furthermore, there are indications that the vendor is lagging behind more modern vendors, such as Shopify and commercetools. For instance, SAP isn’t listed as a native supported platform for OpenAI’s Agentic Commerce Platform (ACP). This makes it harder for SAP merchants to participate in AI-first discovery and transaction channels beyond SAP’s own suite.

Many organizations hesitate to move away from SAP Commerce Cloud because of a perceived risk: “If we change our commerce platform, we’ll break ERP synchronization.” This concern is understandable, but increasingly outdated. 

Modern commerce platforms are designed to integrate seamlessly with SAP ERP (ECC or S/4HANA) through well-established APIs, event streams and middleware, ensuring clean and reliable integration without tight coupling or data duplication.

An SAP ERP system is not a barrier to adopting a modern commerce solution. In fact, core ERP responsibilities — pricing, inventory, order management, tax and fulfillment — can remain firmly in SAP, while a modern commerce platform handles customer experience, storefronts and omnichannel innovation. 

In fact, decoupling commerce from ERP often reduces risk rather than increases it. It allows teams to modernize the customer-facing layer without disturbing mission-critical back-office systems, accelerate innovation cycles, and avoid monolithic upgrades. This architecture also future-proofs the business: New channels (such as AI agents, marketplaces, headless frontends, and B2B portals) can be added without reworking the ERP logic.

Additional considerations worth noting:

• ERP ≠ Commerce: ERP systems are optimized for transactional integrity, not rapid UX iteration or AI-driven discovery.

• Proven patterns exist: Thousands of enterprises run modern commerce platforms on top of SAP ERP today using standard integration patterns.

• Incremental migration is possible: Commerce can be modernized domain by domain (catalog, checkout, promotions) without a “big bang” ERP change. 

• AI & agentic commerce readiness: Modern platforms integrate more easily with AI channels and agent-based buying experiences, while still relying on SAP as the system of record.

In short, the real risk is not modernizing — it’s letting ERP coupling slow down customer experience and innovation. SAP ERP can remain the backbone of the enterprise, while modern commerce platforms deliver the agility today’s digital commerce demands.

SAP Commerce Cloud remains a powerful platform for enterprises deeply invested in the SAP ecosystem. But its monolithic core, upgrade burden and forced migration timelines increasingly limit ROI realization for organizations that need speed, flexibility and experimentation.

Composable commerce platforms offer a different path: Modernization without forced alignment to a single vendor roadmap.

With commercetools’ composable architecture, enterprises can:

• Avoid bundled licensing and forced migrations with a versionless infrastructure. 

• Customize freely without breaking future upgrades.

• Adopt only the capabilities they need. 

• Reduce vendor lock-in while integrating cleanly with SAP as a system of record, such as SAP H/4 HANA. 

• Innovate continuously without platform-wide upgrades. 

• Autoscale cloud-native services to support unlimited growth.

• Capitalize quickly on changing consumer behavior.

• Prepare for agentic commerce on AI platforms, such as ChatGPT on ACP, as well as Perplexity, Gemini and emerging channels, powered by commercetools AI Hub. 

• Create brand-owned agentic experiences with commercetools Agent Gateway. 

Leading enterprises have already made this shift. Retailers such as ARK Bokhandel, Jaycar and Salling Group chose to move away from costly SAP upgrades, modernizing their commerce architectures with commercetools to gain faster time-to-market, greater flexibility and long-term resilience.

ARK Bokhandel moved off SAP Hybris to unlock growth — and increased conversion rate by 15%

ARK Bokhandel, Norway’s leading bookstore, faced significant scalability issues with its legacy SAP Hybris platform, particularly during peak traffic, when handling more than 3,000 users could cause the entire system to crash. This tightly coupled, monolithic setup became a growth bottleneck.

After switching to commercetools, ARK scaled effortlessly, processing 17,000 orders in a single day post-launch and boosting conversions by over 15%. With a more agile setup, they now deploy over 800 updates per year.

Jaycar unified physical and digital commerce with commercetools in only 7 weeks 

Jaycar, a mid-market Australian retailer specializing in electronic components, faced a huge disconnect between its online and offline shopping experiences. The company ran two separate, aging, slow, predominantly on-prem enterprise business systems that relied on SAP Hybris. 

Taking a bold step, Jaycar eliminated the POS (point-of-sale) system altogether and embraced commercetools’ unified commerce platform. Now, store associates have access to relevant data, product returns have been optimized and loyalty works cross-channel. The retailer implemented it in only seven weeks.

Salling Group ditched high licensing and maintenance costs — and reduced TCO by 75% 

Denmark’s largest retailer, Salling Group, faced challenges with SAP Hybris in implementing an omnichannel customer experience, while incurring high licensing and maintenance costs. By migrating to commercetools, the retailer delivered on mobile responsiveness, eCommerce speed and new touchpoints, such as click-and-collect. 

The result: Salling Group increased conversion rate by 30% while reducing costs by 75%.

With SAP Commerce on-premise approaching the end of maintenance and Commerce Cloud retaining its monolithic DNA, enterprises face a clear choice: Follow a forced migration path — or modernize on their own terms.

Composable commerce is no longer an emerging concept. It is the architecture enterprises adopt when they want to move faster, innovate continuously and future-proof their business in an AI-driven world.

Time’s up for monolithic constraints. The future belongs to modular, composable solutions that offer flexibility, scalability and agility for today’s fast-changing world. 

Download the Decision Guide: commercetools vs. SAP for a detailed comparison between both solutions.