Migrate AEM commerce/products on premise to AEM cloud

[Jose_Manuel1]

Hello everyone.
We're using AEM on-premise and want to migrate to AEM Cloud.
We use AEM's Commerce/Products functionality. To do this, we've created our own importers, which connect to a PIM system for data extraction (REST API). (myclassBrand extends AbstractProductImporter implements ProductImporter)

Is this solution still valid in AEM Cloud?
If not, what alternative do you see as viable?

Thank you very much.

Best regards.

[KimonP]

I think you need to consider the following:

- The importers function you mention (I assume this includes the good old per-product/category automatic page creation based on specific templates too) is rather "heavy" and would advise against it. I have used it myself with AEM x SAP CC and it was not easy to implement, customize, configure or maintain. 

- AEMaaCS is not as customizing-friendly as on-prem or even AMS. So the less customizations the better.

- What has worked best for me is dynamic retrieval of Product catalog or commerce data via REST API (or GraphQL) on a per-component basis, along with page naming conventions (at least for Product Detail Pages aka PDPs and Product Listing Pages aka PLPs)

- Towards this, you would definitely need a middleware/integration layer (for security and perfomrance reasons, among others).

- If you want to follow AEM CIF approach, you have different integration options, depending on the commerce provider, aka if it is Magento/Adobe Commerce or third party vendor. Some related links:

Third party commerce vendors

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/experience-manager-cloud-service/content/content-and-comm... 

https://github.com/adobe/aem-core-cif-components

https://github.com/adobe/commerce-cif-graphql-integration-reference 

Adobe Commerce (obviously easier)

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/experience-manager-cloud-service/content/content-and-comm... 

[Jose_Manuel1]

Thank you very much for the info.

It is more or less clear to me the options we have.

However, we need the products to be in AEM, due to technical limitations of external PIM services.
We can't query the REST services on the fly.

Could we still keep the current solution, even though we know it is not the optimal solution?

Regards.

[KimonP · Accepted solution]

@Jose_Manuel1 I think it depends on the customization in place. If you have customized the AEM UI this is already an orange (if not red) flag for AEMaaCS.

Afaik the only commerce integration approach officially supported by Adobe for AEMaacS is CIF (https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/experience-manager-cloud-service/content/content-and-comm...).

Dislcaimer: I obviously do not have the details of what customization/integration setup we are talking about, so apologies for the abstraction level 🙂