Adobe Commerce Optimizer Explained: The Modern Path to Storefront Speed

Introduction: The New Era of Adobe Commerce

What if you could modernize your commerce experience without tearing everything down and building from scratch?

This was the question back in March at Adobe Summit 2025, where the company announced two new additions to its commerce platform: Adobe Commerce Optimizer (ACO) and Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service (ACCS). It’s a major new chapter in Adobe’s approach to enterprise commerce and the announcement has been met with excitement across the industry.

Today, more and more brands are pursuing a shift to SaaS and Composable Commerce. With that shift, there is a significant need for faster and more flexible options that allow for distinctive customer experiences without the complexity of previous legacy platforms. Adobe’s new commerce stack provides a solution with a modern foundation that is built from the ground up with speed, scalability, and innovation in mind.

So What Is Adobe Commerce Optimizer?

ACO is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-powered front-end platform. The tool aims to provide businesses with a path to modernize and innovate their storefronts — without requiring them to rip and replace existing back-end systems. The focus is on the top-of-funnel: content, merchandising, product discovery and site performance.

By taking this approach, Adobe is giving commerce teams the flexibility to fast-track more engaging customer experiences while retaining their existing commerce platform. This is likely to appeal to organizations that want the advantages of a cloud-native storefront, without the business disruption of replatforming everything all at once.

ACO enables a path to customer experience modernization for brands currently on:

• SAP Hybris
• Oracle ATG
• HCL Commerce
• Other legacy and/or custom commerce solutions

In a way, the rise of ACO is reflective of a larger shift we are seeing in the commerce ecosystem. Businesses of all sizes are looking to break down monolithic, slow-to-innovate commerce technology stacks and gain more flexibility, agility, and choice over their front-end capabilities. Retailers want faster innovation cycles, modular architectures that enable piece-by-piece improvements, and the lower operating costs associated with SaaS-first solutions. Adobe is responding to that demand with a new, composable, API-first architecture for modern commerce.

The Role of Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service

ACCS is a complete solution, providing both front-end and back-end services with the operational efficiency gains of a pure SaaS model. It includes all the benefits of ACO for marketers, merchandisers, and customers but with a fully SaaS version of the Adobe Commerce application and the robust feature set brands have come to appreciate from an enterprise solution. Consider ACO as the storefront layer (the showroom-window of your commerce operations). In this analogy, ACCS would be the entire building, including both foundation and framework, that’s engineered to support every back-end operation behind the scenes.

Who ACO Is For: Use Cases and Ideal Scenarios

ACO is designed for enterprise and mid-market brands that want to modernize customer experience without the complexity of a full replatform. It’s a strong fit for organizations that need to improve site speed, streamline content operations, or expand into new markets while continuing to use their existing commerce back end.

ACO is a good fit for:

• Enterprise and mid-market teams running B2C, or hybrid commerce
• Global brands that manage multi-region, multi-site, or multi-brand eCommerce channels
• Businesses in the retail, consumer goods, manufacturing, automotive, and healthcare industries

The organizations described above share a common problem: The need for agility while delivering targeted experiences for different customer segments. Teams want to iterate on experiences more quickly, experiment safely, and enter new markets without breaking what already works. ACO fills that gap by providing marketing and IT teams with a common set of tools to make publishing easier, innovation faster, and to reduce dependency on developers.

Once you understand who ACO is designed for, it’s worth exploring what’s under the hood.

Core Components of ACO

ACO is made up of several individual components that work together to deliver enhanced speed, scalability, and flexibility:

Adobe Commerce Storefront
The Commerce Storefront is a pre-built, customizable storefront layer that gives teams a turnkey solution for accelerated site launches. It includes core page templates (e.g. homepage, navigation, product listing, product detail) and pre-built UI components for dynamic commerce features (e.g. wishlist, cart, checkout, customer account dashboard) that offer brands, designers, and developers a robust, flexible starting point without needing to begin from scratch. Each storefront is powered by Edge Delivery Services (EDS), Adobe’s modern delivery framework that brings content and code closer to the end user for faster, more responsive experiences.

Catalogue Services
The Catalogue and Channel Data Model serves as a centralized location to store product data, streamlining the management of complex catalogues and digital experiences across channels. It provides rule-based Policies and Channels to control which products and prices appear to customers in different regions or storefronts. It’s built to scale, and designed for even the most complex of product catalogs, including millions of SKUs and product information sourced from a brand's PIM, ERP and other back-end systems.

Product Discovery and Merchandising Tools
ACO also provides intelligent search and product recommendation capabilities that can be trained and configured to learn from the customers’ behaviour.

Live Search:
ACO’s search experience (Live Search) uses machine learning (Adobe Sensei) to continuously refine results based on user behaviour and engagement metrics. Business users can adjust relevance with ranking rules and boosted results through an intuitive interface that provides built-in reporting and success metrics. With AI-driven dynamic faceting and real-time re-ranking, search results adapt to user intent to surface the most relevant products. Merchandisers can configure filters and rules to guide users toward curated product results that balance customer intent and business objectives (e.g. higher profitability, clearing stale inventory). Results can also integrate with Adobe’s analytics and experimentation tools, allowing teams to connect search performance directly to business outcomes.

Product Recommendations:
ACO’s recommendation engine uses Adobe Sensei (machine learning and AI framework) to analyze historical behavioural and real time contextual signals to present products most likely to convert for each visitor. Over time, Adobe Sensei learns from customer actions to predict customer intent and provide increasingly relevant recommendations to help brands increase revenue. Merchandisers are empowered with dashboards and readiness indicators to ensure training data volume is sufficient before turning on new recommendations types.

Content Management with GenAI and Experimentation
Content presentation in ACO is driven by intuitive editing and publishing tools that require no developer intervention. Content marketers have the option to use document-based authoring and Adobe's enterprise CMS interface, Universal Editor. Document-based authoring allows business users to work in familiar tools like Word and Google Docs to draft and publish content directly to pre-built storefront templates and UX components. Universal Editor is a fully featured content editing experience for site administrators that want the ability to build and manage pages using an intuitive WYSIWYG interface that incorporates generative AI and A/B testing tools to accelerate the content creation and optimization process.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)
For asset storage and management ACO incorporates components of Adobe's enterprise DAM capabilities. This feature set allows organizations to manage product images, videos, and other assets in a single place, ensuring they are optimized for storefront presentation across the commerce shopping journey.

Developer Platform
Adobe App Builder provides developers with a central place to extend capabilities and functionality, connect data sources, and integrate with other Adobe Experience Cloud and third-party products to best meet the needs of their organizations. Using App Builder to extend the core Commerce functionality provides brands with plans to scale commerce operations across channels with a decrease in total cost of ownership

All together, these components form a flexible, cloud-native front end that empowers teams to deliver faster, more personalized commerce experiences while maintaining control over the systems that power their business.

Key Benefits of Adobe Commerce Optimizer

• Performance That Converts: Improved site speed performance leads to stronger SEO visibility and higher conversion rates.
• Faster Time to Market: Launch storefronts for additional brands and regions more quickly with pre-built storefront components and flexible content tools.
• AI-Driven Personalization: Adobe Sensei continuously adapts search results and product recommendations based on real user behaviour to deliver more relevant experiences.
• Lower Operational Costs: Automatic SaaS updates reduce the effort required to maintain and manage front-end infrastructure and software.
• Data-Informed Merchandising: Integrated analytics help teams understand what drives customer engagement and adjust strategy with confidence.
• Future-Ready Path: ACO provides a flexible step toward a fully SaaS architecture with Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service (ACCS), when the business is ready.

Next Steps

Are you ready to see how ACO could benefit your organization? ACO provides a route for organizations to bring their commerce experience into a modern era without having to start from scratch.

Northern is an Adobe Gold Partner with a history of success across Adobe Commerce, AEM, and the Experience Cloud. We can work with you to determine your organization’s readiness, find your most impactful quick wins with ACO, and plan a longer-term vision that extends past ACO and fits into your current ecosystem of systems and solutions.

Looking to increase your site speed and performance, streamline your content operations, or architect for a SaaS-ready business? Our team is here to guide you through each step.

Contact us to learn more about ACO’s possibilities for your organization.