Originally published November 2022. Updated November 2026 to add sections for marketers and merchandisers, the Amplience Composable Storefront Starter Kit and current Amplience product names.
Salesforce Composable Storefront is Salesforce’s React-based headless storefront for B2C Commerce, formerly called PWA Kit. On its own, most content changes need a developer. Paired with Amplience CMS and Amplience DAM, marketers and merchandisers manage content, media and campaigns themselves, while the storefront delivers faster pages through APIs.
Key takeaways
Composable Storefront replaces SiteGenesis and SFRA with a faster, API-driven React front end.
Without a CMS, business teams lose control of the storefront. Amplience gives it back.
Marketers create, preview, schedule and localize content without code.
Merchandisers arrange, schedule and personalize content across every page, not just product pages.
The Amplience Composable Storefront Starter Kit and partner accelerators shorten implementation.
What is Composable Storefront?
Before we dive into the benefits, it’s probably a good idea to provide some context by recapping what exactly Salesforce Composable Storefront is, for those that are not familiar. Salesforce Composable Storefront is a frontend solution that replaces Salesforce SiteGenesis and Salesforce SFRA architectures. Composable Storefront was originally released under the name “PWA Kit” and is now Salesforce’s headless storefront for B2C Commerce. It uses React to deliver responsive, app-like experiences for Salesforce customers.
If you were to launch Composable Storefront on Salesforce as a standalone implementation, you’d find that the changes that your marketing and merchandising teams wanted to make to the experience would require development resources or time, resulting in reduced business agility and control over your site. This is where composability and Amplience comes in; by adding Amplience CMS and DAM product capabilities, your whole team get to experience all the benefits of headless - without the headaches. or a wider introduction, read what a headless CMS is.
So what are those benefits?
What are the benefits of Salesforce Composable Storefront and Amplience?
1. Stay in Control
Many headless and composable critics point out that marketers and merchants lose control when a business decides to adopt a headless approach. Changes to the experience that were once simple and fast now require custom code and development resources. This might be true in some instances but this issue can be effectively negated by integrating Amplience into your Salesforce stack. Business users now have Amplience’s mature interface and set of capabilities enabling them to manage content, assets and experiences without the need for custom code and development.
Developers are not removed from the equation entirely, but they can be moved from the critical path of the business teams’ needs and day-to-day requirements to work on other areas of the stack that hold higher value.
2. Performance, Performance, Performance
Composable Storefronts’ modern architecture results in faster and more responsive page load times out of the box. By communicating with APIs directly, your frontend site consumes the backend data using JSON, which is more efficient when used with a modern PWA-based mobile frontend. Older website frameworks like Site Genesis and SFRA use server-side rendering, which is slower to transfer as they’re delivered in larger, whole-page blocks.
Amplience Dynamic Media adds to those gains by serving every image at the right size and in the lightest format each browser supports, from one master asset. Performance improvements directly lead to higher conversion rates and improved search engine rankings. Achieving these performance gains is significantly easier for developers to set up and maintain over SiteGenesis and SFRA stacks.
3.Future-Proof
The composable approach to your Salesforce solution through Composable Storefront enables your business to adapt over time by incorporating new technologies as requirements change. By taking an API-first approach, you also free your application from channel silos, ensuring you’re ready for whatever is next for you and your customers - whether that’s a native app, in-store screens or AI shopping agents. Composable Storefront is future-proof in the sense that it can easily evolve with you over time.
4. Increase Productivity
Enable your marketing and development teams to work smarter, not harder, by doing more with less through better tools. Whether that’s scheduling and launching more campaigns, targeting more segments, creating richer content, using better-guided selling tools, launching into new markets faster or delivering multi-channel experiences, the list is endless and the sky is the limit. By running a number of frontend applications from the same set of headless APIs, your teams can create once and publish everywhere, saving them time and simplifying the orchestration of the customer experience.
5. Reduced Time-to-Market
Another issue critics might point out is that headless implementations typically require extensive resources and time to go live. From our experience helping hundreds of customers, whether on Salesforce or other platforms, this is far from the truth and we’re committed to removing this barrier through a solid ecosystem and partnership model that manifests itself in accelerators, integrations and pre-composed solutions where implementations are measured in weeks or days. Amplience’s own Composable Storefront Starter Kit comes with Amplience components already integrated into Composable Storefront, and system integrator partners offer pre-built accelerators too.
6. Recruit and Retain
By leveraging a React-based Composable Storefront and API-first products such as Amplience, retailers and brands will find themselves able to hire from a much larger talent pool of developers, making recruitment easier and potentially cheaper than proprietary SiteGenesis and SFRA developers. In addition to this, modern interfaces and tools that make the day-to-day lives of employees easier in turn improves engagement, job satisfaction and retention.
Ultimately, all of these benefits help accelerate and contribute towards growing your business through increased team agility and better shopping experiences for your customers.
How does Amplience help marketers on Composable Storefront?
Amplience gives marketers the tools to plan, create and publish content across every page, not just product pages. Using modular content types, they can build landing pages, blog posts and brand pages, and reuse the same models to work faster.
Preview as you build: New content shows in a real-time preview, so marketers see the experience before it goes live.
Schedule campaigns ahead: Slots and editions in Amplience CMS let teams schedule content and campaigns in advance and see everything active in one view.
Localize for every market: Marketers create versions for each language and locale from the same content.
Keep media in one place: Every asset lives in Amplience DAM, with consistent metadata, performance and SEO built in.
How does Amplience help merchandisers on Composable Storefront?
Merchandisers can create, arrange and preview content in Amplience without developer input. Assets are searchable in Amplience DAM, so changing the storefront takes minutes instead of a ticket.
Schedule more than slots: Logos, in-grid tiles, category pages, blog posts and navigation changes can all be scheduled.
Personalize every page: With Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Amplience, merchandisers tailor content, promotions and sorting rules to different customer segments across the site.
How do you get started?
Salesforce customers are moving from SiteGenesis and SFRA to Composable Storefront with Amplience, and Amplience won Salesforce’s 2022 partner award for Best Headless Implementation. See all the options on the Amplience for Salesforce page. If you’d like to learn more about Salesforce Composable Storefront and how Amplience can help you go headless on Salesforce without the headaches, we highly recommend you check out our report “Definitive Guide To Composable Storefront And Headless Salesforce Commerce Cloud”.