If you run SAP Commerce Cloud, you’ve likely heard about the 2028 deadline. SAP is deprecating its JSP-based Commerce Accelerators, and support ends completely by mid-2028. Enterprise teams are already deep in frontend evaluations — SAP Composable Storefront, custom builds, Frontend-as-a-Service platforms like Alokai.

We recently partnered with Alokai and Smith Commerce on a practical guide to navigating exactly this decision: The Guide to SAP CC Modernization covers frontend architecture paths, CMS strategy, migration approaches, and integration considerations in detail.

Coveo works with a large and growing number of SAP Commerce customers across retail, manufacturing, and distribution, so the patterns in this post are drawn from real modernization conversations. This post focuses on one piece of that picture that tends to get addressed too late: search and product discovery.

Planning Around the 2028 Timeline

Internal lead times — procurement, legal, architecture review, implementation — mean that most enterprises need to begin planning in 2026 to execute comfortably before the deadline. That’s not a reason to rush, but it is a reason to start scoping now rather than later.

Search tends to get pushed to phase two for understandable reasons. Sequencing plays a role; frontend first, CMS second, search later. So does the assumption that the existing setup is stable enough to carry forward into a modernized stack. And search can genuinely be harder to evaluate than a frontend framework or a CMS, because the differences between solutions aren’t always visible until you’re running real traffic through them.

What’s worth keeping in mind is that search and discovery have a direct impact on commercial performance. Site search users convert at two to three times the rate of non-searchers, and listing pages account for a significant share of total ecommerce traffic. Including search in the initial scoping conversation, even if implementation comes later, tends to produce better outcomes than retrofitting it after the rest of the stack is live.

Shopper Behavior Has Already Moved

Exposure to tools like ChatGPT has conditioned both B2C shoppers and B2B buyers to expect search that handles natural language, tolerates typos, and understands intent embedded within a query. When someone types “jacket under 200 euros for hiking,” they expect all three constraints reflected in the results simultaneously. When a B2B buyer searches a partial part number or uses an informal product description, they expect the engine to resolve it without requiring an exact match.

This shift is already happening. Coveo’s own data, drawn from anonymized and aggregated search activity across customers in EMEA, North America, and APAC, shows that queries longer than five words have increased by approximately 10% since the launch of ChatGPT. The majority of queries are still short and broad — around 65% are two words or fewer — but the trend toward conversational, intent-driven search is accelerating across both retail and B2B contexts. Brands that invest now in search infrastructure capable of handling this evolution will be better positioned to capture the upside as it continues.

SAP’s Native Search Options and Where They Fit

SAP Commerce Cloud includes two search options suited to different organizational needs. Search Service provides foundational keyword search with segment-based personalization and manual merchandising controls — a strong baseline for organizations with focused catalog requirements where relevance can be managed by the merchandising team. Intelligent Search, SAP’s paid enhancement, introduces machine learning and moves toward more individualized personalization, a meaningful step up for teams that need greater tailoring without adding an external vendor to the stack.

Both are well-suited to organizations whose search requirements align with their capabilities. The question every enterprise should ask during modernization is an honest one: will those requirements hold steady over the next five to seven years, or will catalog complexity, traffic volume, and evolving shopper expectations outpace what the current setup can support?

Where Coveo Fits

For organizations where catalog complexity, multi-market scale, or commercial ambition calls for a higher level of capability, Coveo is built to extend the SAP Commerce foundation. Coveo is the only SAP-endorsed app for search and product discovery, delivered as a native SAP Commerce extension integrated directly with the Commerce data model, event system, and Back Office.

SAP Commerce Cloud continues to own the commerce backbone with pricing logic, inventory, tax, and checkout. Coveo handles the discovery layer on top of it, using semantic search to match shopper intent rather than strings, across both products and content in a single unified index. This means natural language queries, typo tolerance, and constraint-aware results without ongoing manual synonym management. A Business KPI Optimization layer lets merchandising teams tune product ranking toward commercial goals,  such as revenue per visit or margin,  without sacrificing the shopper relevance that drives those results in the first place.

Beyond the search bar, the same unified index powers listing pages, recommendations, and conversational product discovery. Rather than adding a chatbot alongside existing search which typically creates duplicate discovery paths and conflicting ranking logic, Coveo makes the search interface itself conversational. Answers and product suggestions are grounded in the actual catalog and content index, not generated speculatively, so shoppers can explore, compare, and navigate through natural dialogue without the experience breaking down at the edges.

Get Search Into the Plan Early

The phased migration approach,  running a modern frontend alongside the legacy SAP instance and validating KPIs before expanding traffic, works best when search is scoped in from the start. The metrics that define a successful migration, conversion rate, revenue per visit, search result consistency, are measuring a complete experience. If discovery is deferred, those numbers are only telling you part of the story.

The 2028 deadline gives every SAP Commerce customer a defined moment to ask not just “what frontend do we need?” but “what does our complete commerce experience need to look like over the next five to seven years?” For teams running complex catalogs across multiple markets, brands, and channels, where discovery is a primary commercial lever, that question is worth answering before the migration plan is finalized — not after the new storefront is already live.