Drupal as a front end for headless Hybris ecommerce – Part 1

Drupal is an open source enterprise content management system we all know and love. Hybris software is a powerful, proprietary ecommerce solution from SAP. Drupal is great at content; Hybris is great at commerce. Combined with headless Hybris, a Drupal front end for commerce is a very compelling solution.

Several months ago we started working with a global luxury retailer in the cosmetics space with a medium SKU count and a considerable monthly transaction total. We were tasked with building a new web front-end experience for the flagship US dotcom and a content spoke and hub model – complete with translation workflow integration – to support the rollout of dozens of international sites for running stores in a variety of different countries.

Drupal was the perfect candidate to stand in front of an enterprise Hybris ecommerce system. Drupal's enterprise content management experience and powerful API-driven backbone make it the perfect solution to integrate with a robust commerce platform like Hybris software.

Using a variety of bidirectional API endpoints, the web front and the Hybris ecommerce backend seamlessly combine to provide a smooth digital experience for the end user. Together these two technologies provide a very compelling enterprise digital commerce experience. Mashups like this project clearly excited people in both communities, as Acquia and Hybris recently announced a formal partnership. The short version: Drupal ? Hybris.

This is great news for every Hybris software user in the market struggling like our client was with a powerful ecommerce solution that lacked the agile CMS power needed to stay relevant in today's fast moving, increasingly mobile market.

Coming up next: In a series of posts our engineering team is going to reveal some of the integrations we built that made this integration possible. Go to Part 2 of the series.