Are you looking for a Quick and Effective implementation of your e-commerce store?
Written by Shamshad Azam
Manager - Business Analyst at Royal Cyber
With a rapidly changing e-commerce market, businesses and brands prefer to have agile and flexible e-commerce platforms that can suit their purpose in our ever-changing world. This article explains about commercetools platform and why you should choose it over other platforms.
Commercetools
Commercetools is a headless Commerce Platform. It provides the building blocks for the new digital commerce age. The API-First approach helps businesses create brand value by enabling their commerce teams to design unique and more engaging digital commerce experiences. Its microservices-based architecture offers a wide range of integrations and reduces the development time required. A commercetools project can be implemented in as little as 6-8 weeks.
- Gartner refers to commercetools as visionary
- Forrester refers to them as a commerce platform for those who want to innovate on commerce.
“Commercetools is latest in commerce tech, but only for the companies who are digitally mature. In Q4 2019, Berlin-based commercetools evolved out from its parent, REWE, and was acquired by Insight Partners to boost growth for this truly cloud-native vendor. It offers cloud-native eCommerce APIs for large enterprises as an alternative to a custom build. First launched in 2013, commercetools was built from the ground up to provide developer-friendly APIs backed by cloudnative microservices in a multitenant architecture. This setup gives it the distinct advantage of being versionless and highly elastic at unprecedented cost-efficiency. Its product strategy and roadmap are above par compared with others in this evaluation. It provides its customers with a commerce platform to built revolutionary commerce experiences at a much lower cost and time it would take to build in-house. The vendor delivers above-par platform architecture and promotions but lags in business intelligence and workflow. This solution intentionally avoids investment in areas like workflow, instead deferring to a client’s enterprise business process management system. This means commercetools isn’t right for clients who need an all-in-one packaged offering. Customers told us they like not having scaling restrictions and not being on an upgrade cycle but would welcome improvements in the availability of out-of-the-box integrations. Commercetools is best for digitally advanced companies with an API-first approach to digital and a strong, modern, agile developer culture”. ~Forrester
What is Headless Commerce & how does commercetools Leverages this?
For starters, headless commerce architecture refers to an e-commerce solution with headless content management capabilities. In short, it means a CMS that stores, manages and delivers content without a front-end delivery layer.
The classic technology adoption lifecycle applies to how businesses have been responding and choosing commerce solutions for themselves. E-commerce is now further along the technology adoption cycle than it was a couple of years ago. Innovators and early adopters are in the initial stages of the technology adoption lifecycle are usually more convinced to embrace high-tech solutions. Companies in that category have adopted modern commerce and headless platforms for several years now. It used to be seen as pretty new and coders who knew about the merits of such solutions had to face serious opposition while convincing their team and company to give it a shot.
What we’ve seen lately is that the majority of early-stage companies have also mostly moved into the cloud, modernized many parts of their tech stack and started their move from legacy systems into modern platforms. This is not just for commerce, but for various parts of their business environment. That’s how they managed to overcome the uphill climb!
API-First Approach: When commercetools platform was being developed, the teams always aimed to provide an API that is highly versatile and can be extended to be used in a lot of different scenarios. The API enables a best-of-breed approach, making it easy for 3rd-party applications to be integrated & can be leveraged as the basis for a microservice architecture.
Cloud Infrastructure: With commercetools, both software development and delivery are exclusively cloud-based. The platform is built for high performance and scales automatically to guarantee the highest levels of availability. It is also run in the most secure data centers around the world, so all data and processes are completely safe.
Merchant Center: Businesses need to handle their most critical data and processes efficiently while keeping up with changing market conditions. The commercetools Merchant Center can help you achieve this. Its natural user interface allows you to manage product data, orders, and customer data for all retail channels. Moreover, functions such as configurable forms and batch processing help you to speedily and easily complete your daily tasks.
Dashboard overview
Take advantage of the Merchant Center for a fast, precise and comprehensive overview of your sales by currency across all channels.
- Overview of all sales made during the past day, week and month
- Average order value for your store
- View the top 5 products that bring in the most revenue
- See how many new customers and carts are created
Commercetools Products
commercetools B2C The core commerce platform has functionality for product catalogs, orders, customer profiles, etc. It is built as a cloud-native, headless commerce platform with a highly versatile API at its core.
commercetools B2B This product has business user administration tooling, allowing people to administer their product catalog, promotions/discounts, customer profiles, and orders.
commercetools Marketplace The commercetools platform also provides functionality that allows businesses to make their platform available to 3rd parties. It is available as source code as each implementation is unique. Customers can use this source code as a starting point. All the essential commerce services are delivered through the core commercetools platform.
Success Stories of commercetools
Audi: It is a manufacturer that designs, engineers & distributes luxury cars.
“The Audi Commerce Platform has been built with three core values in its DNA: Speed, Adaptiveness and Effectiveness. With commercetools as the backbone for our platform, we were able to build a scalable, global commerce infrastructure aligned with our values. As a result, we can now leverage new e-commerce business models at Audi in only a few weeks.”
Henning Henningsen, Chief Product Owner Audi Commerce Platform
TROX: It is a leader in the design, manufacturing and distribution of components, devices and systems for room ventilation and air conditioning. In-depth research has made TROX a recognized technology leader in this field for many years.
- Challenge: The software for product configuration in the air electronics industry is exceptionally sophisticated, as both purchase and sales of ventilation systems require a high level of technical know-how. To further complicate TROX’s case, their software also needed to be integrated into a webshop system.
- Solution: The commercetools platform is built natively on APIs and is deployed using flexible microservices. The implementation of the product configuration and ERP processes was easy and seamless.
