In today's fast-paced digital world, online shopping has become a daily activity for millions of people worldwide. With the increasing demand for eCommerce, retailers are looking for platforms that can provide them with flexible, scalable, and reliable solutions to run their businesses.
commercetools is one such platform that has gained a lot of popularity in recent years. In this article, we'll discuss what commercetools is, the benefits of using it, the different types of use cases for commercetools, and how to learn and use it.
Benefits of using commercetools
commercetools is a cloud-based, API-first, and headless eCommerce platform that allows businesses to build customized eCommerce solutions. One of the primary benefits of using commercetools is its flexibility. It is an API-first platform, which means that seamless integrations with other systems are prioritized. This approach makes it easier for businesses to customize their eCommerce solutions as per their specific needs. commercetools also provides a wide range of integrations with other systems and technologies, which makes it easier for businesses to extend their functionality.
Another significant benefit of using commercetools is its scalability. commercetools is a cloud-native platform that can handle large volumes of transactions, making it an ideal choice for businesses of all sizes. Its cloud-based architecture also ensures high availability, which means that businesses can rely on it to provide a stable and consistent experience to their customers.
Types of Use Cases for commercetools
commercetools is a versatile platform that can be used for a variety of use cases. One common use case is building custom eCommerce solutions for businesses. commercetools provides a flexible and customizable platform that can be adapted to a wide range of eCommerce scenarios, including B2C, B2B, and D2C.
commercetools can also be used for building marketplaces, which are becoming increasingly popular. Marketplaces require a flexible and scalable platform that can handle a large number of sellers and products simultaneously and commercetools can provide just that. Its API-first architecture makes it easy to integrate with other systems, such as payment gateways, shipping providers and marketing platforms.
Finally, commercetools can be used for building omnichannel experiences. With the rise of mobile and social commerce, customers expect to be able to shop from multiple channels seamlessly. commercetools provides a platform that can handle multiple channels, including web, mobile, social, and even in-store experiences.
Learning and using commercetools
commercetools is a powerful platform that requires some technical expertise to use. However, commercetools provides a comprehensive set of documentation, developer tools and support to help businesses get started quickly. The platform is also designed to be easy to use for non-technical users, thanks to its flexible and customizable Merchant centre. front-end presentation layer.
To get started with commercetools, businesses can take advantage of the many resources available, including the online documentation, developer community, and training courses. commercetools also provides a sandbox environment that businesses can use to experiment with the platform before going live.
Conclusion
commercetools is a powerful, flexible, and scalable eCommerce platform that can help businesses build customized eCommerce solutions. With its API-first, headless architecture, commercetools provides a wide range of benefits, including flexibility, scalability, and the ability to handle multiple channels. With the right resources and support, businesses can easily learn and use commercetools to build a powerful and effective eCommerce solution. With its architecture that is based on the MACH principles (Microservices, API first, Cloud-native and Headless) it provides a wide range of benefits. Flexibility, scalability and the ability to handle multiple channels out of the box. For these reasons and many more, at Product League we have put commercetools at the heart of our eCommerce solutions. If you’re looking for a powerful and effective eCommerce platform, we can provide the right resources and support to future-proof your eCommerce engine.
Contact us at sales@product-league.com to learn more about our eCommerce offering and what it could mean for your business.
Types of use cases for commercetools
commercetools is a versatile platform that can be used for a variety of use cases. One common use case is building custom eCommerce solutions for businesses. commercetools provides a flexible and customizable platform that can be adapted to a wide range of eCommerce scenarios, including B2C, B2B, and D2C.
commercetools can also be used for building marketplaces, which are becoming increasingly popular. Marketplaces require a flexible and scalable platform that can handle a large number of sellers and products simultaneously and commercetools can provide just that. Its API-first architecture makes it easy to integrate with other systems, such as payment gateways, shipping providers and marketing platforms.
Finally, commercetools can be used for building omnichannel experiences. With the rise of mobile and social commerce, customers expect to be able to shop from multiple channels seamlessly. commercetools provides a platform that can handle multiple channels, including web, mobile, social, and even in-store experiences.
Why headless?
A good way to look at your technology is through the lens of the pace-layered architecture. In this picture below, you can see the level in which systems need change. Your backend (database, product model, pricing model, etc) does not need to change so often, but your frontend experiences need to. They reside in different layers of the architecture. The frontend is therefore a system of innovation, while your backend a system of differentiation. Below a third layer exists still, your systems of record. Think about your ERP system, your PIM system, where you store your data for master data management.
In other words, the pace of change for distinct layers is different. Therefore, you want them to be independent of each other, so you have as little dependencies as possible for the changes you want to make. You don’t want a stable system with a low change rate to slow down your high change rate systems, or your high change rate systems to introduce instability in your stable systems! The aim of separation (decoupling) is therefore speed. When the amount of complexities and dependencies go down, time to market of new features goes up. That time can then be used to provide value quicker to your customers, bring new features live quicker than your competitors, or even fix defects quicker, before they start preventing customers from clicking on that “order now” button…
The road to composable commerce
You know your customers and you know your changing (digital) business. Your company has built up the eCommerce channel over the past years. Maybe as a digital native, delivering your goods out of your garage at first and scaling to multiple warehouses. Maybe as a retailer that became successful with brick-and-mortar shops, knowing the opportunities that were being missed online. This may have set your foot on the road to composable. The road to composable consists of the digital solutions your business has found to the problems of serving your customers in this new channel. There were never right or wrong answers, which is why it is a journey, not a destination. The best solutions to digital problems have evolved over time, both with the growing technical capabilities out there, and with your scaling business.
Build better experiences with composable commerce + low code
In practice, most organizations will choose a combination of the two tactics, trying to buy solutions to “solved” problems (think commercetools for the eCommerce engine, or Contentful as CMS), while investing in custom solutions where the most benefit can be gained. The custom development will either be done in-house, or through partnerships with development firms.
We can also see that most growth in the eCommerce solution market sits between these Buy or Build tactics. On the Buy side, the SaaS solutions are becoming more flexible and more tailored towards composable. This is true for many modern, headless SaaS solutions, but also for the old monoliths, which are moving towards the cloud in an attempt to catch up with younger competitors (although only time will tell if these are viable solutions or just “cloud washing”). One serious downside to these SaaS solutions remains their lack of flexibility. What if you need a custom frontend for a specific business use case? Or an orchestration service for data between a few systems that are not often used, but are crucial to your digital experiences? These use cases are common in an eCommerce landscape, but without investing in custom development, they might die a slow death at the bottom of your backlog.
On the Build side, the platforms that are doing low code are on the rise. Low code aims at making custom development more accessible by lowering the cost. Either fewer developers are needed for the same result, or the same number of developers deliver more. Some eCommerce frontend SaaS's, like commercetools frontend is moving in this direction, allowing for citizen development. Even Salesforce is offering a very limited low-code drag-and-drop eCommerce starter package. There are also pure low-code platforms entering this space.
At Product League we choose for the high-performance low-code platform OutSystems to develop our eCommerce solutions. We chose OutSystems because it embraces the concept of reusability. For example, it allows you to build once and publish it both as a reactive website and a hybrid app. You can build integration modules that allow you to speed up integration delivery, which is increasingly important as your landscape shifts to composable. What it also allows you to do is quickly build multiple frontends for specific backend users. Since eCommerce sits squarely in your business process, the many users that need access to eCommerce systems need specific functionalities, that are not easily served with one generic “backend portal”. With OutSystems we can build both the customer frontends and specific frontends on top of the same backend which cater to the eCommerce managing employees.
The downside of the build approach remains the lack of reusable solutions. You don’t want to rebuild the wheel, so to speak. Unfortunately, you spend the first months rebuilding what SaaS solutions already built before, only to then start your custom work afterward. This is where the exciting concept of Accelerators comes into play. An accelerator aims at kickstarting your custom development with out-of-the-box components. This can leverage the work that has been done before, making a project start at 60% instead of at 0. At Product League we chose this approach since that is exactly the low code mindset as well - keeping reusability in mind when it comes to designing and building every component. When keeping reusability and accelerator-style development in mind, the benefit is that you think early on about where to buy and where to build, incorporating “solved” solutions in your architecture while focusing your development efforts only on the truly differentiating use cases.
A journey, not a destination
Where is your company on the road towards composable? We've been through many peaks, valleys, and potholes in our 3-part blog. Here is a list of the questions we have asked ourselves over the course of this series:
- Is my eCommerce technology meeting the customer's demand, without scaling issues?
- Is my technology stack holding me back?
- Which business problems make my business unique?
- What unique value am I providing customers?
- Am I trying to solve new problems or am I encountering solved problems?
As you answer these questions yourself, we hope that you are leaving this series with a sense of direction and a sense of purpose, to adopt the principles of composable where they make sense and ignore them when they are not (yet) a right fit.
Phase 1; the Monolith
Traditionally, eCommerce was solved with one-stop-shop applications, the so-called monoliths. The business needed a digital channel, so they bought or built a platform that promised to deliver most of the functionalities that were needed. The customization that was unique to your business added some sauce on top and you were good to go. This approach works relatively well for small businesses: Since spending is limited, customization and performance are not the highest priority. If you’re a corner shop bakery and you want to start a digital channel, a relatively cheap off-the-shelf option like Shopify is still your best choice.
Even large companies such as Amazon (Cadabra), Adidas and Nike (Demandware / Salesforce) started out with large monolithic systems. In fact, most companies start out with such a shop (the Magento-, SAP Hybris-, Intershop customers of this world). It is only when the eCommerce channels start growing and scaling, you see the first growth pains appear.
What tends to happen is that the customizations that are layered on top of the system turn into spaghetti code, upgrades of the platform are no longer compatible with your code, release cycles are getting slower, time to market of new features is slowing down and performance worsens. The good news is your eCod
If you are operating your business at scale, you need the best performance and great flexibility to react to customer demand. Luckily, the move towards headless is also what enables a business to scale even further towards composability.