What is commercetools and what are its advantages?
commercetools is an e-commerce platform designed to develop Composable Commerce.
Through this platform you will be able to manage your product catalog, manage shopping carts, handle orders, ship products, deliver personalized promotions, and of course, manage your online sales.
Its software architecture is based on MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud Native SaaS, and Headless). This structure will allow you to integrate the best e-commerce technologies, accelerate development times, support high traffic spikes or requests, and have greater customization freedom over the interface design and experience.
Commercetools is not a platform for just any company.
It is a platform for enterprise companies that seek greater customization and flexibility in the architecture of their e-commerce.
However, implementing a tool like commercetools to create a Composable Commerce involves great technical complexity that will require much from your development team. The manufacturer is based in Munich, Germany. Some companies that use this platform are: Audi, AT&T, BMW, Volkswagen Group, Burberry, among others.
To evaluate whether commercetools is the right tool for your company, you must first know its advantages and features.
Advantages and features of commercetools
MACH Architecture
commercetools stands out among other e-commerce platforms due to its MACH architecture. This software structure offers multiple facilities to integrate specialized technologies into your e-commerce and accelerate development processes.
Let's review its acronym to understand what MACH is and what its advantages are. Microservices
Microservices are individual functionalities that are developed, implemented and managed independently without affecting the rest of the system. This means that you can modify a piece of your application without impacting the overall system's functioning.
For example, you could change, remove or modify your payment processor without compromising the total functioning of your e-commerce.
API
It is an intermediary software that allows two applications to send information to each other. In very simple words, it is a tool that allows connecting two applications. APIs allow you to integrate multiple specialized technologies into your e-commerce quickly and simply.
This could allow you to integrate a super powerful search platform like Algolia into your eCommerce, or you could implement a high-end personalization engine like Dynamic Yield, or connect it to a headless CMS like Contentful.
Cloud Native SaaS
Software as a Service that leverages cloud capabilities such as storage, hosting, and elastic scaling of high-availability resources. It also allows for automatic software updates. This way, your technology team can stop worrying about traffic spikes or high demand, as the system automatically increases its capacity to support all user requests. Additionally, your systems team can save multiple hours of manual updates.
Headless
Headless is a structure under which the frontend and backend are separated. Under this architecture, your team will have greater flexibility to customize the experience and interface of your e-commerce.
While in other platforms you have to adapt to a series of predefined templates to design your eCommerce. In a headless platform, you can design the interface of your online store exactly as you want, without any limitations.
Headless also allows you to deliver content to multiple channels such as desktop, mobile, smart TVs, smartwatches, or virtual reality devices, making your online store an omnichannel commerce.
The MACH architecture of commertools will allow you to integrate the best e-commerce technologies, optimize the performance of your application, accelerate development times, create omnichannel experiences, and not depend on a single manufacturer.
Composable Commerce
The MACH architecture of commercetools is key to building a Composable Commerce. Composable Commerce is a software development approach that involves selecting the best e-commerce technologies and unifying them into a single custom application.
Under this architecture, your e-commerce can be built by multiple components. Each component is connectable, scalable, replaceable, and can be continuously improved.
You don't like the search engine of your platform?
You can replace it with a leading search technology like Algolia, a search engine focused on providing the best user experience.
Or if you feel that the personalization of your e-commerce is not the best, you can replace this piece with technology like Dynamic Yield, a personalization engine that learns from your customers' consumption behavior and then shows them products based on their own interests.
The only key piece of your e-commerce platform that you should not change are its commerce capabilities such as: order management, inventory, catalog management, among others.
The other pieces can be changed, replaced or improved.
Catalog Management
Manage all of your product information: name, description, features, price, images or videos. commercetools has an integrated PIM (Product Information Management). PIM is a software to manage a company's product information such as article name, description, features, price, images, or videos. This tool will give you several powerful functionalities to manage all of your product information.
Create products quickly and simply
You can import and export your products quickly and easily. Add products, their features and images.
Create links between entities through references, define and manage multiple product variants to provide a better user experience.
You can also upload your product information in multiple languages.
Distribute images, videos and audio of your products
Organize, centralize and distribute images, videos and audio of your products throughout your e-commerce to tell more complex and interesting stories that connect with your customers.
View and manage your entire catalog from a single panel
You will have access to a panel to view your entire product catalog.Which allows you to search, filter and organize all products for better visualization of your entire inventory.
Create multiple categories for your products
Streamline product management by adding multiple categories, category levels, product-category relationships, and easily filtering them.
Manage all the prices of your productos
Maintain control of prices globally by assigning prices by country, currency or channel.
Unified Shopping Cart
commercetools unifies the shopping cart to manage prices, currencies, discounts, shipping, taxes, and shopping lists.
Through the unified shopping cart of commercetools, you can:
Display different prices based on geographic location
Create discount rules
Allow guest users to purchase
Manage product taxes
Activate subscription plans
Incorporate re-purchasing
Enable shopping lists
Order Management
Order management involves everything from when a customer makes a purchase to when they receive their order.
Visualize all of your orders in one place
commercetools provides you with a dashboard to view all of your online store orders, giving you greater control over delivery logistics.
Manage customer information in one place
Organize your user information in one panel. Get a general overview of your customers, their purchase history, and the status of their orders.
Manage products, prices, and inventory from all of your sales channels
Centralize the inventory of your physical stores and e-commerce. This way, you can provide your customers with product availability and physical store information where they can find the item they want to purchase.
Maintain control over shipping and returns
Successfully deliver the sold products to your customers' homes. Integrate order information into your logistics center. Start measuring the efficiency of product purchase and delivery to reduce shipping costs, reduce delivery times, and increase customer satisfaction.
In addition, create your own return rules. Define how many days the customer has to return the product, which types of products are returnable and which are not, and the process the user must follow to request a return.
Machine Learning
commercetools has a Machine Learning module. Machine Learning is a discipline in the field of Artificial Intelligence that uses algorithms to give computers the ability to identify patterns in massive data and make predictions. This learning allows a system to perform specific tasks autonomously without being programmed.
The AI of commercetools offers multiple functionalities for your e-commerce.
Recommend products to your customers based on their interests
The German platform uses Machine Learning to deliver product recommendations, personalized promotions, and on-demand offers to your customers. These recommendations are based on the past behavior of your user.
The AI analyzes the purchase history, viewed products, and searched products of your user to understand their interests and recommend the best products for them.
Optimizes your team's time and autocompletes product categories
This Artificial Intelligence can predict which category a product belongs to. This automates the assignment of product categories, reduces human error, and ensures that each product is in the most appropriate category.
Improve the quality of your e-commerce data using Artificial Intelligence
The AI detects when there are duplicated data to improve the quality of the data. It also identifies when data is missing and generates recommendations on how to correct it to generate more reliable analytics.
Allow users to search for products in your online store through product photos
commercetools allows users to search for products in your e-commerce through images.This means that if a user found a picture of your product that they like on social networks or Google, but doesn't know the name of the item, they can enter your online store and search for the product to make their purchase.
Or, they could take a picture of a physical product with their cell phone, and then complete their online purchase.
Developer Tools
commercetools offers multiple facilities for the programming team.
Integrates new technologies through APIs
Quickly and easily integrate new technologies into your e-commerce using APIs and GraphQL.
Accelerates development processes with microservices
Add, remove or modify e-commerce features without affecting the rest of the system using microservices. This way your system team can accelerate the launch of new features and get to market faster.
Great flexibility to program your e-commerce
The commercetools platform is language and technology stack agnostic, meaning your team can select the technologies that best suit them.
Quick and simple documentation to save time for your developers
Documentation is key for your developers to understand the technology and start building new features quickly and easily.
With commercetools, your developers can access extensive and open documentation on the tool and its functions.
For which companies is commercetools better?
commercetools is a platform for enterprise companies that aim to deliver the best customer experience, integrate the best technologies in the market, and have a team of capable developers who can build composable architectures.
The German platform stands out among other commerce platforms for its MACH architecture, which allows you to integrate the best class technologies into your online store, creating a Composable Commerce.
Composable Commerce allows you to access the best digital commerce technologies and integrate them into your technology stack. And when you have the best tools, you can deliver the best experience to your customers.
This means that you can integrate the best search engine, the best CMS, the best personalization engine, the best payment processor, etc. into your e-commerce.
