Looking for commercetools alternatives? 7 reasons why you should look no further for composable commerce solutions

Are you exploring digital commerce solutions but need to figure out how commercetools meets your business needs? Discover why the leading SaaS provider can help you leverage innovation-ready composable commerce solutions to thrive in an environment of constant change.

With the last couple of years bringing a never-ending tsunami of challenges for businesses, preparing for change is the order of the day for companies to thrive. How? By “becoming composable,” advises the market analyst Gartner, as it predicts that “by 2024 the mantra for new SaaS will be ‘composable API-first and API-only,’ relegating traditional SaaS vendors as ‘legacy’.” This means a growing appetite for all things modular, allowing companies to innovate at warp speed with maximum flexibility — especially during times of turbulence. 

At the heart of the composable philosophy is commercetools. As the inventor of headless commerce, commercetools spearheaded the principles of MACH (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless) and founded the MACH Alliance. The company provides the commerce engine behind leading businesses, including Audi, Bang & Olufsen, Promod and Danone, and has been recognized as a Leader in the digital commerce space on Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ and the Forrester Wave™ for B2B, as well as a Strong Performer for B2C.

Hundreds of B2C and B2B businesses had already customized their commerce stacks with commercetools Composable Commerce — long before Gartner coined the term “composable commerce” in 2020. With a best-of-breed approach and an industry-first portfolio strategy, commercetools provides building blocks like cart, order, PIM and promotions independently from one another for maximum flexibility and agility. In addition, with the storefront solution, commercetools Frontend, you have all the tools for your composable journey. 

Yet, you may be reluctant to adopt commercetools due to the perception that this solution is highly complex or suitable only for large businesses. These are erroneous perceptions:

• While composing your own commerce requires more development than a ready-made platform with all commerce features bolted on, the fact that you can switch on commerce features like PIM, orders and payments one at a time drives the complexity and risk down considerably. You can also use specialized partners during your digital transformation. 

• Hundreds of mid-market brands like Trinny London, Trendhim and Bikes.de have successfully implemented composable commerce with commercetools. 

Now that we have busted the main myths surrounding commercetools, discover the top seven reasons commercetools is the right partner to help you compose your commerce — and how you can benefit. 

Select best-of-breed components like PIM, search and payments for your unique business needs and assemble a customized technology stack. Plug, scale and swap components at any moment. With commercetools, you can unlock a truly modular solution to boost innovation while reducing time-to-market and eliminating tech debt — without vendor lock-in. 

For instance, fashion retailer Express accelerated releases every two to three months to multiple releases a week with commercetools Composable Commerce. The American B2B manufacturer of baked goods Dawn Foods maximized flexibility by swapping vendors for its search function, plugging the new component without a hitch.

With API-first and headless commerce, you can decouple the customer-facing presentation layer from your backend operations, enabling changes and updates without disruption. The flexibility of headless lets you create, update, customize and adapt the commerce experiences and stay ahead of market shifts and customers’ expectations. 

Australian mattress retailer Koala has leveraged headless commerce to manage constant change, shifting to a fast-moving mindset as the foundation for adaptability. Mission Linen Supply, a linen rental company, quickly responded to sudden market changes with a B2B online shop, boosting B2B offerings by 200% to adapt to the pandemic. 

A composable commerce solution also enables various strategies for growth. Create multiple brands, expand internationally and localize as much as you need, and even try out new business models, whether B2C, B2B and/or D2C. The food and beverage company Danone has, for instance, developed and deployed storefronts across multiple markets and business models (B2B and D2C) within weeks with composable commerce.

Cloud-native infrastructure enables you to auto-scale online capacity during sales surges without pre-provisioning or meticulous planning months in advance. Your team is free from the stress and worry during Black Friday or any other seasonal event relevant to your business. 

Companies like Ulta Beauty, Danone and BMW Group have leveraged commercetools with Google Cloud, while The Very Group, Volkswagen and Just Eat Takeaway.com are hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

As a multi-tenant infrastructure that serves multiple customers, you unlock economies of scale that drive costs down and simplify operations. Also, commercetools is versionless, so you’re always up-to-date with incremental improvements and don’t need to worry about maintenance efforts or upgrades. The adoption of cloud-native infrastructure also reduces total costs of ownership (TCO) as you pay only for the capacity you use. Lastly, Gartner predicts that companies adopting composable commerce will reduce their IT costs of managing SaaS operations by 50% in 2024. 

With commercetools, Danish retailer Salling Group has reduced operating costs by 75%, while rail company Eurail reportedly reduced maintenance costs dramatically since implementing composable commerce.

Enable your tech team to work with the most modern and open technologies to develop their careers. Contrary to many proprietary, walled garden systems, no certifications are required and developers can code in their preferred language with commercetools. While there are many reasons why Nuts.com chose commercetools to enable this digital transformation, it boils down to the philosophy of building high-quality, stable, maintainable and developer-friendly software. 

Use commercetools’ customizable functions and flexible data models to craft one-of-a-kind customer experiences. For instance, beauty retailer Trinny London tailored the checkout process allowing customers to pick samples matching what they bought, like a shade of eyeshadow that matches the color of a lipstick. 

Harry Rosen, a Canadian luxury menswear retailer, created a seamless transition from online to in-store by connecting its eCommerce discounting engine to their in-store POS system. In addition, Harry Rosen digitized style consultations by replicating the in-store experience with digital laydowns: Advisors pull together digital images of multiple items to create complete looks in the client’s correct size, presented to clients on a personalized webpage. All the individual has to do is click “add to cart” and, when they’re done shopping, hit “checkout.” The company increased orders by 300% and basket value by 1.8%, plus saw a 3x lower return rate. 

Nearly 70% of consumers admit that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online retailer. Page speed and mobile-first indexing have also been vital criteria for search engine optimization (SEO). With commercetools Composable Commerce and Frontend, brands and retailers can deliver fast-loading, reliable, secure shopping. 

CHRONEXT, a luxury watches platform, accelerated site speed performance by 300% across six country storefronts Europe-wide and in Australia, enhanced SEO rankings by 40% and increased conversions by 10% with composable commerce. 

Take the time to inform yourself about commercetools and how we make composable commerce a reality for our customers. Check Why commercetools and our helpful migration resources for Adobe Commerce Cloud, SAP, Oracle and Salesforce.

If you’d like to learn more, just get in touch with us or simply start our 60-day free trial— and start experiencing key benefits without strings attached.