2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce: Composable commerce is the way to go and commercetools is a Leader

We’re proud to announce that commercetools has shot up the ranks from Visionary to Leader in Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce.

The commercetools platform is designed from the ground up for creating customer experiences of today and tomorrow. The MACH principles – Microservices support, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless – are at the core of what our modern commerce platform is built on. In another recent report (Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce), Gartner describes how businesses have been retiring their legacy eCommerce suites, on a scale that grows every year, in pursuit of composable commerce. Our platform is, in essence, what composable commerce is supposed to look like and it’s been something our customers have been using for years.

It’s clear why Gartner named commercetools a Leader in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce, and we’re just as excited that Gartner is encouraging the adoption of composable commerce platforms in order for businesses to stay ahead of the curve.

The key strength of composable commerce, as the name suggests, is the ability to pick and choose different capabilities to customize your own commerce experience in a way that fits your business needs perfectly. Here are a few of the benefits:

• Scalability and flexibility break down technology barriers and allow you to shape your business to be easily adaptable to market changes.

• Faster and easier collaboration between your teams allows ideas to be shared more fluid and campaigns implemented faster for business success.

• Make your business look, feel and function on-brand to deliver a shopping experience that’s most desired by your customers and helps capture the most sales.

The flexibility of composable commerce lets you develop and use only the features and functionality that you need, leading to an experience that’s not just leaner and faster than the clunky all-in-one eCommerce suites of the past, but also more fluid and better put together. The commerce suites built for the past had their feature set dictated by the vendor. Any additional functionality had to be developed on top, delivering sub-par results. These tacked-on features stuck out like a sore thumb, slowing down the system and constantly needing bug squashing and fixing as vendor updates would occasionally break them. With composable commerce, the ability to make features look and perform the way you want, and work natively as part of the platform, is an invaluable advantage because it frees you from being limited on what you can do.

To work even faster and deliver an experience that’s far superior, composable commerce lets you seamlessly combine different best-of-breed components, from content management to payment processing. Much like a set of prefabricated building blocks to a house, the modular nature of composable commerce enables you to build and maintain an experience very easily. Businesses on commercetools can increase eCommerce ROI up to three times faster than on other platforms.

With the decoupling of front- and back-ends – known as a Headless Commerce Approach – you can update product data and make behind-the-scenes enhancements to your commerce experience, simultaneously and independently of building and testing a new design engaging customers on your storefront. Adjusting or swapping out one feature for another becomes a straightforward task.

commercetools is all of this, and more. We’ve got so many ways for you to make the platform truly yours including the ability to create your own custom Apps, connect better with other software in your business ecosystem using our API Extensions, and discover best-of-breed solutions from our partner network in our Integration Marketplace.

There are many good reasons why businesses have been rushing to adopt composable commerce, particular this year. With the age of digital transformation came a major increase in the number of devices consumers use, enabling constant connectivity regardless of time or place. This level of connectivity brought about billions in potential sales from online channels, now up for grabs. And on top of all that, online evolved from just laptops and smartphones to a whole slew of new devices – like smart home appliances, voice assistants, AR/VR headsets, in-car displays and digital signages – which spelled trouble for businesses stuck on legacy eCommerce suites from the dot-com era that were never designed to support all these modern touchpoints.

Enter: composable commerce. With a decoupled front- and back-end like we mentioned earlier, it’s possible to cater and manage commerce experiences for all devices and channels, while also seamlessly adding support for new touchpoints of the future. You have a single source of truth for all your commerce needs, from product data to customer information, and you simply have to deploy a new suitable frontend for any new touchpoint.

At the start of 2020, the pandemic spurred a push toward composable commerce because digital became the only way for many businesses to continue sales. However, the sudden onset of change has also left many businesses still using dated suites stuck and slow to react, losing millions amid lockdowns and store closures. Composable commerce has helped the many businesses which had already adopted it prior, our customers included, by allowing them to react swiftly to the wild swing toward a digital-only period of shopping. These businesses already had the groundwork in place to add new channels like curbside pickup, handle increased delivery volume and manage product inventory amid panic buying that evaporated stock of certain items.

The best part of composable commerce is that it’s incredibly easy to pick up, whether you’re looking to build a project from the ground up or migrate from an existing eCommerce suite. The extensive APIs and documentation, support for leading-edge tech like JAMstack and GraphQL, and fully functional 60-day trial that commercetools offers makes it easy for you to find out just how much better your business can be with composable commerce. No credit card required and no strings attached: Get started with our 60-day trial today. 

Citation from Gartner: Hype Cycle for Digital Commerce, 2020 (Source)