Despite acknowledging that digital transformation is a necessity, many business leaders continually put off migrating to a new commerce platform. commercetools recently released The Migration Report, revealing a variety of reasons potential migrators hesitate to green-light projects — concerns about vendor reliability and implementation time were high on the list. By taking advantage of the commercetools free 60-day trial, organizations have the opportunity to test-drive our composable commerce platform to gain confidence in the product’s capabilities and the level of customer support available 24/7. Additionally, it allows them to discover just how quickly they can build an eCommerce POC (proof of concept) that gains leadership buy-in by proving commercetools' value. We realize it sounds too good to be true, however, 80% of our free trial users have successfully done it. Here, we offer up additional information, case studies and best practices to convince you that you can too.
Getting started: The “60 days to POC” checklist
To complete a POC in 60 days, you first have to sign up for a commercetools trial account. It’s completely free of risk, free of charge and free of limitations, plus signing up is easy and only takes seconds to complete.
Next, take some time to familiarize yourself with the fundamentals of commercetools Platform and the tools and resources available to you. Here’s a checklist to help you begin:
1. What commercetools IS:
2. What commercetools IS NOT:
No CMS
No built-in “suite” features
No all-in-one monolith solution
3. Resources available
You’ll also receive a link to our Getting Started Guide, which will lead you through the first steps which include creating a project, importing your own data, or using our pre-loaded B2B or B2C data, and exploring our API catalog. The trial allows you to run your project on the cloud of your choice, so it doesn’t matter if you use Google Cloud, AWS or Microsoft Azure.
Best practices: Achieving success in 60 days
Rosemary Momoh, Solutions Engineer at commercetools, said the best way to ensure success is to identify specific things you want to prove. For example, one free trial user decided on three goals:
(1) Build a minimum viable product (MVP) of a product detail page.
(2) Complete one integration to confirm scalability.
(3) Push out as many products as possible to determine performance capabilities.
Rosemary explained that the user was able to present these to leadership to gain buy-in to migrate to commercetools.
Keep the scope narrow but also make sure to pick goals that will help you best decide if commercetools is the right choice for you.
SOLUTIONS ENGINEER, COMMERCETOOLS
It’s important to make sure the POC addresses both audiences. Rosemary pointed out that tech team members often sign up for the free trial and don’t involve the business side. However, giving business leaders a voice in identifying the goals and the opportunity to experiment with the platform will help them understand how its capabilities can benefit them in their daily jobs. Ultimately, it will make it easier to gain buy-in from leadership.
60 days is ample time to build a POC if you treat it like a real project. That means setting milestones, adhering to deadlines, having regular meetings and maintaining documentation. Rosemary said sometimes users will sign up for the free trial, set up an environment and then not do anything with it for weeks.
Free trial users can call our support team if they have questions or need help getting started. Most of the time building a POC takes hours. Sometimes it can take weeks. If you keep the project as structured as possible, you can build something robust that proves the value of commercetools.
SOLUTIONS ENGINEER, COMMERCETOOLS
Success stories: POCs that translated into customers
After you finish building your POC, you can hit the ground running as soon as you sign a contract to partner up with commercetools. In other words, the trial can be quickly and easily converted into a real project that’s ready to go online right from the start of your contract. This saves you money as no costs are incurred to set up your project pre-contract, and time due to the fact that there is minimal downtime. For example, a global healthcare company recently built a POC for a new website to support an upcoming product launch using the free trial. Once they signed on as a customer, they moved the data over to a live project. The head start enabled them to soft launch an MVP in three months.
Most customers who created a POC using the free trial tell us after signing that it is what won us the deal. One customer, a Latin American eyewear brand, said it was the main factor in their decision-making. “We knew what we needed the tech to do and commercetools Platform was able to do it — and do it very quickly. We had been pretty far down the process with other vendors and each one had a different gap that did not fit our needs. Many of the solutions were too stringent and didn’t offer the flexibility wanted. The trial clearly showed the flexibility of your solution.”
Another customer, a European grocery company, shared that they signed up for the free trial because they needed to deliver a website quickly and wanted to confirm they could make it happen on commercetools. “Building an eCommerce site was a top priority for our executives — and they wanted to launch it fast. We quickly recognized the quality of the APIs and the flexibility of the platform. Everyone agreed it was exactly what we needed.”
Choose commercetools with confidence
While a few other commerce technology vendors offer free trials, users are only given 15 days to experiment with the platform. Building a POC in 15 days on a platform you’re not familiar with isn’t impossible, but unless you can dedicate time and resources solely to working on the project, it’s highly unlikely. commercetools not only gives you a full 60 days, we also make sure you’re set up for success. In some cases, we offer a guided trial experience which provides additional support to users who are willing to partner with commercetools and actively participate in a structured program.
To discover the flexibility, speed and scalability composable commerce can bring to your digital commerce business, sign up for commercetools’ free 60-day trial today.
Ankita is a product marketing professional at commercetools and is passionate about developing value-based product messaging to communicate the vision and value of their products to the market. She has lived and worked in five different countries and navigated roles in the consulting and financial services industry before transiting into eCommerce post MBA.