commercetools for Builders: From building faster to lowering the barrier of moving to commercetools

The barrier wasn’t only building on commercetools. It was getting there.

Since June, the pace of building on commercetools has accelerated significantly. For starters, commercetools for Builders’ Foundations provided all the skills to turn an idea into a product-ready shop in hours. The Integrations release in August extended that acceleration to the surrounding ecosystem: Payments, tax, order management, PIM, CRM, promotions, search and more.

But building faster answers only addresses half of the objections we hear about complexity, not only for building on commercetools, but also for how to migrate from another vendor to us. And that makes sense, because most enterprises aren’t starting from a blank canvas, as they already run on another commerce system holding years of accumulated product, pricing, customer and order structure. Just as important, they also hold years, if not decades, of processes and workflows built around their existing system. 

So, the question is rarely “Can you build this quickly?”, but “What does it take to get from what we have today to what commercetools can enable?”

That question is exactly where modernization programs stall, and it’s a major reason why a recent Forrester survey found 70% of software decision-makers in B2C and 60% in B2B say they aren’t planning to change their current commerce provider. 

Three things sit behind this inertia:

• The discovery tax. Before anything gets built, somebody has to establish what the original system actually contains and how it maps onto a more modern alternative. That work is slow, manual and dependent on the few people who understand both sides.
• The foundation risk. Set up the project incorrectly, or model the data wrong, and you may not find out until late, when rework is most expensive and the timeline has no slack left.
• The bespoke remainder. Every enterprise has requirements that no template covers: A marketplace model, a quoting process, a homegrown system that isn’t going anywhere. Flexibility is what makes those possible, but it’s also what makes them feel like work.

Each of those reads as a reason to wait. So our continuous releases of skills target all three reasons.

Three skill groups, one continuous path onto commercetools

The new expansion of the commercetools for Builders library represents one path rather than three announcements: 

• Stand the foundation up correctly the first time.
• Connect the systems you actually run.
• Get off the structures you’re on today. 

That middle part is what the expansion is really about. Flexibility has always been the reason to choose commercetools, and it has, unfortunately, also led to implementations being misperceived as hard. 

Skills change the second half without touching the first: The same Sphere platform, same APIs, same certifications, running in the tools your engineers already use — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot and Gemini CLI — on an open SKILL.md standard with a one-command install.

These are the skill groups in more detail: 

Foundations is expanded within the Merchant Center custom app creation. This skill helps to build fast custom workflows and unique business requirements, giving business users a tool shaped around how their business actually works. 

Integrations provide marketplace skills for multi-seller models and custom integration skills, offering a guided path to connect the systems specific to your business, not only the ones everyone happens to have.

Migrations is a key part of any brownfield project, which triggers multiple work streams, answering questions such as these: What would be the data structure of the catalog? Should we keep data on markets where we are no longer present? What would be our system of record for product data enrichment? 

The topic itself is huge and multi-dimensional, so we need to give our customers tools to reduce complexity at each step. This new addition to our skills library offers tooling capabilities you may already use, like the Smart Data Modeler, which proposes product types and attributes from a sample of your catalog in the Merchant Center. 

Long story short,  the new skills carry that thinking into your engineers’ workflow, so business teams and developers converge on one model instead of reconciling two.

Coming soon: More experimentation and innovation with commercetools Labs

Some of the best things our engineers build start with curiosity and evolve into experiments. For example, a discount preview tool for the Merchant Center, an agent managing the inventory, a search configuration app, a marketplace admin, a TikTok integration and many more. We want to open this space of experimentation and innovation to the public. 

commercetools Labs will soon provide that space to work on real problems in an innovative way, and will be open for all sorts of innovations, like AI skills, agents, Merchant Center apps, search and more. Use it as an inspiration or as a foundation — it’s up to you.  

Very soon, you’ll be able to open your AI coding tool and try out your ideas on the platform to run code in an afternoon. It's all MIT-licensed and free to use. 

Stay tuned for the upcoming announcement and discover more innovations with commercetools Labs!  

Make the move fit your business, not the other way around

What to take from this release: The reasons to postpone a migration to commercetools are being removed one at a time, and in the order that a real project meets them, from discovery and foundations to integrations.

Our recommendation is to stop treating migration discovery as a phase to budget and start treating it as an experiment to run. The Smart Data Modeler is your ally in this journey, helping you map a representative slice of your data and put the project set-up and data modeling skills to work on the result. 

Within days, you’ll have a concrete model to react to rather than an estimate to defend — and that’s a much stronger basis for a business case than any vendor’s slide.

commercetools for Builders is free and available through our open documentation and is part of the 60-day free trial path. Explore the library, and stay tuned: Migrations has only just begun, with more skills and news to follow!