Day 1 of Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit™ closed with commercetools’ Hauke Rahm, the Vice President of Customer Success and Mike Sharp, our Chief Product Officer, announcing the recipients of the commercetools 2024 Customer Awards. As this was our first major event (and the first industry event dedicated to composable commerce), it was also our first time honoring our customers for taking a leap of faith with us into the brave new world of composability. Our co-founder and CEO, Dirk Hoerig, still remembers how difficult it was to get that first customer to sign on to the company’s original “headless commerce” product. He says he got about 100 “No, thank you’s” before REWE became our first enterprise customer (and today one of our main shareholders). Today, there are over 500+ customers on our roster and we’re grateful for every single one.
Here, we present the 2024 winners along with a glimpse into who they are and why they stood out to us this year.
Best B2B Project: ACE SOUTHERN
What ACE Southern was able to accomplish in 6 months with only one full-time developer is incredible. The company, a leading manufacturer and distributor in the oral surgery space with a specialization in bone grafts, turned to commercetools to modernize their eCommerce experience with goals of improving site performance, driving higher online orders and increasing revenue.
Matt Swan, Technical Product Manager at ACE SOUTHERN, signed up for the commercetools Free Trial and developed a POC to prove the capabilities, value and speed composable could deliver for their business. Ultimately, this sealed the deal for the manufacturer’s leadership.
Less than six months after launching, the company reported a 2.5x larger average order value (AOV) for online purchases. “A big part of that is just because we can create a better experience — we can get things out faster because our team doesn't have to work within the confines of a monolith.”
For us in terms of what's in the future, we’re really doubling down on what we're doing now. So, continuing to pull data, continuing to understand the customer and focusing on the customer experience. I think now more than ever, the customer experience is becoming so central to the selling process that having full ownership end-to-end gives us the flexibility to build exactly the customer experience that we need to build.
TECHNICAL PRODUCT MANAGER, ACE SOUTHERN
Best Healthcare/Pharma Project: Cepheid
A molecular diagnostic company, Cepheid provides PCR lab equipment and testing that enables medical providers to identify and treat diseases early. Due to the complexity of the products and the path to purchase, digital commerce was not top of mind for the company. However, when COVID-19 hit, their customers became desperate to know the status of orders; as a result, the company recognized the need for rapid digital transformation.
Cepheid embarked on its journey in 2021, first providing customers with order status along with greater visibility to get support and access instrument information. Within six months, they were able to offer customers the ability to purchase online — ultimately enabling translations for 14 languages to service their global customer base.
Today, in addition to the storefront, where an average order can be completed as fast as 2 minutes, customers have access to the myCepheid portal, a personalized dashboard where they can quickly access orders and shipment information, make repeat purchases, download invoices, view warranty information and more.
A lot of what we're looking at in the future is really on the awareness and research side as we continue to scale and also cater to new prospective customers. So, creating SEO-optimized content to aid customers in their research process, as well as having online tools and online configurators. On the order tracking side for our existing customers, we would also like to do more greater personalization to provide more cross-sell and upsell opportunities, as well as enable our customers to edit and update their orders.
DIRECTOR OF ECOMMERCE, CEPHEID, DANAHER GROUP
Best Retail Project: John Lewis & Partners
A well-established UK department store brand, John Lewis Partnership started its eCommerce journey in 2001 when they purchased the UK arm of buy.com. In 2013, they implemented an Oracle ATG eCommerce package in 2013. By 2018, it became evident that this legacy system was holding back their growth ambitions. However, with 500,000 active baskets at any time, migration to a new platform was a daunting task.
Thanks to commercetools, the strangler pattern and a “migration controller” service, the company made it happen. Within a year they had reduced technical debt, removed bottlenecks and enabled an omnichannel experience that can continually adapt to change. Fast forward to 2024 — the johnlewis.com website now accounts for well over 50% of the company’s revenue — around £ 2.5 to 3 billion every year.
Today, with our microservices model we have over 40 agile product teams who build and run their own services. Last year, I'm pleased to say we did over 17,000 deployments, which were small opportunities for us to test and learn and experiment. This just gives us much more business agility so we can pivot to our business priorities as required.
PLATFORM & OPERATION MANAGER, JOHN LEWIS PARTNERSHIP
Customer Ambassador of the Year: Interflora Australia
As a membership-based flower delivery network associated with over 58,000 affiliated florists in over 140 countries, it may not seem like Interflora would a good fit for composable commerce. However, the company’s challenges in managing the complexity of order confirmations and delivering the high level of customer service people expect when they’re sending flowers to commemorate an occasion, it’s clear that speed and flexibility are critical.
Interflora UK was the first arm of the organization to launch on commercetools in 2021. After learning of the success, Interflora France was next in 2022, followed by Australia in 2023.
The results have been significant and similar across the board, so all three teams have been incredibly accommodating in their willingness to share their experiences with commercetools and their transformation stories. Interflora Australia has been particularly supportive of participating in co-marketing opportunities as we ramp up our sales efforts in APAC.
When we really got the hood open [on the business] and started looking around at what we needed to do, there were a lot of unique requirements because of the membership model that we had to cater to. It became really obvious at the start that this wasn't just a cloud migration project. It wasn't upgrading a couple of servers, it was a top to bottom kind of overhaul, and not just the commerce systems but also the systems being used within the business as well. That’s why we started looking at composable — and there were a combination of requirements that really made commercetools stand out.
CIO, INTERFLORA AUSTRALIA
Most Innovative Customer: Ticketmaster
Long established as the world’s largest ticket seller, concertgoers across the globe know the name Ticketmaster. Today, its customers want to buy more than just a ticket, though; they want to create an entire experience around the evening or even a whole weekend.
As Jawed Yusufi, Vice President of Upsells & Payments at Ticketmaster, explained to Jen Jones, Chief Marketing Officer at commercetools, it got the company thinking of the ticket in a flywheel. “You get hotels and dining and premium VIP club experiences and things of that nature. That's really what fans are now asking and dying for as they go to their events.”
The problem Ticketmaster faced was that their ticketing platform isn’t built to support the additional capabilities needed to showcase all the experiences they want to offer to customers or allow customers to create these exclusive, custom packages. They’ve turned to commercetools to help them deliver on this vision.
What our platform needs is the flexibility to integrate multiple partners, right? Hotels might have their own inventory system, merchandising company that's selling T-shirts for the artist might have it’s own inventory system, etc. So for us, it's integrating multiple inventory systems and order management as well. Ultimately, we see commercetools as a very important piece of that puzzle.
VICE PRESIDENT OF UPSELLS & PAYMENTS, TICKETMASTER
To explore additional content from the event, including videos and customer testimonials, visit the Elevate — The Global Commerce Summit website. Check back frequently as the page will continually be updated.
Anita J. Temple is the Corporate Journalist at commercetools. She was a fashion editor at Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) and W Magazine before launching a career as a freelance writer and creative producer. She has written content and worked on a wide range of marketing projects for companies including Dreamworks, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Verizon, and Adidas.