How many times have you had a brilliant idea to level up your digital commerce, only to be told "no" by your frustrated developers? Well, with commercetools Composable Commerce, the era of hearing "Nope. Not possible. Nah. No way. Never," and all the other ways of saying "no" is over. Give your developers the ability to say "Sure, no problem" to whatever you ask by giving them the tech they're dying to work with.
For your digital solution in 2023, these are some of the requirements: You need to be able to integrate new technologies as fast as they come up and swivel at a moment's notice to meet some new-fangled customer demand. On top of that, your digital solution must be eye-catching and completely differentiated from your competitors'.
Do these must-haves for a digital solution seem impossible? Then here's a quick diagnosis: You're on a monolithic platform.
Monolithic platforms, with their unwieldy, tightly coupled systems, make it difficult to modify or scale large individual components without affecting the entire system. In other words, what you need, monolithic platforms can't do. You're stuck and the possibilities of what you can accomplish are narrow.
Enter commercetools Composable Commerce. The architecture of this product, being MACH™-based, is the polar opposite of monolithic platforms. It is inherently open and, because of it, the possibilities of what you can do in the eCommerce space are endless. This is why developers love working with commercetools — alongside a bounty of other reasons — and why developers find working with monolithic platforms one giant headache after another.
The struggle is real: Top developer pain points on monoliths
Though there are many challenges IT, engineering and developer teams have to work around when it comes to monoliths, these have been identified as the biggest pain points.
Specialized training: Developers must stay current on the latest advancements in technology in order to remain competitive. This often requires extensive training and certification programs and is costly and time-consuming.
Maintenance: There is a need for constant updates and maintenance of systems. This requires a lot of time, is complicated and tedious, taking IT professionals away from innovation.
Inflexible & unscalable: Monolithic platforms are built as a single entity, which can make it difficult to add new features or make changes to the system without affecting the entire platform. As businesses grow, platform complexity increases, leading to slower response times, system crashes and blocked innovation.
Worker attrition: Monolithic platforms tend to be complex and difficult to work with and developers often spend hours debugging and fixing issues. Often, this leads to frustration and burnout. They can also limit developers' ability to innovate and experiment with new technologies, which can be demotivating for those who are passionate about staying up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry.
The answer to every challenge: commercetools
For every monolithic thorn stuck in the side of a developer, there is an antidote from commercetools.
No need for specialized developers: Our programming language-agnostic, so you aren’t restricted to the expensive training and hiring of specialized developers. Onboarding and training new developers are also much less expensive because there’s no proprietary tech. You also gain access to a larger talent pool of developers.
No maintenance & upgrades: Because commercetools is a multi-tenant and cloud-native SaaS, there are no infrastructure maintenance costs. Plus, our agile releases mean our infrastructure is always being updated with the latest features for better reliability and security. These updates and many new features are included as part of our transparent pricing – which means being hit with substantial upgrade costs every so often is something you can leave in the past.
Flexible & scalable: Businesses can easily customize and extend commercetools to their specific needs and add new features with high availability, effortlessly handling sudden surges in traffic. This flexibility and scalability help businesses adapt quickly to changing market conditions and customer needs, ultimately leading to improved customer experiences and increased revenue.
Happy developers: Developers can boost their productivity and enhance their career longevity by learning new skills and gaining exposure to the hottest new technologies. Plus, the architecture makes developers' jobs easier and more efficient, as they can focus on building and implementing new features rather than dealing with fixing bugs and code.
commercetools customers enjoying their digital freedom
Here are a few examples of companies that have made the change to commercetools and all the freedom-making that switch empowered them to do.
John Lewis & Partners is a brand of high-end department stores located in Great Britain, Ireland and Australia. The company offers a range of consumer products ranging from home & garden to apparel and furniture. Since its early eCommerce days, John Lewis has relied on the legacy platform Oracle ATG. With new consumer demands piling up and the legacy solution accumulating technical debt, the company decided to re-platform johnlewis.com away from Oracle ATG to commercetools — and it certainly paid off. According to the Tech Lead at John Lewis & Partners, it took Oracle ATG days to ingest 325,000 products, whereas it took commercetools 15 minutes.
With more than 2 million mattresses sold and over 645 million USD in sales in the year 2021, Emma Sleep has become one of the fastest-growing and world-leading D2C sleep brands. Its previous platform, Adobe Commerce, could no longer handle the mattress company's growth, so the team migrated its digital system to commercetools due to its inherent scalability. Incredibly, the migration to its first market went live after only four months. Emma's new ecosystem consists of best-of-breed solutions for almost all application areas, including systems for order, content and warehouse management, which can all be combined in an agile and flexible way using commerce APIs.
Express is one of the world’s most renowned fashion brands, specializing in women’s and men’s young adult apparel and accessories for multiple lifestyles. Its former Oracle ATG platform stood in the way of Express' potential growth as the company needed a new commerce architecture to facilitate the development of innovative solutions and adapt to consumer behavior and their changing buying needs. That's where commercetools came in. After replatforming, Express experienced an increase of 400% faster time-to-market per week, so it could easily keep up with new customer demands.
These companies serve as great examples of how commercetools empowers developers to create exciting eCommerce experiences that are flexible, scalable and easy to maintain. With commercetools' flexible APIs and microservices architecture, developers are able to bring their vision to life faster than ever before, saving valuable time and resources while improving the overall customer experience. And as a result, businesses can unleash their developers' creativity and innovation, resulting in eCommerce experiences that exceed expectations and drive success.
Learn everything you need to know about composable commerce in our blog article What is composable commerce and why does it matter? Your questions answered.