What you’ll learn:
What’s a digital commerce platform?
Gartner® defines digital commerce as “the technology that enables customers to purchase goods and services through an interactive and self-service or assisted experience. The platform provides necessary information for customers to make their buying decisions and uses rules and data to present fully priced orders for payment.”
In addition, a platform can provide out-of-the-box capabilities or APIs to support the following functionalities:
An interactive, self-service commerce experience with storefronts, product browsing, search, promotions, carts, checkout and customer accounts.
Supports full order pricing with product, customer and order discounts.
Includes business tools for merchandising, catalog and content management, user access, promotions and site configuration.
Offers API integration for customer, product, pricing and order data.
Provides frontend experience composition, personalization, testing and optimization.
Handles or integrates with product information, pricing and inventory systems.
Platforms vs. frameworks: What’s the difference?
Frameworks are toolkits and libraries that provide structure for building custom applications, handling repetitive tasks so developers can focus on tailored experiences (e.g., Spring or Vue.js). They require significant developer effort, as most features must be built from scratch.
In contrast, eCommerce platforms offer ready-made foundations with built-in features, APIs and business tools, enabling faster deployment and easier scaling. Simply put, a platform provides the full environment for running applications, while a framework is a set of tools to help developers build them.
The evolution of eCommerce platforms
Traditional eCommerce platforms, popular since the 1990s, offered merchants pre-packaged tools to build and run online shops. These all-in-one suites were monolithic, with tightly coupled components that had to be managed, upgraded and maintained as a single unit. While convenient, this rigidity limited scalability, flexibility and innovation.
As customer expectations evolved, businesses struggled to customize experiences or launch new features without significant effort. This led to the rise of composable commerce — a flexible, component-based approach that enables companies to mix and match best-of-breed solutions or in-house tools. By breaking free from monolithic constraints, composable platforms enable faster innovation, better scalability and more tailored customer experiences.
The future of commerce is more than composable
As commerce continues to evolve, businesses need more than modular architecture: They need a platform built to unify digital and physical experiences, support enterprise scale and harness the power of AI. Composability is “just” the foundation.
In more detail, a future-ready commerce platform must enable four key pillars:
Delivering consistent, connected experiences across storefronts, mobile apps, marketplaces, AI agents for eCommerce and physical locations. It requires a platform with built-in global routing, localization and compliance to scale internationally without complexity.
Whether B2C, B2B, D2C or hybrid models, a unified commerce approach enables omnichannel agility while maintaining operational control and consistency across regions.
Agentic commerce is the next frontier of shopping. Built on autonomous intelligence, real-time orchestration and human-aware oversight, commercetools enables enterprises to leverage agentic commerce smarter and faster.
More than flexibility, an enterprise-grade platform can scale seamlessly across brands, countries, channels and business models, all while maintaining high performance, reliability and robust security at every level, from regional regulations to enterprise-wide policies.
To keep pace with rapidly changing markets, businesses need a platform built for adaptability and accelerated growth, without the delays and risks associated with replatforming.
Future-ready commerce with the commercetools Platform
The commercetools Platform is the behind-the-scenes foundation and infrastructure for:
The presentation layer, also known as the frontend, is where your customers directly interact with your store. It includes all the elements the customer will see when they’re browsing or searching your site (or any other touchpoint) for something they want to buy.
This can be powered by commercetools Frontend, third-party or in-house-built frontend products. In addition, our agentic capabilities enable businesses to be visible and shoppable on GenAI channels through the AI Hub.
The application layer, also known as the backend, provides component-based applications to address eCommerce needs. commercetools B2C, B2B and B2X Commerce products address specific eCommerce requirements; those are extensible per customer needs.
Additionally, custom-built or third-party applications can be used. Moreover, businesses can unify physical and digital commerce with commercetools InStore.
With the Solution Hub, Payment Hub and AI Hub, businesses can seamlessly plug and play best-of-breed solutions through a wide range of integration options — including support for AI agents in eCommerce, AI workflows and third-party analytics.
The capabilities of the commercetools Platform
The commercetools Platform has the following capabilities:
APIs: With a modern commerce platform designed to be API-first with extensive REST and GraphQL APIs, you can connect your frontends and backends within your business ecosystem effortlessly.
Cloud-native: All commerce services are hosted in the cloud, eliminating dependencies on servers for storage, hosting and scaling. Automatic vendor updates and auto-scaling support a seamless commerce experience, even during traffic spikes.
Microservices: A collection of granular services that perform a specific task within an application. Each has its unique code and can be developed, updated, deployed and maintained independently — increasing the agility of your IT teams.
Multi-tenant: As a multi-tenant infrastructure that serves multiple customers, you unlock economies of scale that drive costs down and simplify operations.
Versionless: With software that’s always up-to-date with incremental improvements, you don’t need to worry about maintenance efforts or upgrades.
Flexible data model: Customize the data model to suit your specific needs. Product types and variants can be assigned to multiple categories and there’s no limit to custom product attributes, which can be configured from many different data types.
Extensible: By using serverless functions, you can modify, add and extend virtually any API call commercetools has under its belt.
AI-first architecture: Built on clean, modular APIs and structured commerce data, commercetools provides the foundation AI systems need to consume, process and act on commerce information. This means that product catalogs, inventory and transactions can be safely exposed to AI models without relying on brittle integrations or data wrangling.
Strong developer community: commercetools has a strong developer community and offers extensive documentation, tutorials and resources for developers.
Security: The entire infrastructure, development and processes take full advantage of state-of-the-art cloud functionality, as well as being multi-tenant and running in certified data centers at several locations in Europe, the US and APAC. commercetools is also compliant with ISO/IEC 27001, TISAX and GDPR, among others.
Discover the only future-proof commerce platform
commercetools helps businesses grow revenue, reduce costs, and accelerate both business and engineering velocity. Its modular, API-first architecture lets teams launch new features quickly, adapt to customer needs and optimize operations without the constraints of monolithic platforms.
Trusted by leading brands: Woolworths, Pet Valu, L.L.Bean and BIC, commercetools powers innovative commerce experiences at scale.
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Dasha leads Product Marketing at commercetools. Software engineer by profession but a creative at heart, she found her happy place in marketing. With 15 years of experience in tech, she concurs that “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” Loves problem-solving, big libraries and 80s music.
With over a decade of experience in identity, commerce, and platform strategy, Saurabh Saxena is a seasoned product marketing leader passionate about building future-ready digital ecosystems. At commercetools, he is driving innovation at the intersection of composable commerce and platforms.