As the B2B sector embraces eCommerce to meet the needs of digitally savvy buyers, accelerating the implementation of modern commerce infrastructure has become as vital as ever. To help your B2B organization strike a balance between implementation speed, low risk and early returns on investment, commercetools’ network of B2B-specific accelerators provides an excellent way to kickstart an eCommerce project — and boost digital maturity for your business over time.
Prioritizing fast implementation timelines for eCommerce projects is paramount for B2B organizations to remain competitive in a dynamic marketplace that will see 80% of B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers occurring in digital channels as early as 2025. However, manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors venturing into digital commerce for the first time, or upgrading from legacy to modern commerce infrastructure, often face challenges in delivering eCommerce projects in a timely and cost-effective manner.
This is where B2B-specific accelerators play a vital role. Typically providing a set of tools, frameworks and prebuilt solutions for eCommerce, accelerators for the B2B sector are designed to fast-track and streamline the implementation of your digital commerce solution.
Serving as companions throughout every stage of your eCommerce project, accelerators help you assess your requirements and design a solution tailored to your business. In addition, they assist in developing and deploying your infrastructure, features and integrations, implementing automated testing and maintenance processes, and more.
Accelerators are offered by system integrators (SIs), which are specialized companies that ensure systems or components function cohesively as a unified system. At commercetools, we collaborate with a diverse ecosystem of system integrators and implementation partners across regions and business models. While many of our implementation partners have B2B expertise, a few of our SI partners have taken additional steps to build accelerators leveraging commercetools Composable Commerce for B2B.
This article showcases the value of B2B-specific accelerators and which SI partners currently provide such an offering.
The composition of B2B accelerators
Accelerators help you establish a robust and tailored online presence at speed and scale, reducing the complexity and time-to-market for your project. More than the technical infrastructure delivery of your project, accelerators provide the best practices and methodologies to help your business succeed now and in the long-term future. While each accelerator is unique and might cater to specific regions or B2B segments, commercetools B2B accelerators usually provide five elements:
The underlying infrastructure is based on cloud-native SaaS and serverless architecture, providing the foundation for best-in-class solutions, automation and deployment workflows, an end-to-end testing (E2E) suite, and more. Middleware and API orchestration are often prebuilt and seamlessly integrated as well.
All of our B2B accelerators are fully compliant with MACH® principles, providing prebuilt deployments that can be seamlessly leveraged and scaled on your cloud provider of choice.
Our B2B accelerators provide pre-configured core commerce components that are ready to go, built on top of commercetools Composable Commerce for B2B. This means all advanced B2B features and processes utilize commercetools' comprehensive library of extensible APIs, including Business Units, Quotes, Product Catalogs and more.
Utilizing commercetools’ APIs enables your business to attain a faster time to market as you can realize a wealth of use cases out-of-the-box, from generating quotes with personalized pricing at scale to customizable role-based permissions and approval flows. At the same time, you have the freedom and flexibility to customize functions as your requirements and customer needs evolve, so your business can always adapt without constraints.
B2B accelerators help you deliver stunning digital storefronts in tandem with the commerce engine behind the scenes. Similarly to the backend, accelerators provide prebuilt components developed with common coding frameworks (React, Next, Typescript) in a modular architecture. Moreover, a few accelerators provide pre-built extensions for frontend-as-a-service (FEaaS) solutions, such as commercetools Frontend, which also provides B2B-specific templates and components allowing for frontends to be built faster.
The same principles used in a composable backend are applied to the frontend: You can take advantage of pre-configured building blocks that streamline and accelerate development while having complete freedom to customize digital storefronts according to your business requirements and buyer needs. It means you can spend less time building the basics and focusing on creating truly differentiating features for your buyer experience.
Another advantage of using accelerators is the availability of out-of-the-box integrations to best-of-breed components, such as search, CMS and payments. In a composable environment, all of these integrations adhere to MACH standards, making them plug-and-play. As a result, they can be seamlessly added, replaced or dropped according to your business needs.
In addition to standard commerce components, accelerators will collaborate with your business to integrate your commerce components with critical systems of record like the ERP, CRM, OMS, etc., ensuring smooth data flows throughout the entire online purchasing experience.
Last but certainly not least, accelerators offer pre-defined yet customizable workflows, business processes and wireframes, automated API testing and best practices across multiple implementation projects. That means your business can tap into know-how from experts who have contributed to tens, if not hundreds, of B2B eCommerce solutions. This makes the strategy, implementation and maintenance of your digital footprint much easier and faster to create, adapt and evolve.
Speeding up your eCommerce with commercetools B2B accelerators
As mentioned earlier, we have many SI partners that have B2B implementation expertise. Here, we highlight the system integrators that have built accelerators for B2B, so you can bring your digital commerce solution to life with ease and speed.
Deloitte Digital’s Composable Commerce Accelerator empowers B2B businesses to own omnichannel customer experiences, expedite delivery timelines and stay flexible with multiple content sources. The accelerator leverages composable frameworks and containerized apps (instead of components or APIs) to integrate composable solutions easily into the complete customer journey, creating exceptional user experiences for your customers.
EPAM’s B2B eCommerce Booster enables you to get your B2B eCommerce up and running rapidly. The accelerator is built on commercetools’ extensive set of B2B features, enhancing and extending them to provide greater functionality to align with your existing platforms. This accelerator supports all major cloud platforms and also provides prebuilt extensions for common storefront solutions, including commercetools Frontend.
Mindcurv’s B2Xaccelerator streamlines the integration of top-notch technologies into composable platforms, allowing organizations to kickstart their journey swiftly, mitigate risks and craft exceptional customer experiences. With a variety of out-of-the-box integrations for content, search, payment and more, this accelerator simplifies the composition of best-of-breed technologies for B2C and B2B to deliver an outstanding digital experience to your customers. More than 25 ready-to-use building blocks for complex and unique B2B business models extend the core capabilities of commercetools.
O2 Web’s B2B commercetools accelerator provides mid to large enterprises with a powerful commerce solution to optimize their B2B operations. With a focus on achieving faster time-to-market and increased ROI, these pre-configured components and integrations built on MACH architecture facilitate rapid deployment, scalability and advanced capabilities for managing intricate workflows and extensive product catalogs.
Smith Commerce’s Conduit is an infinitely extensible, fully scalable B2B-focused solution for the commercetools platform. It expedites launch cycles with deployment cycles as short as 60 to 90 days while enhancing functionality throughout the commerce solution’s lifecycle. Conduit comes equipped with pre-built reference integrations, data models and a digital storefront, furnishing the essential IP and framework to streamline the initial development phase by 50% to 75%. As a result, even B2B companies operating complex business models can move from kick-off to go-live in two to three months.
Valantic’s B2BComposer provides a perfect basic setup, including a set of prebuilt B2B features based on the company’s experience with more than 200 B2B commerce projects. In addition, the accelerator comes with a prebuilt storefront solution that is highly customizable, flexible and runs on a state-of-the-art technology stack.
Valtech’s GEAR is a B2B composable commerce accelerator tailored for industrial manufacturers. It includes asset management, aftermarket sales, online assistance, field services, training catalog and service discovery. GEAR seamlessly integrates these services, ensuring a consistent customer journey. It offers a unified experience with single sign-on, enabling self-service access and precise permission assignments within complex customer organization structures. Moreover, Valtech provides industry-specific modules that can be customized to your business needs.
5 benefits powered by commercetools B2B accelerators
Accelerate your commerce journey with unparalleled speed by leveraging a ready-to-go set of features, functions and infrastructure setup that can be swiftly deployed and customized, allowing you to kickstart development within days. Modular business capabilities powered by our accelerators enable you to customize and recompose effortlessly, ensuring that changes are easily incorporable.
By shortening the discovery and preparation phase to a few weeks based on the best practices, recommendations and prebuilt functionalities provided by accelerators, you can launch POCs (proofs of concept) and MVPs (minimum viable products) at a faster pace. This enables you to capture new opportunities, reduce time-to-value and generate ROI quicker.
Accelerators empower B2B businesses to navigate the complexities of eCommerce development with greater efficiency. The use of a well-defined process framework, coupled with pre-established requirements and running code, ensures a swift development phase, minimizing the likelihood of delays and unforeseen challenges, and ultimately contributing to risk reduction.
Additionally, accelerators facilitate rapid and continuous delivery through the implementation of test automation frameworks, enabling companies to identify and address issues early in the development cycle. The modular nature of accelerators allows for customization and recomposition, ensuring adaptability to specific B2B needs while reducing the risks associated with software changes.
With mature software delivery processes that encompass aspects of quality, security and compliance, accelerators set the stage for teams to embark on projects with confidence from day one. That way, teams can focus on innovation rather than grappling with foundational elements.
Accelerators also have ready-to-go documentation so that your team can leverage that knowledge, further enriching internal expertise. In essence, accelerators not only expedite project timelines but also cultivate a knowledgeable and empowered workforce within B2B companies.
Accelerators are built on the expertise of scores of implementations and best practices that help your business not only speed up deployments but also evolve its digital maturity across all crucial aspects: Digital tools, team culture, data and insights, as well as customer experience.
This ensures that companies leveraging accelerators can enhance their digital maturity by adhering to industry best practices from the get-go. In other words, accelerators serve as catalysts for digital transformation, enabling B2B companies to elevate their digital maturity and stay at the forefront of the ever-evolving eCommerce landscape.
At commercetools, we’re ready to assist you in bringing your digital commerce vision to life. To dive deeper into our accelerators and find the right partner for your business, download our B2B Accelerators brochure or get in touch with us.
Anton, with experience in GTM roles on the agency side, is committed to empowering agencies through a productized service approach. At commercetools, he leads the accelerator program, fueling partner success in composable commerce.