Harnessing extensibility: How to elevate your commerce beyond out-of-the-box features and use cases

The ability to extend and customize features within your commerce platform is essential for businesses to adapt and evolve in response to new customer expectations and market dynamics. In this article, let’s explore what extensibility is, the benefits it brings and how commercetools' composable platform helps you extend and customize features with ease.

With 95% of B2C and B2B C-suite executives acknowledging that customer needs are changing faster than their businesses can keep up, how can organizations become adaptable in this dynamic and fast-evolving world? And how can they choose technology solutions that empower them to thrive amidst this rapid evolution? 

We at commercetools have showcased multiple times how the inherent flexibility of composable commerce helps businesses become more agile and adaptable to meet the Holy Grail of customer expectations. But there is a crucial aspect of composable commerce that has received less attention but is equally vital in addressing this challenge: Extensibility.

So, what’s extensibility? As the name implies, extensibility is a design approach that enables platforms to continuously expand from their out-of-the-box features beyond their initial uses and configurations. In short, it’s possible to use an existing functionality as the foundation and build on top of that, so businesses can meet business needs more easily and quickly. 

Think of extensibility as an expandable toolbox, where you can continually adapt and add new tools without the need to replace the entire box. This adaptability ensures that your toolbox remains versatile and ready to meet a variety of challenges, much like an extensible software system that can seamlessly incorporate new features and capabilities as requirements change.

Platforms that don’t support extensibility force businesses to conform to their predefined structures. The implication is clear: Companies relying on such platforms often find themselves unable to innovate, not due to a lack of willingness to invest in innovation, but rather because of inherent technical limitations. Frequently, attempting to extend functionalities may come at an exorbitant cost to customers.

For instance, these platforms (usually, monolithic legacy platforms advertising an all-in-one solution) often boast their out-of-the-box (OOTB) features but provide limited options for customizing or adding new capabilities efficiently. Users are confined to OOTB features and restricted “platform settings,” leaving little room for innovation. Implementing any novel feature or customizing functions becomes a time-consuming process, discouraging timely updates and impacting the company’s ability to innovate and grow. 

Meeting (and, possibly, exceeding) customer expectations at speed isn’t a tall order when your business relies on an extensible platform. This is because extensibility provides a foundation you can build on top of, so your developers don’t have to start from scratch while not being limited by strict settings. That way, they can tailor functionalities and create unique customer journeys that are fully aligned with business needs.

Achieving this balance helps your business reap the following 6 benefits:  

1. Achieve faster time to market AND time to value: Because your developers don’t have to start from scratch, your business can accelerate development and innovation greatly. 

2. Meet customer expectations today and tomorrow: Extending pre-built functionalities helps your business customize features that meet customer expectations of today and tomorrow. The customer experience should evolve as time goes by, and that’s precisely what an extensible platform enables you to achieve.

3. Boost agility: Extensibility provides the agility needed to respond quickly to market demands. When a new trend emerges or customer preferences shift, an extensible platform allows for swift adjustments without the need for extensive redevelopment. 

4. Enhance developer experience: With extensibility, developers can innovate and create unique solutions without constraints. With access to a robust set of tools and APIs, developers can build custom features that align with specific business requirements.

5. Enhance the experience of business users: Marketers, content managers and other business users can also benefit from extensibility features when integrated with business tooling, such as commercetools’ Merchant Center. By having their business tooling extended to meet specific needs, non-tech users can improve efficiency and productivity. 

6. Avoid large replatforming projects while saving costs: Extensibility avoids the cost and effort associated with rebuilding entire systems, aka replatforming, every couple of years. Because adding or modifying functionalities can be accomplished with ease, your business can benefit from significant cost savings. 

In a nutshell, as the tech landscape evolves, extensibility enables your business to accommodate new technologies and future-proof your commerce platform. As a result, your business remains adaptable over time and always on par with customer expectations. 

At commercetools, extensibility is one of the cornerstones of our composable commerce APIs, empowering businesses to modify, add and extend virtually any API call. That means your developers can extend commercetools’ 500+ APIs to behave according to your business’ specifications.

There are different ways for developers to tap into our extensibility capabilities, from data model and behavior extensibility to custom applications on our Merchant Center (business tooling). Let’s explore each alternative:    

Data model extensibility

Data models represent the underlying structure of your data. While commercetools Composable Commerce APIs provide flexible data models that cover a wide range of use cases out-of-the box, you might want to consider additional fields to better support your use cases, such as Custom Fields. 

Custom Fields, created using the Types API, allow you to customize data models to meet specific requirements. For example, imagine you have a user who wants to sign up for a new customer account on your digital storefront. Your business requires the nationality of the customer to be stored in the customer records. However, the Customer resource in our Composable Commerce APIs does not offer a field for this purpose. 

This is where data model extensibility can help. Using Custom Fields, you can create a new field (e.g., nationalId) to capture the desired information. After you assign the new Custom Field to the Customer resource, you can capture and store the nationality information for each of your customers.

Behavior extensibility 

You can extend the behavior of commercetools Composable Commerce APIs with your business logic and customize how an API behaves. You can extend an API behavior using synchronous or asynchronous methods, which you can decide depending on your use case. 

Say you want to intercept a process and change its outcome depending on certain conditions, such as validating the contents of a cart (e.g., no more than eight beverage crates can be ordered at once) or calculating custom shipping costs. In this synchronous behavior, the caller of the API has to wait for an answer. This can be achieved with API Extensions.

In an asynchronous behavior, the application is aware that some action needs to be taken, but it can execute it in a non-blocking way. For example, if you have a business requirement where a customer cannot buy more than six tickets to a single concert, you can set up an application that checks this requirement. Subscriptions allow you to execute behavior within a short time frame in such a scenario, like sending an order confirmation email or charging a credit card after a delivery has been made. 

Merchant Center 

The Merchant Center is commercetools’ business tooling, so you can manage all products, catalogs and business projects. While this command center provides extensive functionalities, you may still want to extend the Merchant Center functionality for some business-specific requirements. This is where Merchant Center Custom Applications come in, enabling you to extend functionality by developing your UI applications and seamlessly integrating them into the Merchant Center. 

By using Custom Applications, you can extend the functionality of the Composable Commerce APIs and the Merchant Center, tailor to specific business requirements and use cases, and integrate the Composable Commerce APIs and the Merchant Center with external services. 

There’s also now the possibility of extending the Merchant Center with Custom Views without creating a Custom Application. This newly released feature enables you to perform quite a few new use cases, including showing third-party data related to a Composable Commerce entity (like logs, memos or tracking information), and triggering actions related to a Composable Commerce entity (like re-indexing or customer password reset). 

In short, Custom Views help you cater to specific needs on a more granular level and in an in-context way at the Merchant Center. For instance, you can now view shipping progress by connecting to the delivery service APIs in an Order page within the Merchant Center, supporting improved usability and efficiency.  

By leveraging commercetools' extensibility, powered by composable commerce, you can embrace agility while empowering rapid adaptation and innovation in the ever-evolving digital commerce landscape.

Get to know in more detail all the extensibility possibilities offered by commercetools in our comprehensive documentation.