With commercetools, you are given limitless possibilities to customize a commerce solution that precisely fits your unique business needs and is flexible enough to support your evolving business strategies. This is possible due to the myriad of extensions and integrations that can be easily incorporated into your commerce platform, many of which are available on our Integrations Marketplace.
What are integrations and extensions? How are they useful to you? And where does the commercetools Integrations Marketplace fit into all of this? Read on to explore the various ways you can customize and extend the functionality on the commercetools platform, what’s available on the Integrations Marketplace and discover which solutions are the right match for your business.
What are integrations?
Integrations connect your software to third-party applications so they can share information with each other. Built on APIs, integrations connect different pieces of software used within your business ecosystem, so everything works together. Integrations come in many forms, from frontend interfaces and CMS solutions to payment services software.
Thanks to the “headless” nature of commercetools, you can put together integrations designed for the modern web and have them work with one another to fit your business needs – so leave your worries about compatibility behind since they just work. After all, being able to pick and choose the best technology components for your specific industry or profile of shoppers can make their experience more personal and relevant – this is composable commerce.
What are extensions?
Extensions are achieved by incorporating solutions that run externally from the commercetools platform. There are several types of extensions: custom microservices you build yourself, commercial solutions you’ve licensed, open-source projects you want to leverage and, of course, commercetools Integrations Marketplace solutions.
So how can you tell when choosing to extend is the right move? It’s simple: when your use case involves the implementation of complex or detailed rules specific to your business, especially when those rules apply to resources undefined by commercetools, you need to turn to an extension. Extensibility is therefore priceless for many businesses which have such complexity in their use cases or may want to expand on their model in the future. And all sorts of extensions are possible because of the API-based design of commercetools, which allows for a rich ecosystem of loosely coupled solutions to co-exist and interoperate.
The Integration Marketplace
The commercetools Integration Marketplace comprises a library of supported third-party vendors that cover domains like frontends, order management, promotions, search and much more. There are also marketplace tools that can optimize an implementation in areas like release management, price optimization and localization.
With its detailed descriptions, links and demos, the Integration Marketplace makes it effortless to discover both the integrations and extensions you need to build your commerce platform exactly the way you want it. For the ultimate level of compatibility, these integrations and extensions are developed using standardized practices and are quality controlled, so you can be assured that they work smoothly and seamlessly with the commercetools platform.
In addition to the Integration Marketplace, you should take a look at the MACH Alliance. The MACH Alliance presents and advocates for a business ecosystem that uses open and best-of-breed enterprise technology built based on four principles that are: Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS and Headless. The member companies have all adopted a point of view that is similar to and compatible with the strategic foundations of the commercetools platform.
To get a great in-depth look at what integrations and extensions are in terms of building your eCommerce platform, download our how-to guide on Building commercetools Extensions today.