In fact, a business ecosystem made up of a multitude of components that must all work together to drive a business forward. So how does commercetools fit into your business ecosystem and how do we help you develop it? The answer: our Integrations Marketplace. In part 1 of our series, we explained what the Integrations Marketplace is; here you’ll discover how you can exploit it to create your own business ecosystem with a best-of-breed approach.
A business ecosystem is all the parts that comprise your business that allow it to carry out daily processes and grow, usually involved in the delivery of a specific product or service. It is a network that includes everything from marketing and sales to finance and staffing – and of course, digital commerce – although the specific parts of a business ecosystem vary quite a bit from organization to organization.
Think of it like a biological ecosystem; in other words, the idea is that each element within the ecosystem is affected by each other, which creates a continually evolving relationship between each entity. Everything works hand in hand. That’s why it’s not only imperative that your commerce platform is highly functional, but must also be able to function in terms of technical compatibility and performance with the other components that make up your business ecosystem.
Best-of-breed: commercetools as part of your business ecosystem
To get an online commerce experience out, you need at least these three components: a commerce platform, frontend and payment processor. In the old days, these were all lumped together into monolithic platforms, which were inflexible, difficult to customize, couldn’t scale for growth and were slow to respond to changes.
Now, to provide a truly modern commerce experience, companies are realizing that the best approach is composable commerce, meaning that businesses can pick and choose separately which commerce platform, frontend and payment processor, as well as any other component of their online commerce, best suit their requirements.
This way, composable commerce offers every business a selection of best-of-breed commerce components that are all connected – or composed – into a custom application built for specific business needs. How is this possible? With commercetools’ hallmark headless commerce approach, which decouples the backends and frontends and rely on open APIs.
The result is greater flexibility and speed across all touchpoints to provide innovative, highly customized experiences for all end-users. Although this means working with several vendors, in the long-run companies can select the optimal components to fit their business needs and get the best pricing and flexibility by having different vendors to choose from.
How to build an ecosystem with the Integrations Marketplace
Composable commerce gives you the freedom to choose the best vendor for every business aspect of your operations. This is why it’s important to be aware of what components are already on the market. This is where our Integrations Marketplace comes in.
We take all the guesswork out of which third-party integrations and extensions are completely compatible with the commercetools platform. And best of all, they don’t require any customizations or configurations for ease of implementation for smooth development and a seamless solution. We also work closely with each of our partners to assure each of the extensions and integrations are designed with standardized best practices in mind and the highest standards of quality control are met. And our growing network of partners of different sizes that cover a lot of ground – so there’s something for everyone.
In the Integrations Marketplace, you’ll find vendors that will fill out the pieces of your business ecosystem in one place, containing everything from content management to fraud prevention and digital customer experience management systems. The marketplace contains a variety of solutions that provide options for those different needs. Like commercetools, these solutions are world class, scalable and easy to work with. Accordingly, you’ll be able to keep your ecosystem modern while you’re enhancing your commerce experience.
Composable architecture. Composable business ecosystem.
Here at commercetools, along with our MACH partners, we’re trailblazing a new way of thinking. That having a composable, best-of-breed approach isn’t only a great idea for commerce – it is a philosophy that has a place within the entire business network.
With commerce, MACH supports a composable enterprise in which every component is pluggable, scalable, replaceable, and can be continuously improved through agile development to meet evolving business requirements – and the benefits speak for themselves. That’s why more and more businesses are adopting this approach. So if composing a commerce solution is like snapping LEGOs into place, why shouldn’t that apply to the entire business ecosystem?
It’s time to not only rethink commerce as being composable, but entire business components. So that your business can continually swap out and plug-in the best solutions for the enterprise – not interconnected approaches that you are stuck with.
If you want an exceptionally easy start in as little as two weeks (not months!), look into the commercetools Accelerator Program. It combines our leading API-based modern enterprise commerce platform with pre-built frontends from our partners to power a greater commerce experience. Get started today.