7 reasons why commercetools is the only alternative for composable commerce

Looking for commercetools alternatives? There are none! 7 reasons why you should look no further for composable commerce solutions

Manuela Tchoe
Manuela Tchoe
Senior Content Writer, commercetools
Published 06 June 2024
Estimated reading time minutes

Are you exploring digital commerce solutions but need to figure out how commercetools meets your business needs? Discover how the leading composable commerce platform helps you build and run outstanding shopping experiences with remarkable simplicity, limitless scale and lightning-fast speed. 

7 reasons why commercetools is the only alternative for composable commerce

With the last couple of years bringing a never-ending tsunami of challenges and economic headwinds for businesses big and small, leveraging agility has never been so important. That’s why the unparalleled flexibility of composable commerce continues to gain passionate advocates every day, a technology designed to meet the constant waves of change. At the heart of the composable philosophy is commercetools

Widely recognized as a Leader in digital commerce by leading market analysts Gartner® Magic Quadrant™, IDC MarketSpace and more, commercetools composable commerce platform provides all the capabilities and components to deliver outstanding shopping experiences that delight customers and increase conversion rates. 

Attested by a roster of leading B2C and B2B businesses, such as ACE Southern, Bang & Olufsen, Danone, NBCUniversal, Ulta Beauty and Woolworths, our composable solutions power 25% of the largest 20 brands in Europe’s Fortune 500, including five of the world’s top 10 car manufacturers, including Audi and BMW. Making inroads into new markets, commercetools customers also include Ticketmaster, Bausch + Lomb, PetSmart Inc. and top healthcare and medical institutions including The National Health Service (NHS) in England.

Composable ≠ complexity

Composable commerce arose as a response to constant change, leveraging agility and real-time responsiveness to new market dynamics. Most importantly, a composable approach helps businesses to minimize complexity because it’s easier to:

  • Tap into the power of best-of-breed applications as integrations are plug-and-play. 

  • Leverage low/no-code commerce solutions for business practitioners. 

  • Deploy components incrementally, reducing the risk of large-scale implementation projects as well as accelerating time to value. 

  • Empower developers to scale tech stacks and drive innovation without the burden of proprietary technology as they can work with a tech-agnostic approach. 


As Matt Swan, Technical Product Manager at ACE Southern, pointed out, “We’re already seeing returns on the average order value size 2.5 times what we had previously. And a big part of that is just because we can create a better experience, we can get things out faster. Our team doesn't have to work within the confines of the monolith anymore.”

Learn how commercetools outperforms other digital commerce players

  • Adobe Commerce
  • BigCommerce
  • Oracle Commerce Cloud
  • Salesforce
  • SAP
  • Shopify
  • 7 reasons why you should consider commercetools

    Discover the top seven reasons commercetools is the right partner to help you compose your commerce — and why B2B and B2C companies are increasingly embracing commercetools Composable Commerce

    1. Customize shopping experiences on the fly 

    Tailoring experiences is of immense value in setting a competitive edge for your business. Today’s customers aren’t content with the “sameness” vibe that persists across B2B and B2C experiences; instead, they expect personalized experiences that speak to their needs. 

    The ability to customize experiences starts with the component-based design approach of composability. In essence, your business has the freedom to select best-of-breed components like product catalog, search and payments to meet your unique business needs. That means you can add, replace or drop components at any time — without vendor lock-in. 

    Extensibility is another aspect that helps you leverage the power of customization, as you can expand from commercetools’ out-of-the-box features beyond their initial uses and configurations and build on top of that. As a result, your business remains adaptable over time and always on par with customer expectations. 

    How Cargo Crew customizes experiences - to increase online revenue by 34%

    For instance, the Australian workwear company, Cargo Crew, started to build custom B2B websites dedicated to strategic clients to streamline the complex uniform supply chain process. “We have created scale within our business by being able to quickly launch and customize a web of eCommerce sites across our complex business,” said Paul Rodgers, Co-Founder and Operations Director.

    2. Build seamless omnichannel and phygital journeys

    Phygital strategies have never been so crucial for business success, especially in retail, as shoppers increasingly move across channels before the actual purchase. For example, a shopper finds a product on social media, then jumps to the company’s website for more product information and buys the product in-store. For businesses, the challenge is to erase the boundaries between the physical and digital as much as possible, creating a seamless transition between the two. 

    On a broader scope, frictionless omnichannel experiences across online, mobile and in-store is a winning strategy for businesses. commercetools Composable Commerce is the engine behind successful omnichannel implementations for hundreds of leading businesses, from Sephora and Audi to B2B organizations such as Atlas Copco. By providing a single commerce backend as the single source of truth for your data (customer, product, inventory and more), flexible components enabling seamless integration and orchestration of new channels, from new apps to BOPIS, self-checkout and more, your business can truly unlock the benefits of an omnichannel strategy.

    How Ulta Beauty blends physical and digital commerce

    Ulta Beauty, an American retailer, empowers shoppers to blend physical and digital with an app that becomes the shopping companion within the store. “You walk into the store, you have your app, your loyalty status, you know your points, how many points you can redeem for products, how much you’re going to earn, activate different offers. So, you talk about touching and feeling, but there’s a holistic journey in that,” said Jeff Hamm, President of Digital Experience and Operations.

    3. Create new growth strategies efficiently and cost-effectively

    A composable commerce solution also enables various strategies for growth. Create multiple brands, expand internationally and localize as much as you need, and even try out new business models, whether B2C, B2B and/or D2C

    For instance, your business can run multiple individual brands, locales and business models when all commerce operations are consolidated on the backend while presenting each brand individually on the digital storefront. That means businesses no longer need to manage multiple brands, locales or business models from disparate platforms, slashing costs and boosting synergies.

    How Cimpress leverages multi-brand commerce

    Cimpress, a group that invests in mass customization businesses, such as Vistaprint, customizes commerce capabilities at a platform level, with each brand using the APIs that fit their needs. “We have provided a lot of autonomy to our brands as well to have their own features live, which are brand-specific,” explained Dhaval Shah, Principal Software Engineer.

    4. Improve site speed and performance

    Still today, many companies struggle to scale online capacity automatically to match the increasing number of visitors landing on their websites. The solution: Leverage the infinite scale of cloud-native platforms to navigate Black Friday-like traffic. 

    Cloud-native infrastructure enables you to auto-scale online capacity during sales surges without pre-provisioning or meticulous planning months in advance. Your team is free from the stress and worry during Black Friday or any other seasonal event relevant to your business.

    How SPORT 24 taps into infinite scale for year-round sales surges

    SPORT 24, a prominent sports retail chain headquartered in Denmark, handles numerous online sales peaks connected to the seasonality of every sports category. When the company relied on legacy technology, it struggled to scale as quickly as required, resulting in slow performance and frequent site crashes.

    After migrating to commercetools Composable Commerce, the webshop performs at Usain Bolt-like speed as it can auto-scale eCommerce capacity to handle a high influx of customers.

    5. Reduce costs

    commercetools Composable Commerce is a cost-effective choice that helps you reduce costs in several ways: 

    • With best-of-breed solutions, you can add, subtract or swap components easily, so you pay for only what you need and thus, reducing overhead costs. 

    • You can say goodbye to upgrades and maintenance costs with a versionless, cloud-native and multi-tenant infrastructure, allowing you to scale operations more efficiently. With commercetools, you can adjust to changes in demand without significant investment in new infrastructure or licenses.

    • Traditional commerce platforms often require extensive customization to meet specific business requirements. Composable commerce, on the other hand, offers greater flexibility out of the box, reducing the need for costly customizations.

    How APG & Co. reduced technology operating costs by 35%

    commercetools enabled APG & Co. to significantly reduce its technology expenses while improving operational efficiencies. By simplifying the tech stack and carefully selecting vendors, the company achieved up to a 35% reduction in technology operating costs.

    “Development on a legacy platform was costly and unnecessarily time-consuming,” said Carina Ton Micheal, Group Head of Technology. “This hindered our ability to experiment or adapt quickly to consumers' behaviors.”

    6. Boost productivity for developers and business users 

    Enable your tech team to work with the most modern and open technologies to develop their careers with a tech-agnostic approach. Contrary to many proprietary, walled garden systems, no certifications are required, so developers can code in their preferred language with composable commerce powered by commercetools. 

    Business users, such as marketers and content managers, can also get their job done easier and faster with no-code tools provided by commercetools: Merchant Center, our business tooling to manage all things commerce in the backend, and Frontend Studio for companies using commercetools Frontend. 

    How CHRONEXT increased developer productivity by 80%

    With commercetools Composable Commerce and Frontend, the global platform for buying and selling luxury watches CHRONEXT enabled technical and business teams to leverage commercetools’ developer and business tooling effectively, achieving higher internal efficiencies. As a result, developer productivity increased by 80%.

    According to Emanuel Schleussinger, CTO, “It would have taken us years to build a solution like this ourselves.”

    7. Accelerate time to value for your composable implementation 

    A short time to value allows commerce businesses to adjust to market changes, implement new features, and address immediate customer or business needs. With commercetools, you can accelerate the implementation of your composable project in various ways, ... from incremental rollouts to utilizing accelerators and pre-composed solutions such as commercetools Foundry. 

    commercetools Foundry brings together all the components you need to build and run outstanding purchasing experiences as a pre-composed solution. By combining the power of commercetools products, best practices, easy integrations, expert services, store launchpads and more, commercetools Foundry gives you all the components to create and launch your commerce store with unmatched simplicity and a faster time to market. 

    commercetools Foundry provides blueprints for B2C retail and B2B manufacturing.  

    Leading businesses that implemented composable commerce in record time

    WThe manufacturer of high-end consumer electronics Bang & Olufsen created a website prototype in six weeks and launched a site with an integrated global shop in 10 weeks.

    Meanwhile, the B2B manufacturer and service provider of underground mining and tunneling equipment Normet digitized an extensive product catalog of 65,000 spare parts in only 4.5 months.

    Take commercetools for a spin and experience all the benefits with our 60-day free trial. If you prefer to learn more about the world of composable commerce first, download the white paper How to Compose Your Commerce in 2024.

    Manuela Tchoe
    Manuela Tchoe
    Senior Content Writer, commercetools

    Manuela Marques Tchoe is a Content Writer at commercetools. She was a Content and Product Marketing Director at conversational commerce provider tyntec. She has written content in partnership with Facebook, Rakuten Viber and other social media platforms.

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