The future of digital commerce is composable and headless, using modular, microservices-based APIs for core commerce capabilities. It helps to unlock the agility, speed and flexibility needed to provide transformative consumer experiences.
The headless architecture based on MACH®, spearheaded by commercetools, can become even better with Google Cloud. Here, you will learn how retailers and CPG brands can modernize digital commerce with a composable solution that brings the best-in-class commerce APIs, data and personalization tools, as well as AI experiences, in one home with Google Cloud.
It’s no wonder that brands and retailers continue to face intense pressure to perform in an increasingly omnichannel environment with rising customer expectations, plus the challenges of unpredictable markets and economic uncertainty. To stay ahead and continue to gain market share, they are focused on improving customer experience across channels and digital touchpoints, being agile to launch new capabilities and lowering the cost of operating their commerce platform. How can you stay ahead in the game to provide an “always on commerce experience” anytime, anywhere and on any channel?
Benefits of combined commercetools and Google Cloud solution
A composable commerce solution from commercetools on Google Cloud is helping brands and retailers deliver personalized and engaging customer experiences that deliver three main benefits:
Reap the benefits of cloud-native and containerized architecture enabling autoscaling to handle peak season sales traffic spikes, such as Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) at a lower cost with the enhanced security, reliability, and high availability of Google Cloud.
Use commercetools’ complete library of commerce APIs available on Google Cloud Marketplace to create a composable commerce solution to modernize your commerce stack and pay only for the APIs you use.
Access to Google Cloud’s advanced data and analytics technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) tools and data analytics capabilities, plus Discovery AI (Retail Search and Recommendations) for personalized experiences.
In this article, we explore how you can take full advantage of Google Cloud’s technology capabilities with commercetools Composable Commerce for modern digital commerce.
Download now: The Composable Commerce Guide with commercetools and Google CloudGetting commerce right, every step of the customer journey
A large number of retailers globally choose Google Cloud as their preferred cloud provider recognizing its global, hyper-scale secured infrastructure and network, openness, and continued innovation in AI, data and analytics technologies. Google Cloud provides industry solutions that help retailers transform and improve their business with a focus on enabling retailers to:
Become customer-centric and data-driven with cutting-edge AI/ML solutions.
Capture digital and omnichannel growth with personalization, discovery and conversational commerce possibilities.
Drive sustainable and efficient operations to run mission-critical workloads.
Modernize store experiences with seamless online-to-offline experiences.
Organizations seeking to modernize their commerce can gain agility and speed by quickly composing commercetools’ capabilities (built as a set of microservices and exposed as APIs), such as product information management (PIM), unified cart and checkout, and extend with cloud services for order analytics, product discovery, and other Marketplace solutions, such as order and fulfillment management.
Illustrated below is a typical composable commerce solution architecture with commercetools as headless backend. The storefront can be either “build your own” progressive web application (PWA) with commercetools Frontend or a storefront of your preference. Additionally, integration with a variety of digital channels, such as mobile, chat or voice, streaming (i.e., live) or social media, and third-party marketplaces are easier with a decoupled headless backend commerce using multiple programming languages (PHP, JS, Java) via SDK tools.
The architecture has the following additional components as building blocks for a complete composable commerce platform on Google Cloud:
PWA web app as storefront runs on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) or Cloud Run and enables launching new experiences quickly with CI/CD services.
Cloud Retail Search, Recommendations AI, Vision Search, new Generative AI-powered Conversation AI to improve and personalize customer and shopping experiences.
Storage (Cloud Storage), Database (Cloud SQL, Cloud Firestore) and edge caching for faster content delivery (Cloud CDN).
Networking (Cloud DNS, Global Load Balancing) and Security (Cloud Armor, WAAP for API Defense and API protection).
Apigee API management orchestrates frontend interactions with the backend APIs and on-premise systems, such as ERP, order management system (OMS) and warehouse management system (WMS). Alternatively, use ISV solutions for OMS, IMS, WMS on Google Cloud Marketplace.
The flexibility of commercetools on Google Cloud enables you to further extend and customize commerce functionalities with Google Cloud services to fully meet your business needs:
Extend and integrate commercetools via Events handled by Pub/Sub.
Inject serverless functions into commercetools using Cloud Functions.
Select the right Google Cloud region for very low latency for custom apps.
Build advanced data analytics using BigQuery predictions, such as propensity to purchase, customer churn, and personalized promotions.
Use Vertex AI for demand forecasting, pricing and promo optimizations.
Integrate Manhattan Omni for API-first inventory and fulfillment functions.
Easily integrate Google Maps Platform to reduce delivery failures and make “checkout” faster with address validation and autocomplete.
Make your products available via Google Merchant Center for product and local inventory listing on Google Shopping and Ads campaigns.
In a nutshell, commercetools and Google Cloud provide ready-to-use commerce building blocks in the cloud, such as product information management (PIM), unified cart and order management. Also, you can combine the API-based headless approach with complete frontend tooling via commercetools Frontend to establish a modern digital commerce presence fast and without friction, and with high availability, reliability and security of Google Cloud.
You can achieve a composable commerce solution powered by commercetools on a global, hyper-scale Google Cloud infrastructure with a best-of-breed approach. Easily extend and customize the functionalities according to your business needs to stay ahead by providing a transformative “always on commerce experience” anytime, anywhere and on any channel.
Tight commercial integration via Google Cloud Marketplace
When purchasing commercetools Composable Commerce on Google Cloud Marketplace, you fast-track procurement and onboarding processes, as Google Cloud is already your merchant of record. As with any SaaS solution purchased through the Google Cloud Marketplace, all spending counts toward your committed contractual Google Cloud spend.
In addition, you can unlock exclusive pricing offers available only on Google Cloud Marketplace and use Google Cloud credits to pay for commercetools purchase and use.
Ready to grow your eCommerce?
Leading retailers and brands like Ulta Beauty and Danone have already made the move to the combined solution by commercetools and Google Cloud — and reaped significant results.
The American beauty retailer can process high-volume dataflows to support its personalization and omnichannel strategies, such as a virtual try-on experience using artificial intelligence, GLAMLab.
We are ready for a holiday season that everyone–even those of us in IT—gets to enjoy. We’re positioned to continuously focus on new, better ways to serve our guests.
IT Architect, Ulta Beauty
At the same time, Danone could expand to D2C (direct-to-consumer) and B2B strategies with this highly flexible and scalable combo solution.
As we were already working with commercetools, we could easily deploy direct-to-consumer solutions by simply adding a cart function to our existing brand websites. And, because commercetools on Google Cloud is able to powerfully scale to meet demand, we didn't have to worry about spikes in traffic causing sites to crash.
Head of Data and Technology, Danone
Just like for Ulta Beauty and Danone, this prize-winning approach (commercetools won the Google Cloud Industry Solution Partner of the Year Award for Retail Digital Growth in 2020 and 2021) is primed to grow your eCommerce with the flexibility, agility and scalability for your business to stay competitive.
Learn more about the combined solution by commercetools and Google Cloud by downloading our white paper.
Ovidiu Cobzaru is a Product Marketing Manager focusing on the infrastructure of commercetools. Previously, Ovi held various marketing and enablement roles at multiple Forbes Top 20 technology companies. Today, he enjoys implementing a mix of technology and marketing initiatives to support a composable commerce future.