challenges and opportunities facing digital commerce

Partner Possibilities Program: the challenges and opportunities facing digital commerce, according to our partners

commercetools author image Stephanie Wittmann
Stephanie Wittmann
Head of Communications & Content, commercetools
Published 21 June 2021

In the fourth and final part of our Partner Possibilities Program series, our partners let us know how collaborating with commercetools has helped them to rise up and meet the obstacles that the commerce industry is currently facing. Plus, they let us in on what they envision the future of commerce will look like with commercetools as their ally.

challenges and opportunities facing digital commerce

What challenges does your industry experience and how does commercetools help?

Kristian Hagset, Chief Growth Officer, Avensia

New technology and channels are popping up and everything is going faster and faster. We believe that breaking up parts, systems and processes into focused areas with quality and having the right glue to connect the dots is the right way to go. Only then can you be able to prioritize and build for scale. A strategy based on a composable and replaceable methodology is what you need.

Michael Sommer, Director Partner Management, Diconium

Some commerce technologies have reached their limit while customers expect personalized experiences across several devices and touchpoints. Additionally, we see that many companies have to reconfigure their GTM tactics (also due to COVID restrictions).

For many of these problems, tech is the answer. commercetools offers an API-first and microservice approach that allows for flexible, scalable and therefore future-proof platforms. A fast enablement to speed-up teams and optimizing delivery capabilities add to the great value of commercetools.

Matt Bradbeer, MACH Business Lead and Client Partner, EPAM

Many organizations want to move to more modern architecture, while maintaining control of their development and roadmap. commercetools is a feature-rich platform that gives customers a great deal of flexibility and control. 

Michal Bartmanski, founder of Enginiety

Formerly dominating commerce platforms fail at delivering modern customer experience, handling mobile and new channels. They are costly and inflexible in development and maintenance. Clearly there is a need for a new approach, which, in our eyes, will be built around composable commerce. Of course, commercetools is one of the drivers of change and a major player in the area. commercetools makes it easier to build neat PWA frontends and integrate other backends, while providing the same enterprise quality as the commerce suites did, but with much more flexibility.

Yogesh Gupta, Lead Consultant, HCL Technologies

As eCommerce is evolving from traditional web stores to highly personalized channels, the demands of retailers and brands are shifting to a more agile approach to commerce that allows them to launch new business models and scale quickly, and not worry about the typical IT issues like integrations, updates and upgrades. commercetools is one of the very few, infact only commerce platform providers, that offers multi-tenant SaaS solution that can be extended flexibly in multiple ways to support custom business requirements. 

Pascal Lagarde, Digital Director Commerce, Valtech

From a business perspective, there are three key developments among the clients and prospects we work with:

  1. Direct to consumer/business – Many brands are looking to build a deeper relationship with their clients. 

  2. Connected Experiences – Users are expecting to be recognized across all touchpoints. they should be able to start a transaction on one touchpoint and complete it somewhere else and they should have the same assortment, information, promotions, etc. independent of the touchpoint they are using.

  3. Marketplaces – Brands are also looking for ways to augment their assortment with additional products from third party sellers. 

These developments demand flexible and agile platforms and commercetools is one of the building blocks we need to create future-proof solutions like these for our clients and their customers.

Is there anything you hope your commercetools partnership will bring for your company in the future?

Robert Queck, Head of Competence Center eCommerce, Adesso

To continue our exchange on market and development visions.

Piotr Maksim, Chief Growth Officer, Divante

Knowledge exchange, innovative approach to projects and educating the market together for shaping a better future.

Christian Grötsch, founder and CEO, dotSource

We look forward to mutual customers who regard the topic of digital transformation as an opportunity for fundamental system and business model innovations. All parties – customers, commercetools and we – benefit most from long-term and sustainable cooperation.

Marc Irish, President, Digital Commerce Solutions, DMI

We think this partnership leads to expanding customer value and business growth. As modern commerce moves into new categories and finds new applications, we’ll be right there. We’re already partnered with commercetools to extend its reach into B2B. That’s a great example for where the relationship will continue to have mutual value.

Matthias Steinforth, founder and CEO, Kernpunkt

In the short run, we want to develop joint solutions and integrations for everything to do with commercetools. That is why we have set up a partner network around commercetools – for example with Algolia, Contentful and Frontastic – that pursues the same vision.

Markus Tillmann, Executive Vice President, Mindcurv

More great joint memories and more great projects that will last long and make a big impact on how businesses all around the globe think about the future of commerce.

If you could only use one word to describe what it means to partner with commercetools, what would it be?

Adesso: Intentionality

Avensia: Success

Divante: Headless

diconium: Collaboration

DMI: Purposeful

dotSource: MACH

Enginiety: Future

EPAM: Fun

eWave*: Complementary

HCL: Success

Kernpunkt: Eyelevel

Lab Digital: MACH

Mindcurv: Soulmates

Valtech: Visionary

Want to know more? Visit our page about the commercetools Partner Possibilities Program if you’re interested in more in-depth details. Get to know the program and make sure to read how the partnerships were forged and the main benefits of the program in our blog series about the Partner Possibilities Program.

* Camille Baumann, Global Chief Client Officer at eWave

commercetools author image Stephanie Wittmann
Stephanie Wittmann
Head of Communications & Content, commercetools

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