It’s a wrap! Unveiling the innovative products launched by commercetools in 2023

199 releases and 13,885 deployments in 12 months: What a year! More than numbers, the value of our constant product innovations has brought tremendous benefits to our customers. With the next year just around the corner, here are the commercetools product highlights in 2023. 

At commercetools, we truly practice what we preach: Incremental innovation! Overall, we've released a constant stream of new features and products to continue enhancing customer experiences. In the last 12 months, we delivered 13,885 deployments (that’s 38.04 deployments a day) and 199 releases, from brand-new products like commercetools Checkout and Connect to major feature sets surrounding commercetools Composable Commerce for B2B as well as Frontend.

As the #1 advocates of composable commerce, we are seeing firsthand how this technology enables companies to keep the innovation ball rolling. Before we sprint toward the 2023 finish line, let’s highlight our top innovations across products, features, services and tools.

2023 started with a bang as we delved deeper into B2B commerce! We made a ton of new B2B-specific features available throughout the year to aid manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors in elevating buying experiences for organizations of any size. These features include but are not limited to:

• Business Units: You can reflect sales operations and customers’ organizational structures by mapping business customers and their divisions into the data model with Business Units. Set the appropriate Roles and Permissions, so sellers and business associates can place orders and quotes on behalf of their business units. 

• Quotes: Automate the quoting process to reduce manual labor and overhead costs. With the flexible and extensible Quotes API, businesses can model and reflect existing sales and quoting processes, including quote generation, negotiation and acceptance. 

• Buyer Approval Flows: Leverage granular permissions settings in combination with Buyer Approval Flows to help customers implement purchasing checks and balances to ensure authorized purchases based on specific criteria (i.e., order total and shipping costs). 

• Purchase Order Support: Enable your business customers to pay via Purchase Order and keep track of it in their systems of record, e.g., ERP, CRM and accounting systems. Purchase Order numbers flow throughout the B2B offering, including Quotes.

To help our growing B2B customers create and elevate their buying experiences even faster, commercetools Frontend is committed to delivering B2B-specific value with templates and components that match the commercetools Composable Commerce for B2B functionality, so frontend developers can deliver stunning digital storefronts at speed. Simultaneously, we have worked with our partner ecosystem to develop B2B-specific accelerators to speed up time-to- market and ROI across multiple use cases for industrial and CPG manufacturers.  

All of this action hasn’t gone unnoticed by the market: commercetools has broken the record in the 2023 Paradigm B2B Combine with 14 gold medals across enterprise and mid-market. Plus, with B2B firms of all sizes adopting composable commerce, such as Tamron Europe, ACE Southern, Normet and so many others, it’s becoming clearer for the market that implementing composable can be achieved quickly, with a modest investment and small, lean teams.  

May marked the launch of our dedicated solution to the Chinese market to help merchants navigate the complex and disparate multichannel environment in the Far East country. commercetools Composable Commerce for China is a product unlike any other currently available in the market! 

Not only it delivers the same robust functionality and features provided by commercetools while also addressing China’s stringent governmental requirements, but it also leverages the unique shopping behaviors and preferred buying processes of its consumers.

As if a dedicated product for the Chinese market wasn’t enough in May, we also launched commercetools Checkout to provide merchants with a faster, easier and lower-risk way to implement a scalable checkout experience within days. The product introduces more opportunities for businesses to make every touchpoint a sales opportunity, such as turning regular packaging into content inspiration or enabling customers to instantly buy tickets for events by using QR codes on seats for instant conversions. 

To implement checkout functionality with ease, merchants can take advantage of the growing options of pre-built integrations with recognized PSPs (payment service providers), like Adyen and Worldpay. Recently, this product also added PayPal as a payment method. In addition, we have recently developed an invoice payment connector that lets you automate an invoice payment process, which is especially relevant for shoppers who want to pay via bank transfer or use Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL).     

Moreover, our Checkout UI functionality has become even more flexible and customizable as businesses have more options to tailor the styling of a checkout page, such as fonts and colors. It’s also possible to adapt labels of all the fields and have the option to set address validation rules, which is important to increase/decrease the level of customer information needed, configure fields as optional, and more. 

To make a composable journey even easier, we launched Premium Support, a solution that provides elevated services and specialized guidance for commercetools implementations. 

This offering combines personalized guidance from an assigned Customer Success Engineer throughout your commercetools journey, priority incident response and an industry-leading 99.99% core uptime SLA for all commercetools products. That way, enterprises of all sizes (and their supporting partners) can deploy a commercetools portfolio of next-generation commerce products to provide outstanding, mission-critical experiences to their customers.

Creating stunning digital storefronts at speed is becoming ever more important for businesses. That’s why we improved and enhanced commercetools Frontend, a best-in-class FEaaS (frontend-as-as-service) solution, so businesses can deliver frontends that delight customers without sacrificing time-to-market. Here are the most interesting enhancements for this product: 

• Updated Page Builder: Enjoy better usability in the page builder with simpler, time-saving actions that you can complete without switching between different screens. 

• Collaboration in the Studio: Collaborate with teams using Frontend Studio easier and faster. Now, you can post comments, tag your colleagues in comments and assign users to review tasks. 

• TypeScript-based software development kit (SDK): Develop custom, backend-agnostic and backward-compatible integrations faster and with more flexibility with commercetools Frontend SDK. 

• Out-of-the-box integrations: commercetools Frontend comes with out-of-the-box integrations to reduce development effort when integrating your commercetools Frontend project with third-party services, including Adyen for payments, Bloomreach for content delivery, Contentful and Contentstack for CMS, Dynamic Yield for product recommendations, and many more. 

• Pre-installed templates: Leverage frontend templates with pre-installed components and integrations matched to the needs of B2B and B2C businesses. Frontend developers can tap into over a hundred UX/UI best practices to build new storefronts with a faster time-to-market.

From B2B customers like Loomstate to retailers like APG & Co., commercetools Frontend is delighting users by achieving the perfect balance of performance, speed, flexibility and customization.   

September arrived with a promise: Make it easier to instantly add new components, allowing businesses to accelerate new features to market. In a nutshell, commercetools Connect enables merchants to launch new integrations of best-of-breed components like marketing automation, AI-powered search and campaign management.

You can integrate with a wide range of pre-built connectors from partners Bloomreach, Fluent Commerce, Klaviyo, Talon.One and more. With three types of connectors  — pre-built, enhanced and fully custom — businesses can reduce integration efforts by 60% while balancing speed and customization to meet business needs. 

To help leading brands and retailers continually expand, improve agility and deliver the best digital experience for their customers, we continually invest in delivering the capabilities needed to support use cases of today and tomorrow. Our goal is to empower every user to get maximum value from their commerce solution.

As a way to streamline commerce operations for our customers, we revamped the Merchant Center redesign. As the day-to-day admin tool for many customers, our breadth of UX/UI improvements to our Merchant Center includes a new contemporary look, clearer visual hierarchy and improved readability.

No matter the number of products or variations of products, our highly flexible product catalog helps brands and retailers manage products more efficiently while delivering an exceptional product discovery experience for their customers. Such enhancements encompass the ability to select multiple shipping methods and shipping addresses, add countries to stores, and manage individual assortments for different sales channels through product selections.

With developers as some of the key users that bring a unique shopping experience to life, we invested in a series of SDK enhancements across Java, DotNET Core and TypeScript including Java SDK: OpenTelemetry specification support (Java SDK), New Relic Support (DotNET Core SDK), and more to help developers work smarter and faster.

We know commerce isn’t going to stop evolving, so we’ll continue to innovate to ensure your business can confidently thrive in the future, no matter what comes next. 2023 continually showed our commitment to innovation, and we’re certainly not resting on our laurels. 

We’ll continue bringing innovation to you with new products, enhancements and improvements coming as soon as the fireworks announce the arrival of a new, exciting year. 

Here’s to 2024! 🎉

Do you want to know in detail all the latest innovations and enhancements? Check our release notes in the commercetools Documentation.