commercetools

My main use case for commercetools  is for a raffle platform where people can buy tickets, add them to their cart, pay for them, and then a winner is chosen from those raffle tickets.

The best features commercetools  offers include developer friendliness with many tools available to assist in both development and ideation. The AI Assistant is quite strong and can help with technical questions or architectural questions. There is also the API Playground that you can use to experiment with the data and see what kind of data you are getting back, and the extensibility. The architecture is set up in a way that you can connect to cloud platforms, and its system with extensions and subscriptions is a very elegant way of dealing with extensibility.

Out of those features, the AI assistant is what I find myself using most frequently. It has a very good understanding of what commercetools can do and how best practices are implemented. When we started, this AI Assistant was not available yet, and we had to rely on a technical analyst, but we have noticed that when the AI assistant was introduced, you could basically ask all questions there and it has about the same result. When it comes to the most valuable feature, I would say that the extensibility framework that they have set up is the number one feature of using commercetools.

commercetools has positively impacted my organization, especially for developer experience, as it is a very good tool to work with because it almost feels tailored towards developers. They have great APIs and great documentation. For the organization, I would say that the speed of the go-to-market was quite incredible. I remember when we first kicked off the project, we went live in about a month and a half with a full checkout experience with a payment integration, which is quite amazing. Apart from that, the MACH architecture that commercetools has prompts the rest of the organization to see what is possible and see what the future of these kinds of platforms is and hold themselves to a higher standard.

commercetools can be improved in terms of the interface, especially if you have been away from it for quite a while, as it tends to evolve a lot. Documentation that we have written for our developers or for our analysts becomes outdated very quickly. That is a good thing because there are many features being pushed and many changes, but it is not very consistent. Also, while it is part of the API-first strategy, certain features could really do with a UI. Sometimes you have to use an API to get to a feature, whereas a UI could make it more user-friendly. An API always means that a developer has to execute it or somebody who has technical knowledge. With their Merchant Center, they cover a lot of the functionality, but I remember that promotion-wise or voucher-wise, we could only configure certain features via API at that time. I did see that they added an interface for this, but in general, it is in its nature API-first, and that means that sometimes the interface in the Merchant Center lags behind, which is unfortunate if you are used to having full package solutions that have all of the functionality in the interface.

I have been working in my current field since 2012, so that is coming up on 14 years now. I first used commercetools in February 2023.

I cannot share any metrics or numbers around time saved, cost reduction, or any other measurable outcomes my organization saw after adopting commercetools since we started from scratch, so I do not have anything to compare it to. However, the measurable outcome is the fact that we had a very tight deadline and we were able to meet it because of commercetools and the way that the platform is set up. Cost reduction is hard to define, but in terms of time saved in development, I think if we had to do it on a different platform, we would have spent around three to five times the effort.

Regarding governance and security, if you are looking at the AI chat assistant, I did notice that sometimes it feels like it has access to certain internal information, and it was found out that it was hallucinating and offering internal APIs. I would rate commercetools overall at a nine out of ten. I chose a nine out of ten because the approach that they are taking with the API-first strategy is something that needs to be applauded, but it does mean that for business users, it can feel a bit immature or unsure if the feature is really going to be there in the long run. There are often some beta features that are only available via API, and it can give a sketchy feeling when you are implementing a feature that you cannot use via Merchant Center or maybe will be deprecated in the long run.

My main use case for commercetools  is maintaining a website that uses commercetools  as a database. A quick, specific example of how I interact with commercetools in my daily work is that every day I have to check commercetools for a specific client. I check orders, investigate any new bugs, and use commercetools front end for these tasks.

Other than that, I use commercetools API daily. If something is not available through commercetools front end, then I have to use the API directly to maintain something, check orders, check users, or perform other necessary tasks.

The best feature that commercetools offers in my experience is customizability. For every specific entity in commercetools, you can create a custom entity, and under custom entity, you have your own custom fields. Everything is customizable and you can incorporate whatever specific requirements you have. Pretty much everything is doable in commercetools.

Regarding the customization options I mentioned, we have a few enterprise clients that have a lot of custom, unusual features and options that they require, and everything that we have had to implement, we could do it inside of commercetools one way or another. The commercetools documentation is pretty huge and very helpful. For example, we had to implement multi-warehouse for a specific client inside of commercetools and you can create your own custom parcels, custom packages, and custom shipping options. Since everything is customizable, we can implement everything.

One of the great features of commercetools is that you can subscribe to changes for any entity. Inside of commercetools, you can create subscriptions for any entity and any change on that entity. If you have a microservice on a microservice architecture, you can create a new microservice and new event, new service bus, and based on that specific subscription that you create, you can create an event bus, and based on those messages, you can do everything. You can subscribe to only products change, for example, and based on the products change messages, you can implement whatever you need.

commercetools has impacted my organization positively, especially for a specific client if they request scalability. If you want to create something that is infinitely scalable, commercetools is a great way to do that. Since everything is messages and service bus or event-driven architecture, there is no limit on how many orders you can process daily and how far you can go.

We have increased order volume, but that is not only because of commercetools. That is also because of some other things, but after commercetools implementation, we have faster processing times and at the same time we can ship more orders daily.

commercetools can be improved with plugins and third-party packages. For example, the payment depends on what your requests are and which payment you use. You can use some third-party or plugin for payment that is outdated and we had some issues on that part, but it depends on what your exact need is.

I have been using commercetools actively for the past two years.

commercetools is pretty stable.

commercetools is infinitely scalable, so that is one great thing. One thing to mention is that backward compatibility with commercetools is excellent, so you don't have to be constantly updating everything.

Customer support is excellent. If you have any issue that you can't figure out, you can call customer support and resolve pretty much everything you need.

We have used .NET CMS for NopCommerce, which is open source and free to use. It is just outdated, built a long time ago, more than ten plus years ago, so it had to be redone.

We did evaluate other options, but I don't really remember right now. It was a long time ago. The main thing was scalability, so that is why we decided on commercetools.

The project is not that long in production, so we don't have any specific metric right now.

We haven't had any issues with commercetools security.

The main issue is the price. Usually you have a Windows server and that is pretty much the only thing you have to pay. If you want to switch and make everything infinitely scalable, you have to do Azure  serverless, commercetools, and the expense ramps up and gets pretty expensive. If you really need it, take commercetools. Other than that, I would just do some open-source CMS and go from there.

At this point, the product works flawlessly.

It depends on how you look at it. If you think about commercetools, the product itself is an excellent solution that you can use. However, it is pretty expensive and sometimes it makes sense to create a monolithic architecture project that can sustain a lot of orders. commercetools is great for very large enterprise solutions, but anything smaller, I think it is just too expensive.

You can use commercetools AI implementation for searching documentation and helping you decide on what to implement and where, and I have used it and it is pretty nice. I haven't had any issues, but I didn't use it that much.

My overall rating for this product is eight out of ten.

My main use case for commercetools  is majorly B2C, and I have completed multiple B2C projects with commercetools .

A specific example of a B2C project I completed with commercetools is for an Australian customer for whom we executed a large project. It is a composable commerce implementation where commercetools serves the commerce information, but the front end is built using Node.js and React, specifically using Next.js for that project. It is a large, multi-year project that we delivered.

Regarding my main use case and that particular project, we were enabling the project with backend for frontend. We introduced backend for frontend for that company, connecting multiple systems including commercetools, their PIM  platform, ERP , and CRM  platforms. This backend for frontend served as middleware between the frontend and backend, creating quite an architecture that performed well.

The best features commercetools offers include recent AI-specific implementations on the MCP part. They have introduced two major areas: one is on Agentic Commerce and the other is on the AI agent. They refer to Agentic Commerce as Agentic Lift and for the AI agent as Autonomous, with the frontend for Autonomous being Mosaic. These two features are what we are currently exploring, and they seem quite interesting, focusing on aspects many other e-commerce platforms are also considering.

These two new features are gaining traction, but aside from those, commercetools has pioneered the composable commerce part of the architecture. It has all the necessary APIs to develop a B2C or B2B platform, utilizing GraphQL and offering good speed. I do not see many competitors having the same pioneering approach.

Commercetools has positively impacted our organization as a service company by allowing us to execute multiple projects and bring in a good amount of business for us.

The kind of business impact I have seen includes delivering commercetools projects for various customers, and as a partner, our company has built multiple accelerators. These accelerators help us sell commercetools internally, enabling us to speed up processes for customers. For example, a new customer we are currently in the discovery phase with found our customer service accelerator very useful, and we are helping them understand and initiate things. This illustrates the opportunities commercetools provides us, which we leverage when paired with the platform.

Improvements for commercetools could focus on their major initiatives around Agentic Commerce and the AI agent. They may need to enhance their marketing strategy as they currently do not host large-scale marketing events. While technology-wise they are solid, a better marketing strategy could benefit them.

On the technical side, commercetools operates robustly as a composable commerce platform. They have an excellent roadmap and strong technology, so I do not see major trouble there. Support is also good overall, although they may be a bit slow with our queries at times.

Improvements for commercetools that have not been discussed yet could include a broader feature set. They offer a good range of features for building B2C or B2B platforms, but enhancing their capabilities could yield a more competitive platform, especially when they face questions regarding why to choose commercetools over others. Their strengths lie in composable commerce and the recent Agentic Commerce, but expanding their feature list would create a more rounded offering.

Regarding how I am exploring those AI features and any early benefits or challenges, it is very early, and Agentic Commerce is not yet full-fledged. The plan is to discuss with customers to see how we can implement it and what benefits our existing customers would gain from that. Agentic Commerce is picking up speed, and the AI agent has the potential to autonomously adjust product pricing based on competitor pricing, which is a thought I have for implementation. The AI agent also allows us to create promotions on the fly, which is another nice feature.

For data migration and synchronization when implementing commercetools for new clients, we have created a migration tool that understands the structure of existing platforms. Utilizing AI, it helps map the schema for commercetools and manage data transfer seamlessly, ensuring sensitive information is protected while developing API-based architecture quickly for our customers.

The biggest challenges I typically face during a commercetools implementation involved past difficulties with data imports and synchronization, but with recent improvements and AI assistance, processes are moving smoothly now, and I do not see significant issues currently.

To ensure my team stays updated with new features and updates from commercetools, I have implemented an AI agent that scrapes information weekly from various sources. This agent pulls data from newsletters, social media, and the commercetools website, providing me with the latest developments, roadmaps, and press releases to take into consideration.

For training and onboarding new team members working with commercetools, we focus on educating them about e-commerce principles first. Once they grasp the foundational concepts, we introduce them to key commercetools APIs, ensuring they are not overwhelmed while building their understanding gradually.

To measure the success of commercetools implementations for clients, we look at how the platform meets their enhanced functionality needs and how we can accommodate those within commercetools, or via an intermediary database when required. The platform's flexibility for front-end integrations also plays a vital role in our success metrics.

When handling integrations between commercetools and other systems such as ERP  or CRM  platforms, commercetools allows us to build web hooks for automatic order passing to those systems. This flexibility allows us to create events and process any triggers efficiently, utilizing backend for frontend architecture to connect multiple platforms.

In terms of accuracy and reliability of output from commercetools' AI capabilities, it is quite accurate for tasks such as searching for or checking out products. It effectively understands user prompts and provides good responses. Mosaic also performs well because it is directly connecting to their APIs to find the right tools that need to be called.

My advice for those looking into using commercetools is to view it as a solid mid-range e-commerce platform. It is best suited for those willing to build their front-end. While they offer some integrations such as Frontastic, building a flexible, robust front-end while leveraging commercetools as a backend e-commerce platform is the ideal approach. I would rate this platform a seven out of ten.