commercetools

My main use case for commercetools  is that it functions as a commerce engine in a MACH environment where all of the rest is implemented by different services or different third-party vendors. But the commerce itself, such as card calculations, checkout, and the commerce engine itself, is commercetools .

A specific example of how I used commercetools in a project is that it served as the center core of the e-commerce system. All items which were added into the cart were calculated properly, promotions were applied, discounts were applied, and whatever else was needed. There were no specific tiers for customers' pricing because it was B2C. The rest of the checkout logic was implemented using commercetools.

I think that the primary use of commercetools is to act as the center of the e-commerce system.

The best features commercetools offers include being API-first, which nobody was thinking in this way before. If you ever worked with SAP Hybris or ATG , ATG  Commerce, how they call it, Oracle ATG, it was a monolithic system which implements everything in one. Then commercetools stepped in and provided a lot of APIs which are comfortable for developers to work with, which are charged per API use, which are flexible to use in different scenarios. I think for B2C, it is a great solution because at EPAM we were able to implement it quickly. A typical Hybris project is two years, while a commercetools project is more like half a year before go live.

What made those APIs comfortable for developers is that the documentation is very structured. They were able to quickly identify all of the integration scenarios and estimate them. Unlike Hybris or similar monolithic engines, it was much faster because multiple teams were working in parallel. As far as I remember, we had six or seven teams. That is unbelievable speed and that is an unbelievable amount of people working in parallel compared to traditional monolithic systems.

Commercetools has positively impacted my organization by providing a great opportunity to increase time to market. When it comes to pricing, I think it was more or less the same. Every big project is expensive. There was no significant difference in commercetools versus other systems.

The faster time to market benefited my team by allowing us to launch the first MVP version to production in half a year. That is absolutely impossible in traditional monolithic systems.

Commercetools can be improved by remembering that B2B capabilities are limited, unlike Hybris which has a lot out of the box. I think there is a big problem with budgeting nowadays. Most of the customers are looking for cheaper solutions as BigCommerce or Shopify  or whatever else. I have seen that at EPAM and I see it now. People are not ready for large-scale commerce re-implementations unlike it was in 2020. For the rest, I think it is a good product. I am not in a position to compare it feature to feature to any modern solution, but most of the customers have selected it before we started the project. So we were not in a position to recommend it or compare it to other systems.

I do not have any ideas about capabilities, but another thought is that Salesforce  Commerce has a much larger developer base. I do not know why, but it is much easier to find a Salesforce Commerce Cloud  developer, and the rates will be lower, unlike commercetools developer. Probably that is important for some of your clients.

I have been working in my current field for more than twenty years.

Commercetools is stable; I have never seen any faults on a production environment caused by commercetools itself.

For Primark, commercetools' scalability is impressive as they have one million users per day. That is pretty scalable. I think that is an amazing system for that.

I previously used SAP Hybris, and their licensing model was too expensive for the amount of orders they had. Moreover, Hybris  got outdated and everyone at Primark wanted to change that.

We did not purchase commercetools through the AWS Marketplace ; that was a direct relationship between the customer and a commercetools representative.

Before choosing commercetools, the customer evaluated other options, but I was not part of this process. So the decision was taken by the customer before we stepped in.

I do not have any ideas about capabilities, but another thought is that Salesforce  Commerce has a much larger developer base. I do not know why, but it is much easier to find a Salesforce Commerce Cloud  developer, and the rates will be lower, unlike a commercetools developer. Probably that is important for some of your clients.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate commercetools an eight because it is a solid commerce system. I do not see any significant flaws. It is not a ten because to me, it requires a lot of technical knowledge, solution architecture, and proper software development principles or frameworks to implement such a project in a short timeline. A random developer would not be able to use it efficiently.

I chose eight specifically instead of a higher or lower number because it requires a lot of engineering culture and the random developer would not be able to use it effectively, unlike a simpler system as Shopify .

I literally have no idea about commercetools' AI capabilities. I have not seen any AI in commercetools.

I am not the person to talk about the accuracy and reliability of output regarding commercetools' AI capabilities.

My advice to others looking into using commercetools is that in 2026, I would go with a simpler solution. It is really hard to use all of its capabilities, and probably you do not need most of them. If you are not a Primark, if you are not a large international, multi-country, multi-currency, multi-language, multi-catalog company, then probably you do not need that kind of capabilities.

While I was working at my previous company, I used commercetools  for about one year and built several projects with it.

My main use case for commercetools  is making an e-commerce website where the entire dataset and structure have been handled by commercetools. We built a full-stack e-commerce website using Next.js for the front end and Node.js for the back end, with commercetools as the database. All products, SKUs, product types, and everything have been stored inside commercetools and categorized in a way that allows for efficient fetching. We did not have to design our entire database from scratch.

commercetools fits into my workflow by providing the best feature, which is the structure of the data. When calling commercetools API, the structure is straightforward. We do not have to iterate through nested loops inside the data. The data is simple and we can control what sort of data we want from commercetools. That is one of the features I appreciate the most. Additionally, commercetools provides hundreds of APIs that are very useful in cases where you need to print certain customer data or avoid manual joins. The particular information requested is provided by a separate API. Furthermore, the customizations available in commercetools through the Merchant Center allow you to use your own fields inside the Merchant Center and customize the entire platform. That is one of the great advantages and the key differentiator for using commercetools rather than other e-commerce platforms such as Magento  or Shopify .

commercetools is deployed in my organization on a public cloud. We purchased the Merchant Center hosted by commercetools itself. We do not need to host anything ourselves. We bought the cloud version, the public cloud version.

commercetools fits into my workflow by providing the best feature, which is the structure of the data. When calling commercetools API, the structure is straightforward. We do not have to iterate through nested loops inside the data. The data is simple and we can control what sort of data we want from commercetools. That is one of the features I appreciate the most. Additionally, commercetools provides hundreds of APIs that are very useful in cases where you need to print certain customer data or avoid manual joins. The particular information requested is provided by a separate API. Furthermore, the customizations available in commercetools through the Merchant Center allow you to use your own fields inside the Merchant Center and customize the entire platform. That is one of the great advantages and the key differentiator for using commercetools rather than other e-commerce platforms such as Magento  or Shopify .

commercetools has positively impacted my organization by saving time. First, you do not have to design your own database from scratch according to your e-commerce website needs. Whatever functionality is needed can be managed through commercetools, whether the store is multinational or single nation with multiple positions. Additionally, commercetools provides numerous APIs that are quite useful when making e-commerce websites. While starting a project, you may not know what APIs you will need, but as you build in real conditions and use commercetools, it is quite valuable that you get each functionality by default. The main issue I encountered is the lack of resources for commercetools. I did not find comprehensive resources to learn commercetools. I learned through documentation, but I did not find materials that explain the whole commercetools system in video or lecture format.

Regarding how commercetools can be improved, I did not find anything that could be better in terms of features for my use case. However, the resources and documentation of commercetools could be clearer so developers can understand the APIs and build websites accordingly. Whatever is needed for my use case, commercetools provides. If the project scales and certain companies require additional changes, you might need customization in Merchant Centers. Otherwise, all the features that are there provide what I needed.

Additionally, commercetools could improve how they handle the customer database and orders by consolidating their two separate collections for carts and orders. Once a cart is ordered, it is converted into an order state, and this process could be improved. Furthermore, they could improve the customer collections. When I was using commercetools, there was no AI analytics, but they could add AI features such as product recommendations for specific customers based on their viewership, cart suggestions, and bundle products. These are improvements they could make.

commercetools performs quite well when handling large volumes of data or high traffic situations. When handling a large volume of data and applying filters, the API fetches data very quickly. It stores data in MongoDB, a document-based database. The fields that can be filtered are already indexed in the database. When applying any sort of filter inside a product, for example, if we have 100 million products inside our database, applying a certain category or specific filter returns the first 10 products very quickly, under one second. That performance is quite impressive.

Regarding reliability, I would say commercetools is highly available. It runs on AWS  servers, which are quite popular in the IT industry, and the platform is reliable and highly available. I did not encounter any scenarios where commercetools server went down or went offline or the store went offline.

commercetools supports multi-language and multi-currency requirements for global e-commerce with built-in functionality. You can integrate multi-language and multi-currency capabilities. As mentioned earlier, you can integrate different stores in different regions or different stores within one region, and both can be supported by commercetools.

commercetools integrates with other systems and third-party applications through the back end. The flow we created to use commercetools involves a Node.js middleware that handles calls between the front-end Next.js and the commercetools back end. We implemented commercetools SDK in Node.js, and we can fetch whatever is needed from commercetools. From Node.js itself, we integrate different third-party applications such as Google sign-in or Razorpay for payment gateway. We perform that integration from the Node.js application, but I know that you can do some things from commercetools itself, such as payment gateway integration.

commercetools is quite valuable in terms of requiring less work while working with it. That is one of the reasons I chose commercetools. Additionally, our company wanted to explore commercetools. We were working on projects based on Magento, but we wanted to explore other options such as commercetools and Shopify. We built several projects with commercetools and they are still running fine. I would say it is a good option to choose.

The reason I give commercetools an eight is that there are platforms available in the market that are more perfect than commercetools, such as Magento, but those platforms are expensive. If your project or site is not limited by budget constraints, you could still choose Magento. Magento is the best available option in the market. However, if your budget is slightly lower and you still want to use more functionalities, commercetools is a viable option. I gave an eight because it is a more mature platform than others, but it is not the perfect platform.

My experience with the documentation and learning resources for commercetools is that it was not very clear. When I wanted to do something, I needed to go through the entire documentation of that particular feature, whether adding a product or adding a custom field. The documentation was not clear. They should separate documentation for the API, showing what response you can get and the structure of the response, from what that particular feature does. They could separate these things, but they are currently integrated into one. Documentation was reasonably decent, but I have read more structured documentation than this. There are quite a number of fewer resources and fewer YouTube resources available. They should organize more coaching sessions for developers so they can learn commercetools. That is the only problem I encountered.

commercetools helps with personalization and customer segmentation for the e-commerce site quite well. Personalization and customer segmentation capabilities are quite good. However, as mentioned, they should include AI features where they can recommend products to customers. They are lacking in that area. Otherwise, it is fine.

commercetools is quite flexible when it comes to customizing the e-commerce experience. Everything you need to change is available through API or Merchant Centers. You can easily change anything.

My advice is to try not to learn everything inside commercetools because it is not required. Learn  only those things that are necessary to save time and apply more knowledge to those areas which are required for your product. My rating for this product is eight out of ten.