Today, retailers are working with rapidly changing and increasingly complex marketing and retail scenarios. They need a flexible commerce technology that integrates well with their various subsystems to create a user-friendly shopping experience across all sales channels. commercetools’ cloud-based commerce platform allows retailers to simplify their retail architecture by connecting multiple commerce applications with a single back-end through commercetools’ single API.

This innovative API-first model also is a perfect fit for microservices, a revolutionary architectural approach for agile IT development where small services are individually developed, deployed and managed, and communicated via standardized APIs. This ensures that retailers “avoid the need to alter their enterprise architecture just to accommodate a new e-commerce platform,” adds Arthur Lawida, Managing Director, commercetools North America. A number of the well known commerce suites in the market still rely on so-called monolithic architectures, combining and deploying several different e-commerce components as one single application. The code base of these monolithic systems can get quite complex, making it harder for the IT team to change functionalities quickly. Embracing a more modular approach based on microservices architecture can assist retailers to enable an innovative, marketing led approach that can increase customer traffic and intelligently evolve the e-commerce solution.

“Our platform also makes it possible for retailers to engage customers through new, non-traditional channels,” explains Lawida. This is possible through a clearer separation between the customer experience and back-end development. As the digital shopping experience matures, retailers continue to invest in visually appealing and often media-heavy web shops to differentiate themselves from the competition. commercetools breaks up the traditional dependencies between shop front and back-end, placing the capability of e-commerce development in the hands of marketing teams instead of IT. Now they can employ a front-end developer in their team to establish innovative user experiences without needing to understand the complex back-end e-commerce technology first.