Founded in Germany in 2010, commercetools lays claim to having invented the headless commerce concept, describing its platform as the world’s leading enterprise commerce platform built on modern MACH principles (Microservices Support, API First, Cloud Native and Headless). In 2019, the company raised $US145 million from private equity and announced it would use the funds to expand both its customer base and product suite.

commercetools now operates in more than 30 countries and boasts a client base of more than 250 major organisations, most with revenues in excess of $US100 million annually. The company powers the commerce operations of some of the world’s best-known brands including Audi, AT&T, Bang & Olufsen, Danone, Eurail, REWE, Tiffany & Co, Ulta Beauty, Universal Music Group, Volkswagen and Yamaha Motor.

Shopping experiences supported by Commercetools range from brand-based websites and mobile commerce services to social commerce solutions and online marketplaces offering millions of products.

commercetools arrived in Australia in March 2020, bringing Qantas on board as its first local customer. Since then the company has rapidly added a slew of prominent brands to its customer list – including household names like Kmart Australia, Breville and Baby Bunting, plus challenger brands like Bailey Nelson optometrists and Koala online furniture.

commercetool’s headless commerce architecture helps businesses create seamless shopping experiences across every digital touchpoint. It achieves this by allowing any type of frontend touchpoint – such as retail websites, voice-activated virtual assistants, “smart” devices and Internet-of-Things (IoT) appliances – to connect to a backend commerce platform via API calls. This means the backend platform is no longer closely coupled with the “head”, or frontend, making it “headless”. As a result, the interface of any digital touchpoint can be modified or updated without the need for costly changes to the backend infrastructure.

Using commercetool’s headless commerce platform, brands can easily curate their own suite of commerce solutions by connecting to multiple cloud-based microservices. Here, flexibility is a key benefit, as brands can freely alter their microservice configuration or auto-scale their service usage through the cloud. The upshot? A commerce ecosystem that’s much easier to maintain, update and upgrade than traditional commerce solutions based on a single platform.

As part of its innovative platform, commercetools also offer customers a range of third-party integrations, pre-built accelerator projects, an instore app, and an easily customisable iOS app with barcode scanner.

There’ll be more news soon on a go-live date for the Comestri commercetools Channel.