In the rapidly evolving world of digital commerce, businesses seek platforms that offer flexibility, scalability, and innovation. commercetools Foundry emerges as a powerful contender, designed to meet these needs with its modern architecture and comprehensive capabilities. But is commercetools Foundry a potential alternative to Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC), notably its Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA)?
A Business Case to Migrate from SFCC
In the realm of e-commerce, the architecture of your platform is pivotal for its success. With its monolithic architecture, SFCC presents challenges in deployment flexibility and limits the ability to update or scale individual components with ease. While it transitions toward a more composable commerce approach, current limitations may hinder rapid innovation and scalability.
Additionally, the cost associated with its comprehensive suite can be high, adding to the total cost of ownership, especially for businesses seeking granular control over their e-commerce environment and cost-efficiency. It might be time to explore a future-proof and composable commerce solution, commercetools, which offers a flexible and efficient system that can effectively address the issues above. commercetools can empower your business to thrive in online retail's fast-paced, competitive landscape.
Why Would You Consider commercetools Foundry?
commercetools is a powerful, API-first, cloud-native composable commerce platform designed around the principles of microservices, API-first, cloud-native, and headless (MACH) architecture. It offers your business high flexibility and scalability for building custom e-commerce solutions. However, implementing a solution from scratch with commercetools, despite its flexibility, can be complex and time-consuming. It requires a deep understanding of its API and architecture, and a significant development effort to tailor the platform to specific business needs. The recently launched commercetools Foundry overcomes the commercetools limitations by providing a pre-composed solution that is more streamlined and eases your path to leveraging the commercetools platform.
We understand that migration from one platform to another is a huge decision. GSPANN experts can help assess your current and future needs and suggest a viable solution. Write to us at #marketing@gspann.com to schedule a meeting.
commercetools Foundry
commercetools Foundry is a groundbreaking offering from commercetools, embodying the principle of composable commerce, that introduces a range of valuable additions to the existing commercetools website. Its pre-composed solution accelerates implementation speed while reducing costs.
The Foundry provides a comprehensive blueprint for B2C businesses, including best practice guides, AI-powered developer assistants, and store launchpads for B2C commerce. It also offers expert services to turbocharge implementation and accelerate time to value, ensuring a quick and effective transition to composable commerce. With tailored resources, launchpads, and expert services, the Foundry guides you through the planning, implementation, onboarding, expert support, and optimization, leading to simplified and effective composable commerce.
commercetools Foundry Architecture
Every component offers a range of business capabilities you can use as they are or customize to align with your specific requirements.
Frontend
The commercetools Frontend component furnishes a development framework along with the necessary tools for building, deploying, and maintaining an e-commerce website. This component includes templates for specific use cases (e.g., B2C retail). The commercetools Frontend Studio is a management application that empowers business users and developers to construct, modify, and oversee a commercetools Frontend website.
Composable Commerce
Composable Commerce offers standalone APIs of the highest quality, unlocking limitless commerce potential. It additionally provides a Merchant Center, an administrative application for commercetools Composable Commerce, enabling comprehensive management of all project aspects.
Checkout
commercetools Checkout is a prebuilt solution designed to enhance your customer's checkout experience by providing seamless, efficient, and secure integration for your commerce websites or applications. It offers the flexibility to support existing and future channels while enabling swift conversion of new sales opportunities.
Connect Integrations
With commercetools Connect, you can seamlessly enhance your composable commerce project, eliminating the need to purchase and manage dedicated hosting or runtime environments. It offers a runtime environment for running small applications known as Connect applications.
commercetools Foundry Benefits
| Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
| Flexibility | Enables customization to meet specific business needs through a modular architecture. |
| Speed to Market | Accelerates deployment with pre-composed solutions and streamlined workflows. |
| Scalability | The cloud-native infrastructure supports scaling to handle growth and demand fluctuations. |
| Innovation | Facilitates rapid adoption of new technologies and approaches with its API-first microservices architecture. |
| Global Expansion | Supports multi-region, multi-language, and multi-currency deployments to enter new markets quickly. |
| Developer Experience | Offers a developer-friendly environment with comprehensive documentation, SDKs, and API-first design for smooth integrations and custom development. |
| Cost Efficiency | Reduces total cost of ownership by leveraging cloud services and minimizing the need for custom development. |
| Enhanced Customer Experience | Allows businesses to deliver exceptional customer experiences across all touchpoints, from web and mobile to voice and IoT devices. |
| Effortless multi-channel integration | Makes it easy to connect with customers through any device or platform, like chatbots, smart appliances, and mobile apps, ensuring a smooth shopping experience now and in the future. |
commercetools Foundry Vs. SFCC Storefront Reference Architecture
Using Salesforce Storefront Reference Architecture (SFRA) provides flexibility in building and customizing e-commerce storefronts; however, it inherently ties you to the SFCC platform. While SFRA offers a standardized framework for scalable and responsive storefront development, it limits your ability to transition to alternative e-commerce solutions without complications. This lock-in effect means that your business may face challenges if you intend to migrate away from Salesforce Commerce Cloud.
Moving away from this monolithic architecture can lead to higher transition costs, time-consuming re-platforming efforts, and dependency on Salesforce-specific technology and expertise down the road. While SFRA offers immediate flexibility within the Salesforce ecosystem, you need to consider the long-term implications of platform dependency and evaluate the trade-offs between flexibility and vendor lock-in when making strategic technology decisions.
commercetools Foundry, with its many advanced capabilities, has a number of advantages over SFCC-SFRA. Foundry offers a more modern, adaptable, and efficient approach to e-commerce that emphasizes quick innovation, seamless scalability, and a developer-centric environment. Table 2 provides a feature-to-feature mapping.
| Feature | Feature | Feature |
|---|---|---|
| Architecture | Microservices, API-first, cloud-native, and headless. | Monolithic with a move towards headless options via the Progressive Web App (PWA) kit. |
| Development Approach | Promotes a decoupled, composable architecture, allowing for a selection of best-fit technologies. | Provides a comprehensive, integrated suite with predefined components for quicker setup. |
| Flexibility & Customization | Extremely high due to its API-first and microservices approach. Developers can build unique, custom solutions. | Moderate, within the confines of the platform's capabilities and extensions. Customization is possible but within a more structured framework. |
| Ecosystem & Integration | Designed to seamlessly integrate with any third-party service, tool, or application through APIs. | Designed to integrate with any third-party tools using SFCC APIs. |
| Storefront | Frontend Studio, Vue storefront, React storefront, Custom | SiteGenesis, SFRA, PWA kit, Vue storefront, Custom |
| Scalability | Inherently scalable due to its cloud-native structure; easily adapts to varying traffic and transaction volumes. | Scalable, but may require additional configuration and optimization for peak loads |
| Deployment & Operation | Cloud-agnostic: can be deployed on any cloud provider, offering more control over hosting and operations (e.g., SaaS, commercetools Connect, AWS, GCP). | Typically hosted on Salesforce's cloud, providing an integrated environment with managed services (e.g., SaaS-based SFCC-owned environment). |
| Upgrades | The platform is frequently updated, with 150+ releases per year (an average of three releases per week). | Monthly major and minor releases, each with various release dates for different instances (e.g., sandbox vs. production). |
| Generative AI | High adaptability for integrating Generative AI through API-first architecture. Requires custom integration with AI services, offering flexibility to innovate. | Direct access to Salesforce Einstein for AI capabilities, including personalized recommendations and predictive search. Pre-integrated AI features without the need for extensive custom development. |
| Market Focus | Suitable for businesses looking for a highly customizable platform that can evolve with their unique needs. | Ideal for businesses seeking a comprehensive solution with less emphasis on deep customization but a strong need for an out-of-the-box solution. |
| Innovation & Time to Market | Enables rapid prototyping and innovation due to its flexible, modular nature | Quicker initial setup with out-of-the-box features may have limitations for highly customized solutions. |
| Extensibility | Flexible, can build microservices using Java, .NET, PHP, and JavaScript. | Restricted framework, limited classes, and API; Issues with components requiring older versions of SFCC (e.g., Pipelines and ISML). |
| Global Expansion | Cloud-native platform supports agile global deployment across multiple cloud providers. High flexibility in creating localized experiences with multi-currency and multi-language support via APIs. | Built-in global commerce features, including multi-site, multi-currency, and localization. Streamlined management of global operations within a unified platform. |
| Pricing Model | Utilizes a usage-based pricing model that offers flexibility and scalability, adapting costs according to actual usage. | Employs a licensing and subscription model, potentially including costs involved in fixed, recurring, and percentage-based gross merchandise value. |
Our Verdict
Businesses facing challenges with legacy monolithic platforms, such as limited scalability, inflexible architecture, and high operational costs, could greatly benefit from leveraging commercetools Foundry.
If you are looking for a solution that is future-ready, flexible, and has a relatively lower TCO (total cost of ownership), migrating to commercetools Foundry could be a move in the right direction. Its API-first, microservices-based architecture facilitates quick customization and innovation, enabling businesses to create unique customer experiences and expand into new markets efficiently.
commercetools Foundry can help businesses achieve a sense of confidence that their e-commerce platform will support their evolving needs. They can react to the market demands faster and gain a clear competitive edge in the global marketplace.
Let GSPANN experts help assess your current and future needs and suggest a viable solution. Write to us at #marketing@gspann.com to schedule a meeting.
Harish Sangavarapu
Director-App Dev
Vijay Kumar
Associate Architect-Commerce
Published Apr 08 2024
