As we know, customer experience continues to be an important factor in the success of any organistion. Yet experience isn’t just about the customer – the brands and retailers we work with also expect and deserve a great experience, and it starts with investing in the right tools that promise both a great customer experience and a great employee one, too. 

From your repeat shoppers to your teams and developers, commercetools recently unveiled 50+ innovations as part of their inaugural commercetools Compilations Fall 2024, to ensure a great commerce experience for everyone. 

We recently sat down with Paul Williams (Director – Solutions Engineering APAC, commercetools) to hear his thoughts on the latest announcements, and what he’s most excited about.

The theme was “Experience is Everything” for the very first edition of Compilations, so we have focused on three main types of experiences:

1. The end user: The end user or the shopper’s experience, in which we focus on capabilities and features to boost shopper and buyer happiness

2. The user experience (so the experience of our merchants), in which we focus on capabilities and features to help teams excel - and not just developers, but marketers, ecommerce specialists and other personas that help operate commerce

3. And the platform experience, which includes investments in the commercetools foundation - helping us become the unmatched backbone for powering commerce

There really are so many to choose from, but for me it has to be the work that was done around promotions usability and features with a focus on making it easier to create and manage promotions in our platform. Plus expanding the scope of which promotions can be created, specifically the new BOGO (buy one get one) type promotions, the ability to generate 1000s of discount codes directly from the Merchant Centre, and lots more.

On top of this, the introduction of Custom Views as a customisation capability in Merchant Centre is truly unique and compelling for users of commercetools. With Custom Views, developers are able to extend a view in the Merchant Centre to show the data they need to work with in the context they need it in. Some example uses for this could be: 

1. Display Customer Documents: A developer wants to show customer documents stored in another service, like returns, in the customer page of the Merchant Centre. Here, you can take data from one service and apply it in a read-only manner in the context of the customer page in the Merchant Center. 

2. Storefront Preview: Another applicable use case is if a developer wants to show a storefront preview from within the Merchant Centre. Rather than jumping to the frontend application, the user can see this storefront preview directly from the Merchant Centre, this is just a few but the options are endless and really expands on the capability and composability of our tools.

That’s a bit of a trade secret that our product teams keep very close to heart, but what I can say is they are very disciplined in their approach, they stick to their principles and don’t get distracted. This enables them to remain focused on their quarterly plans, ensuring that what they build meets both our rigorous standards and those of our merchants, while also being delivered on schedule.

Staying focused. In this modern world it’s super easy to be distracted by what is popular, AI this and AI that, and whatever the next fad is. As a product business, if commercetools chased after all these fads then we would easily get off track from our main goals. That’s not to say we don’t use those capabilities, we just make sure we don’t get distracted by them. 

As mentioned, our teams remain diligent in their focus and our vision is to stick to what we do really well, it's what our merchants depend on and what they like about us - delivering a really great product that does exactly what it says on the box. We listen to our merchants and focus on delivering great experiences for them so that they can continue doing what they are good at.

It’s hard to pick one as the value is in the sum of all the parts. Capabilities like product selections and product tailoring enable businesses to provide much more contextual product information to their customers, while promotion improvements make it easier to target discounts to specific customers in a personalised way. Plus, large carts (up to 1000 line items) enables us to cater to larger more complex use cases in the B2B and Grocery space. All of these add up to greater value to merchants being able to meet the evolving needs of their customers the way they need to, and all backed by the consistent scale and stability of our platform.

The launch of our checkout feature is gaining more and more traction for us, and is now allowing us to have more robust conversations with our merchants to meet their evolving checkout challenges. commercetools’ Checkout takes care of everything - from the summary, addresses, prices, delivery/shipping methods, and so on. This is what we call “Complete Checkout”. But sometimes, a brand only wants to use the secure, seamless payment capabilities from commercetools and use their own checkout flow. Maybe they have a hyper-unique set up or a complicated use case such as enabling a customer to select a specific delivery time and date and our Complete Checkout doesn’t fulfill that for them. No worries, because we also offer a payment-only mode for checkout. 

This is especially important for brands looking for a commerce solution to take care of all the headaches that can come with payments, such as the complicated PSP integrations, while providing the most secure, reliable and seamless payment capabilities. After all, compliant, and always-up-to-date payment operations are one of the most essential parts of the checkout process. Without reliable payment operations, brands run the risk of sabotaging their operational efficiency and customer trust.

Development teams love payment-only mode because it reduces their workload as they don’t need to create unique, custom changes to our Complete Checkout. Instead, they can use the existing checkout flow they have and use the commercetools payment-only mode. This mode also reduces the work on dev teams to manage payment integrations and compliance, plus given that commercetools manages the integration, dev teams also save time on any integration maintenance because the integration is always up-to-date. Aside from dev teams, those in business operations roles also appreciate payment-only mode because of the cost and time-savings benefits, plus compliance that comes with using commercetools integrations.

Buyers and shoppers, while critical to the commerce experience, are not the only “stakeholders” an organisation serves. Customer success and service teams, procurement teams, and finance departments are all also critical to providing an exceptional end-to-end commerce experience, and at commercetools, we develop for everyone’s benefit.

One way commercetools has uplevelled the experience for internal teams supporting the commerce experience is by zeroing into our search capabilities - including customer search and business unit or company search - and enhancing them to fulfill more use cases. 

At the core, customer and business unit search is all about finding the right customer and their details quickly and efficiently, whether in a service and support scenario or settling an invoice. For example, as a marketer you may want to create a targeted marketing campaign geared towards a specific group of customers that have purchased a particular product. Maybe as an Account Manager, you want to revisit your customers’ past orders to determine a strategic upsell opportunity. These are just a few of the ways that the right customer information at the right time can unlock revenue generating opportunities. 

In another way, having the right customer details at your fingertips can also improve customer satisfaction when resolving issues, such as if there’s a customer concern, complaint or a billing issue. Maybe a customer calls in to Service & Support and the agent needs to be able to pull up their most recent order to be able to provide them the right support. These teams can use the Customer and BU Search to run through extensive customer records quickly to find the correct information they need to serve a customer quickly. This is extremely useful if you are a customer service representative on the phone with a customer and are trying to resolve an issue or risk losing the customer. Another use case is for finance and accounting teams, such as those in billing roles. With the right customer information at hand, these teams can resolve billing issues and efficiently process payments.