E-commerce platform creates flexible building blocks for businesses – Business

While the COVID pandemic was a time most people would rather forget, it was a boon to e-commerce platforms. Now the cloud-based, headless platform, commercetools GmbH, is looking to continue that growth.

“Over the last 10 years, there ha[s] been so much innovation on the consumer side,” said Dirk Hoerig (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of commercetools. “We’re now in the times of AR, of VR, of AI. There’s constant change happening to all of us on the consumer side … if you want to build this business resiliency to be able to not only adapt, but embrace that change and make an opportunity out of that, you need to gain that flexibility to constantly evolve, to constantly iterate.”

Hoerig spoke with theCUBE analyst Rebecca Knight and Shelly Kramer at the commercetools Elevate event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed what’s next for e-commerce platforms and how commercetools is planning to approach a new era of technology. (* Disclosure below.)

Making e-commerce platform transactions a streamlined experience

After experiencing significant growth during the pandemic, commercetools projects to make around $40 billion by the end of the year and expects a growth of 8% across the entire industry. Part of the company’s success is creating a smooth consumer experience, according to Hoerig.

“We talk about unified commerce because we all, as consumers out there, we don’t care if I’m working on it or connecting on a tablet, on a smartphone, on my computer,” he said. “In the store, we are [the] customer and expect that everything is working seamless.”

Consumers have even less brand loyalty and are more likely to switch vendors if the platform is not working for them, according to Hoerig. He compares commercetools’ product offerings to Lego bricks that allow customers to build a flexible, customized platform.

“We have a complete solution. But within that solution, it’s all composable, which means if you want to make a change to the customer experience, to a functionality, if you want to launch a new business model … it makes it way easier, way faster, way simpler,” Hoerig said.

Commercetools will be releasing a new series of products with its partner PayPal Holdings Inc., focused on increasing conversion rate. The company also announced commercetools Foundry, a solution that provides a set of resources for commerce implementation for B2C customers, and B2B in the coming months.

“It’s about a pre-configured solution around it that we brought to market, and it makes enterprise commerce — that had been complex for more than the last 20 years — significantly more simple,” Hoerig said.

The hottest topic of discussion, artificial intelligence, will also have a major impact on the future of e-commerce, according to Hoerig.

“All of the abilities and capabilities that we are already getting today and the pace of change on innovation, on AI, it’s moving so fast that it’s hard for all of us to follow,” he said. “But we believe that when we look forward to the next two to three years and on, we will see things happening … that we would have not thought before would’ve been possible today.”