Kelly Goetsch, commercetools: “We want to democratise commerce technology”

Kelly Goetsch is the Chief Product Officer of commercetools and responsible for the e-commerce platform’s overall product strategy. With its API-driven approach, commercetools has been one of online retail’s frontrunners during its rapid rise.

In this episode of REWRITE TECH, Kelly Goetsch from commercetools explains why the platform is built for growth and outlines what he predicts will be the key e-commerce trends in coming years.

commercetools: enabling e-commerce growth

According to NASDAQ, 95% of all purchases will be facilitated by e-commerce in 2040 — and this is a prediction of the pre-COVID-19 era. In the last months, e-commerce skyrocketed. In the UK, online sales grew 19% year over year and we see similar figures all over the world.

commercetools is one of the enablers of this massive growth, even though some consumers might not know their name nor their capability. The Munich-based company offers a hyper-flexible platform for brands to build commerce solutions of any kind, that are scalable and can be adapted to new trends and circumstances in no time. “If Google, Microsoft or Amazon build a commerce platform, what would it look like? It would look like what we’ve built:” — Kelly Goetsch

To achieve that, commercetools has four main principles: micro services, APIs, cloud-native and headless. This mix ensures the flexibility of every commerce solution built with the technology. In total, the platform offers more than 300 APIs that cover every corner of e-commerce like inventory, pricing or the checkout process. In order to distinguish itself from old-school e-commerce giants, commercetools formed the MACH Alliance together with firms like Contentstack or Valtech. MACH is an acronym formed by the four principles mentioned before and all members commit to following them.

Enabling companies to step into e-commerce

With Amazon being one of the key players in digital commerce, it’s even more important for brands to build and sustain their own distribution channels. “A lot of our customers choose between building it from scratch or buying us as a foundation”, says Kelly. When clients don’t have the capabilities to build a state-of-the-art product in-house, they reach out to commercetools and still get a customised solution.

By making e-commerce as easy as it gets for large retailers, commercetools pursues a larger goal:

Kelly Goetsch: “Augmented reality is going to be the next big thing for commerce”

Even though e-commerce is a mature market, there are still major trends to come. “I think if we look out a few years from now, augmented reality is going to be the big thing for commerce,” predicts Kelly, who is observing the market closely. He bets that companies like Apple or Google will crack how AR can become more user-friendly.

But already today, commerce is deeply integrated into our lives:

“I think we’re moving beyond a world where you go to website.com from a desktop to buy something. And we’re moving more towards commerce being embedded and part of our everyday lives.”

On a more technical side, Kelly sees two huge trends besides microservices: GraphQL and Jamstack, two technologies that have already been widely adapted by clients of commercetools. All in all, Kelly sees huge advancements both from a customer and a platform perspective — a classic win-win situation.

Listen to REWRITE TECH with Kelly Goetsch from commercetools

You find the whole conversation with Kelly on all audio streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Or listen to older episodes including:

● Diana Heinrichs (Lindera) talks about digital health care

● Dr Carmen Köhler (Austrian Space Forum) talks about analogue astronauts and space travel

● Kenza Ait Si Abou (Deutsche Telekom) explains the powers and limitations of artificial intelligence

● André Christ (LeanIX) talks about his enterprise architecture scale-up

● Christian Hardenberg (Delivery Hero) gives insights into the technical challenges of growth

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