commercetools vs. Shift4Shop

Commercetools is generally a very flexible, smart platform for eCommerce business. It's an API enabled, cloud solution that makes integration seamless and quick to deploy. It's also a modern platform that utilizes API query languages like GraphQl. It lacks some functionalities in pricing and geographic variations of product portfolio but the platform is constantly improving and new functionalities are added.

Incentivized

At this point I would recommend looking elsewhere - 8 years with a platform and finally have to switch due to the unreliability is not something a business likes to do! They should sell the platform to a company that actually cares about owning an ecommerce builder. Research Shift4 - the parent

• Very good documentation
• Stabile and scalable Microservice-Architecture
• Cloud Native Platform

• In my opinion, charge you too much for what it is worth
• In my opinion, tech support is always blaming client and end up fixing it own issues
• In my experience, make you believe client is important

• Pricing - Commercetools has pricing limitations with respect to customer/SKU combination. If an organization provides lots of custom/contract pricing for customers, Commercetools has difficulty mapping it in. They are working on this to make it more flexible.
• Geographic variations in product portfolio - Commercetools has central product master that doesn't provide product activation/enabling based on different geographies/elevation/sales office structures. Some creative mapping skills are needed to overcome this limitation.
• Data mapping limitations - Commercetools lacks in out of the box data mapping limitations to full fledged ERP platforms. Extensive data mapping workshops are necessary to fit the functionalities of an ERP platform from order, to delivery , to warehouse operations and billing.

Incentivized

• Page structure is all over the place. It can be difficult to find where to go to make page edits.
• Base platform isn't very robust and requires multiple add-ons in order to add CRM, Taxes, and other capabilities
• Reporting isn't very strong, necessitating outside analytics
• File system is also pretty wonky and feels very primitive
• Customer service and technical help leaves MUCH to be desired.
• Not as many supported add-ons/plug-ins as other platforms, and many of them cost additional fees. Many of them also don't seamlessly integrate, meaning you'll need to dev the integration yourself.
• In general, what you see in the WYSIWYG is not what you get.
• Order System is not very intuitive for the modern era

Incentivized

Not applicable - as a franchisee, the franchiser took over the web site and shopping cart capabilities, so I no longer need the tool. But I would recommend it.

If you are looking for ultra basic interface ...

regular updates braking our site

You always manage to fins someone, but, in my experience, resolving issues are not an easy task. Why do we pay for a service , and then spend time trouble shooting constantly with them ?? In my experience, they eliminate features , send you an email what you can use instead, with instructions most people cant do without an IT guy . It feel more like an open source than a true integrated service.

Initially it was difficult to manage the UI to the client, and then hard to change anything , unless you used the boring and too generic templates . Their template selection is very limited , that are basically all the same with different background images and colours . If you are unfortunate to have been a long-time client, you will have to completely rebuild your store, because old templates are not supported anymore

We used them for 2 years and had minor problems up until the end. For the last 2 months, customers were unable to checkout, or connect to our payment processor. We put in like 3 to 5 hot tickets to get fixed and day after day nothing was fixed and support got ruder and ruder with us! We lost thousands of dollars online with this company and now they are chasing us for a renewal payment! Simply put, this is bad software with a poor customer care staff!

• We were able to successfully launch the ecommerce platform in under 4 months of starting development work.
• Integrate the same APIs to different client facing solutions.
• The total cost of platform recovered in 8 months of deployment.

Incentivized

• We have seen an increase in sales of 440% since starting with 3D cart.
• We find that the 3D features of promotions, coupon codes, rewards points all make customers want to come to us or come back to us.
• They made mobile conversion pretty easy, and our mobile traffic went from 33% to 54%.

Incentivized