commercetools vs. Spryker Cloud Commerce OS

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

Spryker is very well suited (B2C and/or B2B) for big companies with complex and individual business models or also if your company needs a certain level of customization. Very good fit, if you need a scalable system. It is rather not the perfect fit for small companies or companies with very basic E-Commerce needs.

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

• Data Importers - Spryker is able to cope with large chunks of data ingest e.g. from PIM or ERP. Its integrated Middleware of handling this data.
• Scaling - Modern architecture makes it possible to scale flexible.
• Internationalization - Role our your shop with different assortments, pricing and products with out of the box features.
• Pricing - Spryker supports custom pricing out of the box (volume prices, gross/net prices, customer specific pricing).
• Order Management.

Incentivized

• 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

• Content - content administration is not a strong part of Spryker, although it improved over the years. I still see room for improvement in the world of bigger CMS systems being able to also do "commerce".
• Backoffice-usability - for non-technical users the first few days, weeks and month[s] can be full of surprises. An extended documentation, or more intuitive handling on the backoffice could serve every party on Spryker.
• Off-the-shelf internationalization - Spryker right now comes with an initial data set in English and German, which is for a German based company already a pretty stable starting point. Extension on the base data for Europe-wide used countries would be very helpful - French, Italian, Polish, Russian, etc.

Incentivized

Spryker's usability depends a lot on custom development. Therefore, I would like not to consider usability as something that comes with Spryker Cloud Commerce OS. Spryker Cloud Commerce OS; however, brings all the tools needed to design a solution with great usability.

Support suffered from Spryker Cloud Commerce OS's rapid growth. Contacts, department heads, and support systems changed frequently. Support processes as well as documentation are rather poor. One notices that they are putting more effort into the customers recently, but in the course of growth, there is still a lack of focus here. As a customer, I would like to see growth at a slower pace and a phase of stabilization.

Incentivized

If you compare Spryker with commerce solutions on the market, you will notice that the focus is not on the front end. Spryker assumes that the store is only one of many possible channels through which customers order today and in the future. To understand the differences, one must therefore take a look at Spryker's architecture. This is divided into the Spryker [Cloud] Commerce OS (the backend with all process-related components), the front-end modules for B2C and B2B, as well as the integration modules (middleware) and interfaces (Glue API).

• 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

• Extending the reach and visibility of the brand through content and commerce.
• Increased customer satisfaction through better accessibility (self-service) and easy access to important product information (CAD data, technical documentation, etc.).
• Rapid deployment thanks to packaged business capabilities and clear development leads to fast ROI and low TCO.

Incentivized