What is commercetools Foundry?

Earlier this year, Aries Solutions rewrote the MACH Booster to be fully compatible with commercetools Foundry. We see Foundry as an excellent starting point for going composable. Since launching the new version, most of our discussions have been focused on “What is commercetools Foundry?” instead of what the MACH Booster adds.

This confusion is understandable. There has been a lot of buzz this year around commercetools Foundry, the potential it provides, and how it represents the best pre-composed solution for those looking to adopt MACH technology and composable commerce.

The discussion has revolved around Foundry’s benefits, including quick time-to-market, true flexibility, and ease of use. It’s great to see the stats and success stories from companies who have adopted Foundry. However many conversations have jumped right past the definition… What is commercetools Foundry? Is it a mindset, a guide, or a specific product? Let’s break it down in simple terms.

The simplest way to look at commercetools Foundry is to define it as a bundle. commercetools has grown beyond its initial offering and now has a suite of composable products. Foundry, at its core, is a bundled offering of everything they sell. These products include:

Composable Commerce represents the commercetools original APIs with a trendier name. These APIs are the underlying power of a commerce application with offerings from product modeling to carts and orders. They now offer a b2c and b2b set, with the b2b option including additional APIs for quotes, business users, and approval flows.

These APIs are the core of modern composable commerce architectures and exemplify why commercetools has grown to dominate the enterprise market. Each API offers functional modularity allowing companies to adopt them according to their needs and simplifies transitions by allowing for a strangler pattern approach. They also allow for best-in-class extensibility, from data customizations to asynchronous events.

commercetools Composable Commerce also includes the Merchant Center, a modern admin portal for managing your customers, discounts, and more. This interface includes powerful dedicated search engines for products and orders and allows employees to interact with the platform without needing to call an API. The Merchant Center also allows customizations by adding new screens or enhancing the functionality of existing screens. Aries Solutions has built many Merchant Center custom applications, some of which are freely available through Aries Labs.

One of the best and unrecognized features of commercetools Composable Commerce is their approach to extensibility. Other commerce software offers plugins, which are known to slow down an application, make debugging more difficult, and require high learning curves or experts with deep knowledge. commercetools Composable Commerce leverages the public cloud as its extension model. From AWS Lambdas to Google PubSubs, commercetools integrates cleanly into a modern cloud environment. This cloud approach means that all extension code is fully isolated from the composable commerce core, ensuring debugging and speed optimizations are straightforward and performance at every level can be maximized.

While leveraging the cloud for extending business logic and integrations is an excellent approach, not every company wants to handle the DevOps and monitoring involved in managing their own infrastructure. This is where commercetools Connect comes in. Distilling things down, commercetools Connect is container hosting that has been optimized for extending commercetools Composable Commerce. The code is co-hosted with the API removing latency and can be easily configured for events, API Extensions, and Custom Applications.

Everything is available through an API and, once configured, offers an easy CI/CD pipeline. Connect applications are monitored for uptime and therefore require a certain level of code quality including unit tests.

Customers can build their own Connect applications or install prebuilt options that include connectors to other MACH software. Connect can quickly become the glue or plumbing in a composable stack.

Checkout is a pre-built, one-page checkout that’s fully integrated with Composable Commerce. It provides a quick and secure way to set up a checkout.

Aries Solutions has the least amount of experience with Checkout as the majority of our clients want more control over the user experience (UX) and integrations from their payment service providers to their tax calculations.

While it may not be the preferred approach, Checkout could be a temporary solution to launch quickly or may be ideal for smaller customers going composable.

commercetools Frontend started as an acquisition of Frontastic. While all of the same functionality was retained, the product has gone through a significant rewrite. The product is now more robust and provides a better DX (Developer Experience).

Frontend can be broken down into three major components:

Studio – An administration section for managing the website. This includes a visual design tool for building out pages with drag-and-drop support for React components as well as advanced workflows for staging and scheduling.

API Hub – An API Hub to act as a backend-for-frontend within your project. The API Hub allows for custom code in NodeJS to connect the many API services found in a composable architecture.

Website Hosting – The ability to host the NextJS website on a robust CDN with edge functions for pre-rendering and React server components. The hosting includes a CI/CD pipeline and allows for a production version, staging version, and as many development branches as needed.

There are also two launchpads available, b2c and b2b, which can act as website templates to allow companies to get started quickly.

• https://github.com/FrontasticGmbH/scaffold-b2c
• https://github.com/FrontasticGmbH/scaffold-b2b

These launchpads, also referred to as scaffolds or blueprints, include the base functionality for an ecommerce website. They represent a great starting point but are not complete. You can expect to add additional components and pages. They also lack some essentials including unit tests and Open API specifications. Development on these launchpads is very active with regular commits. We expect the codebase and functionality to improve over time. In the meantime, Aries Solutions, with the help of the MACH Booster, can add the required pieces.

You will also see content referencing blueprints, docs, best practice guides, expert services, and AI-powered assistants. These are all valuable resources. From my perspective, they are not part of Foundry, but instead part of their respective products. Each product above has clear and robust documentation to help along the way. The Foundry docs page also includes tips on data modeling, project planning, and go-live checklists, but these are generic in scope. While worth exploring, companies will get more value from a Composable Confidence Assessment which will provide similar artifacts tailored to the specific project. The assessment will also include all software in the project scope, including other MACH services like search or personalization, and back office systems such as an ERP or OMS.

To fully illustrate the integration and interplay of various components within commercetools Foundry, here is an architecture diagram visualizing how these parts fit together to form a cohesive system. Contact Aries Solutions today to find out how commercetools Foundry and the MACH Booster can efficiently launch your business into the world of composable.