Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce
Authors: Tom Karwatka, Piotr Karwatka, Bartosz Picho, Damian Kłaptocz, Bartłomiej Loc, Piotr Znamirowski, Kacper Cebo Introduction Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce
We see that the eCommerce software monoliths are starting to crumble.
We’ve been working with eCommerce platforms for more than 12 years at Divante, and we see the competition getting fiercer with every year. The fast-paced eCommerce world is a ruthless test for any tech bottlenecks and weak spots. It can quickly push you to the wall where your old software gets stuck against your budget, just like the Ever Given container ship in the Suez Canal.
The headless approach is an answer to those problems. It replaces a complex picture with puzzle pieces that you can quickly move around, plug them in and out, and seamlessly replace if necessary. It gives you the maneuverability to pursue constant optimization, ambitious business results, and new trends.
This eBook will introduce you to new and prospective technologies for the upcoming years. It presents a set of proven headless tools that have been on Divante’s radar for some time and are steadily growing in popularity. Introduction We’ve tried them out so you don’t have to go through each solution one by one. It’s all in here.
It consists of three chapters that start with the initiation of the project and follows through to the headless technology:
■ What comes next: Composable commerce An introduction by Tom Karwatka that presents our vision for the composable future.
■ Our CTO’s take on eCommerce technologies
Insights on the ever-changing technical aspects of eCommerce and the newest hot topics by Piotr Karwatka.
■ Headless toolkit A set of reviews by our team, including Damian Kłaptocz, Bartosz Picho, Bartłomiej Loc, Piotr Znamirowski and Kacper Cebo. They’ll present you their most important features and, in the case of marketing tools and digital experience platforms, walk you through their dashboards and onboarding.
In the end, you’ll be aware of the essential details of each platform and see how they might help you in your business. ■ eCommerce platforms ■ Product information management ■ Enterprise search ■ Marketing tools
■ Digital experience platforms
Of course, feel free to jump right to the chapter you need. After all, the main goal of this eBook is to save your time and help you kickstart innovations in your own company.
Now, let’s take a deep dive into the possibilities of headless applications. The rocket ships of eCommerce / 16 What’s How about the others? / 16 Feature sets vs. ecosystems / 17 inside Our approach to the tech stack of the future of eCommerce / 17
What comes next: Headless Toolkit | 19 Composable commerce | 6 eCommerce Platforms / 20
What is composable commercetools / 20 commerce? / 7 Shopware 6 / 24 Packaged business capabilities / 8 Spryker / 33
What are the differences between Shopify Plus / 38 microservices and PBCs? / 8 Product Information The ecosystem of composable Management / 45 commerce vendors / 9 Akeneo / 45 Composable commerce Pimcore / 49 is already here / 9 Enterprise Search / 54
How to start with composable Algolia / 54 commerce / 10 Constructor.io / 58 A CTO’s take on Marketing tools / 61 eCommerce technologies | 11 Open Loyalty / 61 The myth of enterprise software / 12 Talon.One / 67 The vital change in eCommerce / 12 Digital experience platforms / 83 Own vs. buy / 12 Contentstack / 83 The future of eCommerce Contentful / 96 software / 13 GraphCMS / 108 Illustrating the future Strapi / 117 of eCommerce software / 13 Authors | 126 Evaluating eCommerce software / 15
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 4 Empowering eCommerce. Together.
We build powerful digital products and passionate communities around the technologies that are coming next. 400+ 280+ global brands eCommerce experts as clients. on board. 11+ 1000+ years on the market. delivered projects.
Let’s talk about new technologies in your eCommerce.
Contact us at divante.com What comes next: Composable commerce
Tom Karwatka, Advisory Board Member at Divante
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce One of our four fundamental values at Divante is Next. We’ve always said that “We don’t believe in novelty. We seek and utilize technologies that will shape the future.” In our domain, composable commerce is almost certainly what comes next.
The dramatic shifts in the market we saw this year have made us all realize that the flexibility and speed of implementing enterprise software are more crucial than ever. The so-called headless approach is helping companies to innovate faster by separating the back end from the front end. It’s a genuine game-changer in software development, and it leads the way to composable commerce.
In the last couple of years, we’ve seen the growing popularity of microservices, API-first, cloud, and headless (MACH). This year, commercetools started to promote the MACH Alliance, of which Vue Storefront is a member. It aims to educate corporate clients about the benefits of using software that is microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native SaaS, and headless.
We can use these MACH technologies to build with a more business-minded approach. MACH is something like a set of digital Lego blocks where every block can be a separate business feature.
It also lets us look even further, beyond headless builds, to see what comes next. Composable commerce connects all the dots and allows us to imagine a whole new way of building eCommerce systems.
What is composable commerce?
Composable commerce is a commerce system built from packaged business capabilities (PBCs). Each PBC is a software component that represents a well-defined business capability.
This way, composable commerce offers every business a selection of best-of-breed commerce components that are all connected, or composed, into a custom application built for specific business needs.
Each packaged business capabilities is a feature or capability of the application and is typically a third-party software component. An excellent example of PBC is a checkout or a search engine.
The composable approach utilizes a whole palette of various vendors who offer dedicated solutions for specific business needs.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 7 PBCs Allow Organizations to Compose Modular, Hybrid Experience Applications
Experience Customers / Users/ Roles
Commerce
Service
ERP CRM
Vendor / Partner-Built Custom-Built Hybrid Application API DXP/MXDP/FaaS
Source: Gartner Packaged business capabilities
Each PBC can be deployed independently, and that means you completely eliminate the risk of choosing the wrong component. Every component of your eCommerce system can be easily removed or exchanged with another one. This allows you to experiment with more vendors.
What are the differences between microservices and PBCs?
Microservices are a relatively low-level and technical approach to building applications from independent components. PBCs are usually a whole set of microservices connected to deliver a business value.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 8 The ecosystem of composable commerce vendors
One of the most significant benefits of using composable commerce is the freedom of choosing the best vendor for every business aspect of your operations.
This is why it’s essential to be aware of what components are on the market already.
Composable commerce is already here
We see a growing number of vendors of PBCs on the market. It’s already possible to buy or rent capabilities from dedicated vendors to address functions like:
■ Product catalog
■ Shopping cart
■ Checkout
■ Promotions
■ Loyalty
■ Reviews and ratings
■ Search
■ Product recommendation
■ Content management
■ ID management
■ Analytics
■ Front end
The list is getting bigger and bigger because the whole composable commerce concept is fueling many new startups. In the future, integration among PBCs will be even more accessible by using a no-code or low-code approach.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 9 How to start with composable commerce
With its recent publication on composable commerce, Gartner is giving clear recommendations for companies to move from monolithic architecture to a more flexible one.
Gartner recommendations:
■ Create a roadmap to strangle your digital commerce monolith by adopting an incremental, modular approach using packaged business capabilities.
■ Secure the future of your digital commerce strategy by developing a composable commerce platform.
■ Maintain business agility and control by selecting delivery options that retain business user control of the presentation.
It’s a good idea to focus on capabilities impacting customer experiences, such as search, personalization, new touchpoints, and mobile UX. This is where you can find quick wins and gather momentum.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 10 A CTO’s take on eCommerce technologies
Piotr Karwatka, Advisory Board Member at Divante
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce The myth of enterprise software
If you deal with enterprise systems of any sort, like eCommerce, fintech, etc., you may be convinced that complex systems require complex architectures.
This is somewhat true because the architectures aren’t getting any simpler. However, the way they’re managed and accessed is. Teams prefer to divide the complex systems into services or microservices that are deployed separately to serverless infrastructures. This way, they avoid the expensive dev and maintenance operations to provide more business value faster and easier.
The complex enterprise systems increasingly turn towards a “buy” instead of “build” attitude. That means that they’re willing to even adapt how their existing business processes work in exchange for way lower ownership costs by using existing API-first, cloud-native, and open-source standards.
The vital change in eCommerce
One of the pretty cool examples of the shift is how eCommerce has evolved. Have you ever built an eCommerce store, maybe with Magento or Hybris, deploying huge java apps and exploring the domain-specific XMLs?
Well, now, you’d use the Spartacus project, a Vue or React front end, and a simple REST API and deploy your app to Netlify within a few minutes. Of course, you’d have the entire CI pipeline on Github for free.
Many eCommerces migrate towards the back-end platforms that are scalable with pretty cool APIs. Shopify Plus, commercetools, or Shopware6 are just a few examples. The CTOs simply knew that it’s much easier and effective for the team to build even a whole set of small JS-based apps instead of finding the one-size-fits-all solution.
Own vs. buy
In my recent CTO-CTO interview with Steffen Sandner, the Chief Digital Officer of Marc O’Polo, he pointed out a fundamental decision one needs to make. That’s which pieces of your architecture puzzle you’re about to build, then own and maintain, and which one you can simply buy and use?
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 12 This is a question of which fights you’re going to fight with the knowledge of knowing you can pick just a few to win. The fact is that the complexity and amount of software required for a successful digital transformation has only grown. At the same time, the time-to-market urgency is increasing with the growing competition.
The COVID-19 situation has shown us that standing on the shoulders of giants or, said another way, using out-of-the-box solutions, is sometimes the only way. Very often, it’s a shortcut into the market.
As Steffen told me later in this interview, their strategy to succeed was to buy everything that didn’t require too much customization and focus on actually building the front-end apps. It’s where you optimize the user experience and conversion rates.
The strategy was to mash up the best-of-breed services with a high-performing, unified front-end application.
The future of eCommerce software
We’ve been working with eCommerce platforms for more than 12 years at Divante. When we started, IBM Websphere was king, and ATG Commerce was a leader, too. After that era, we saw a lot of traction from Magento, SAP Hybris, and Demandware.
And finally, not so long ago, commercetools and Shopify have entered the stage as the next wave of leaders who are forging the future of eCommerce software. eCommerce is a highly competitive market, and online stores need to think ahead to stay in the game. Picking the right technology to support the future of eCommerce software effectively ultimately starts with a deep understanding of clients’ needs.
Illustrating the future of eCommerce software
Adam Sturrock drew a kind of a hype-cycle for eCommerce software. It can illustrate our basic hypothesis on the technologies that will fuel the future of eCommerce software.
At this point, we see more and more large clients asking for MACH solutions. Most of them already use cloud, APIs, and microservices but are starting to build more extensive and subsequent systems that put all of these components to work.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 13 Martec’s Law applied Fast to commerce software ??? Technology changes exponentially (fast), yet Low code organizations change logarithmically (slow). Organisation that How do we manage that? adopts Composable Composable Commerce trajectory Revolutionary Technological Eventually an organisation Change Organisation that adopts must „reset” to a new Microservices MACH Architecture Change technelogical baseline trajectory but such transitions are Serverless Organisation that adopts extremely disruptive Jamstack Headless implementation Headless trajectory API-first Organisation that retains Slow monolithic SaaS trajectory SaaS Cloud Organisational Platform change
Time Source: Sturrock
The next step will be to move this discussion to a more business-driven level, and then, to step into composable commerce. Using a MACH stack, you’ll be able to build PBCs and use them like Lego bricks to compose any software you need.
With low-code and no-code tools growing in popularity, the integration process between these building blocks will be more accessible than ever.
Even now, our marketing teams already use solutions like Webflow, Airtable, and Zapier to create complex marketing processes. Imagine taking this to the level of the whole organization. The innovation boost will be just incredible.
Once more, referring to Gartner:
By 2023, organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace the competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation.
Gartner
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 14 Evaluating eCommerce software
Vendors use the technologies I’ve just mentioned to build their products. Knowing what clients need, we should bet on products that leverage cutting-edge technologies to deliver tangible value.
This is a process of constant reevaluation that happens on the market as new technologies appear. Ultimately, clients vote on the best solutions with their wallets.
Adam Sturrock prepared another valuable graph that shows a little bit of this sentiment, though I still think that a lot of interesting platforms are missing.
Vision The Chasm
„The ones to watch” „Rocket ships” The Index The wedge of of innovators winners
High risk, highest reward Low risk, higher reward
Commerce.js New companies & products
Commerctools Commercelayer
BigCommerce Low Shopify High Execution Execution Capabilities The creek of Capabilities complacency
Adobe (Magento) Salesforce Dead companies & products SAP
„Oh dear, you really need Oracle „Where product begin to reinvent yourself” to die, slip-slip sliding The slice of away” stagnation The crevasse
Higher risk, lowest reward of carelessness Higher risk, low reward
Lack of Vision
Source: Sturrock
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 15 The rocket ships of eCommerce
Undoubtedly, the most exciting area for us here is the “Rocket ships” section of this graph. It shows us software that is getting traction and growing in popularity among clients. It creates the tornado effect: Other clients observe how these software solutions are getting more and more popular and choose them for their growing popularity.
■ You can see that commercetools is a clear winner for the enterprise sector, and they are also a strong proponent for a MACH stack.
■ Shopify is very strong for small and midsize businesses. It’s another clear example of a low-code or no-code approach. They can also offer a kind of composable commerce approach thanks to their massive ecosystem of partners. You can argue that the Shopify model is something that large companies dream of and try to achieve, but they need to have the flexibility. This is why commercetools can solve this problem one day.
■ BigCommerce is currently somewhere in between commercetools and Shopify.
These three companies are the future of eCommerce software for the next three to five years.
How about the others?
You can see companies like Adobe (Magento), Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle in the “Lack of vision” part of Adam Sturrock’s chart. I personally don’t feel that this reflects reality entirely. I think these companies have a very clear vision that is executed well. It’s just executed differently from that of the new players.
There’s a reason for that. Having a massive installment base makes it harder to innovate if your product is not based on a MACH stack. Your updates are painful and costly to implement.
This is why Salesforce is doing better than SAP and Adobe, and why the latter are now both 100% in the cloud. There’s no other way to stay relevant in the future of eCommerce software.
These companies are investing massively in MACH stacks, starting from being cloud native and headless. This is, of course, slowing down the development of their product, but they are great companies, and I do believe that they can safely navigate through this pivot.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 16 IDC MarketScape: Worldwide B2C Digital Feature Commerce Platforms, 2020 sets vs. ecosystems
From the client’s perspective, there’s still a features vs. case studies conflict. The majority of established companies haven’t heard of MACH or composable commerce, and they still use the software they bought ten years ago. This is why we still see these older companies listed as leaders in analysis like this one from IDC.
We see Salesforce, Adobe, SAP, and Oracle as leaders alongside VTEX, BigCommerce, and commercetools. Source: IDC, 2020 The reason is that the installment base is fundamental. A business usually uses eCommerce software for more than ten years.
Our approach Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce to the tech stack of the future of eCommerce
At Divante, our bet is to intelligently offer a set of eCommerce software solutions that will allow us to work with our existing customer base and help them migrate to the more modern tech stack. For some of them, this will mean re-platforming. For others, Source: Gartner (August 2020)
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 17 it’ll mean taking a strangler pattern approach to modernizing their current setup by incrementally replacing their monolithic application functionalities with microservices.
As a top-of-mind eCommerce technology company, we want to work with any enterprise eCommerce clients, no matter what their current setup looks like. The main goal is to help them achieve their business goals.
Our approach to help to drive innovations through:
■ A focus on front-end development because this is a crucial part of the MACH stack.
■ Using back-end systems that are moving towards composable commerce.
■ Partnering with vendors of composable bricks to be able to integrate them smoothly.
■ Investing in the fast-growing commerce software of the future.
For us, from the technological stack perspective, it means:
Maintain and develop Invest in Research, learn, and try
Adobe (Magento) commercetools Shopware SAP AboutYou Cloud Spryker Shopify Salesforce
It paves the way for a wide range of composable commerce solutions. At present, we work closely with the following partners, and we suggest you take a closer look at them, too:
■ Promotions: Open Loyalty, Talon.One
■ PIM: Akeneo
■ DXP: Pimcore
■ CMS: Contenstack, Amplience, Coremedia, Contentful, Storyblok, Crafter
■ Search: Constructor, Algolia
In the following chapter, you’ll find descriptions of some of the most promising solutions from those lists.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 18 Headless Toolkit
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce eCommerce Platforms commercetools
Bartosz Picho, eCommerce Solution Architect at Divante Description commercetools is a highly scalable SaaS platform for B2C and B2B enterprises that is cloud-native (you can choose AWS or Google Cloud provider), multi-tenant, and headless with a flexible API system (GraphQL and REST API).
Its architecture is made for demanding omnichannel eCommerce projects. The mission of commercetools is to free businesses from being restrained by monolithic legacy suites, such as Magento, Hybris, and SalesForce.
Features
Headless commercetools is an API-first solution, which gives you the freedom to choose any front-end solution on the market.
Being headless with a decoupled front-end and back-end, it supports multiple storefront providers, such as Vue Storefront. commercetools also offers a wide range of integrations and supports a modern microservice-based architecture.
Growing in popularity commercetools has rapidly gained popularity worldwide with Fortune Global 500 enterprises. Among their clients, you can find companies like Audi, Danone, Yamaha Motor, Volkswagen, Swarovski Optik, John Lewis & Partners, and Geberit.
Quoting Henning Henningsen, Chief Product Owner of Audi Commerce Platform, „The Audi commerce platform has been built with three core values in its DNA: speed, adaptiveness, and effectiveness.
With commercetools as the backbone for our platform, we were able to build a scalable, global commerce infrastructure aligned with our values. As a result, we can now leverage new eCommerce business models at Audi in only a few weeks.”
Extensibility One of the most powerful aspects of commercetools is its flexibility. There are many ways to modify the behavior of the system and extend it with new features:
1 Merchant Center (administration panel) custom application extension
A custom application is a web application that is developed and self-hosted by the customer. The application needs to be registered to be visible in the Merchant Center.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 21 To develop custom applications, commercetools provides a set of tools and packages in JS, Node.js, and React.js.
2 Event-driven architecture support through integration with Message Queues
It currently supports AWS SQS, AWS SNS, Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Grid, and Google Cloud Pub/Sub.
... An Order is created from a Cart
Push a Queue Service Get a Client e.g. Send Enable message message an email Subscription Action
Subscription witch message ’orderCreated’
Cloud Queue Service CTP e.g. AWS SQS MyApplication
3 Customizing data structure via various techniques like product types, types, custom fields, and custom objects.
4 API extensions
5 ImpEx commercetools offers 300+ API endpoints and decoupled services, such as:
■ Product information management (PIM)
■ Cart and order management
■ Inventory management
■ Customer history and recommendations
■ Marketing and promotions
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 22 ■ Payments
■ Internationalization
Summary of commercetools
■ High flexibility and extensibility
■ Auto-scalability
■ Modularity (you can compose commercetools á la carte)
■ Support for microservices and event-driven architecture
■ API-first
■ Great documentation for developers
■ Rapidly growing marketplace
■ Helpful tools like SDK in a few programming languages (PHP, JS, Java), ImpEx
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 23 eCommerce Platforms Shopware 6
Damian Kłaptocz, Business Analyst at Divante Description
Shopware is designed to fulfill the needs of small and midsize businesses, but it can also be successfully used as a global eCommerce platform. It’s a good choice for companies that are not sure if they want to run just a regional business or be international as well as those that need something modern and not too complicated in development.
Features
Country and language settings The country and language settings in Shopware 6 are intuitive and easy to manage. Languages and countries can be added for each sales channel separately in dedicated
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 25 sections of the administration panel.
By default, all system texts are available in English and German. For other languages, you can download a language pack extension (with over 15 languages) or manually translate additional elements for each page in each language, making Shopware 6 very usable during rollouts. There’s no need to ask developers for additional translations.
You can do everything from the administration panel. Language packs are available for the majority of European countries as well as Chinese and Turkish, so, if Europe is your primary target, you should consider it.
Following the multisite structure, there’s always a “main shop” and “sub-shops” that can be configured in Shopware 6. The main shop’s template and settings are, by default, inherited by sub-shops and can then be edited or replaced according to your needs.
This solution allows you to create new sub-shops quickly. It’s instrumental when your company is heading for a few rollouts in one week.
Each sub-shop can have its own design. If you don’t set a special template, it will use the main shop’s template. That means that you should make a master version that will be pretty universal.
Content management Shopping Experiences in Shopware 6 let you create content pages such as landing pages, category pages, product detail pages, listings, and manage them centrally. It enables merchants to have a unified shopping experience across channels, regardless of content or end device.
Creating Shopping Experiences comes intuitively and requires no design affinity or prior technical knowledge.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 26 Product management If you decide to manage your product data in Shopware 6, you’ll find a clear and intuitive PIM-like section of the admin panel. It will let you configure the critical elements like categories, attributes, products, and media assets. Shopware allows for dedicating products to each sales channel, like a sub-shop.
Because of this, admins and managers have total control over the publication of products in each country/region. However, there’s no possibility to configure some actions or rules that could sort products to sales channels automatically. It has to be done manually or you’ll need to develop it as an additional feature.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 27 Orders management You can also manage orders directly in Shopware 6. The order manager is simple but quite powerful. It gives you the possibility to add and edit orders manually and allows you to sell and manage orders even without (enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration. The orders list has a sales channel column included, making it easy to filter orders from one country or sort them by country of origin.
As in product management, Shopware 6 is flexible. However, additional development will be needed to automate some processes. It works very well until you
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 28 have a flood of orders from all sales channels, although this is admittedly the kind of problem all stores would love to have. In other words, as long as your team is able to manage orders manually, the Shopware 6 order manager is a good solution.
Customer management Managing customers and grouping them can be a challenge in global eCommerce. Not only is it necessary to group customers by country, but we also need to do so according to their purchase history and other factors. Every automation is a blessing when you have hundreds or thousands of customers from each country. Unfortunately, without a plugin
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 29 or custom development, Shopware 6 can’t group users in complex segments.
On the other hand, user data can be manually edited from the admin panel. There’s a rule builder that can help you trigger some actions when the user meets certain conditions. This means you can automate some actions like gross price display or promotion activation. It is also possible to connect those customer conditions to the tailored content the merchant can display for specific targets.
For managing large customer databases, an external tool is advised. One of the features you may like is that customer groups can be assigned to specific shops and sub-shops.
So, if you want to create a kind of VIP shop for your customers and allow only some of them to enter, Shopware 6 provides this out-of-the-box.
Pricing and tax management Pricing, taxes, and currencies are three crucial elements for every international eCommerce. Flexible and easy-to-manage tax rates are a huge advantage of Shopware.
The platform allows you to add tax rates and assign them not only to countries and product categories but also to other factors like postal codes. The administrator can add a new tax value and select the circumstances in which it should be applied.
Prices can be set for each sales channel independently, so it’s possible to sell the same product at various prices.
Currencies can be bound to countries or configured to work with all available countries
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 30 with a currency switcher available on the front end. Price roundings can be easily configured via the admin panel.
Payment and shipping methods management
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 31 Payment and shipping methods available in the core of Shopware 6 are very basic. At the same time, they allow users to configure plenty of payments and shipment combinations without coding thanks to an built-in rule builder. Payments available out-of-the-box are Klarna (invoice, installment, direct debit, direct bank transfer, and credit card), Paypal, Mollie (all major and local payment methods), Amazon Pay, Stripe (all major debit and credit cards in 135+ currencies, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and local payment methods), as well as Payone, Adyen, Pay.nl and ratenkauf by easyCredit. Shipping methods can be configured in the administration panel as well.
Flat rate, rate matrix, and rule builder provide plenty of options, but if you need integration with a shipping company, there are some modules available in the store as well.
Summary of Shopware 6
■ Quick shop deployment
■ Clear and intuitive product management
■ Intuitive and simple country and language settings
■ Direct orders management
■ Flexible and easy-to-manage tax rates
■ Flexible built-in rule builder for payments and shipments
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 32 eCommerce Platforms Spryker
Bartosz Picho, eCommerce Solution Architect at Divante Description
Spryker is a PAAS B2B, B2C, and digital marketplace commerce solution.
It is a PaaS solution that provides ready-to-use Capabilities and Features that can be customized and provide the building blocks for an individual eCommerce solution. You can choose the blocks and extend the features for your project needs. It takes into account that each project is different, and each shop has its own processes and infrastructure and requires an individual approach.
Features
The core of Spryker is a set of two separate applications, Yves and Zed. In short, Yves is a lightweight application for the front end, and Zed is the big gun for the back end.
Yves (in the first version developed with Yii, now with Silex) reads any needed data from an in-memory NoSQL back end, such as Redis.
YVES Mobile SDK Fast and scalable shop front-end for a custom SDK for the construction look & feel of hybrid mobile app
■ Easy to develop ■ Short execution times without cache
YVES Mobile SDK Shop front end application REST API Rest API Connector for all kinds of applications ZED to communicate Back end application for business logic with the ZED back-end
BI Business Intelligence
ZED Business Intelligence Solid and extensible back-end for Tech-driven approach to data analysis business logic ■ Integrates the transactional data with ■ Order life-cycle management external sources (marketing) ■ IT landscape integration ■ Visualization of KPIs ■ Loosely coupled components ■ Reporting Cubes
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 34 Zed (Zend Framework 2) handles communication with MySQL, message queue, and external systems and contains the business logic for order processes and so on.
Spryker does not try to be capable of doing everything a little or even attempt to be a full-fledged application. It chose to be an extensible one instead. At the end of the day, it’s a more efficient approach to realize individual requirements.
There are still smaller merchants without special needs and without ERP who are well served by an off-the-shelf application with custom themes and minor modifications. Those are, of course, not the target group of Spryker. In those cases, Magento is still the first choice, if not a SaaS platform like Shopify.
Touchpoints Integrations
Shop App API GLUE Storage Redis
Client Search Elastic Search
ZED
3rd Party e.g. ERP
Database SQL
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 35 Spryker Application Layers Layered Architecture
Glue / Yves Application Presentation layer Layer
Client Application Communication layer Layer Zed Application Layer
Business layer
Persistence layer
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 36 Summary of Spryker
■ Real separation of front end and back end
■ Designed to build custom solutions
■ B2C and B2B suits and marketplace
■ High barrier to entry
■ Progressive web app (PWA)
■ Modularity
■ Great documentation
■ Small community
■ No GraphQL
■ Wide range of features
■ PAAS solution
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 37 eCommerce Platforms Shopify Plus
Piotr Znamirowski, Head of Shopify Development at Divante Description
Shopify Plus is a platform launched in 2014 that is used in 175 countries, supporting over 10,000 active online stores. It’s designed for enterprise-level customers who face thousands of sales every day. Shopify Plus is a fully hosted platform that allows you to start, grow, and scale your business.
Additionally, your billing model is based on clearly defined terms. Billion-dollar online brands, such as Fashionnova, Gymshark, KKW Beauty, Rebecca Minkoff, Morphe, and Allbirds, have chosen Shopify. Shopify’s rapid growth has already generated 1.7 million businesses using the software with $277 billion in sales to date.
With Shopify, you can forget about:
■ Ongoing hosting costs.
■ Performance issues.
■ Security patches.
■ Increased time and costs when making changes.
Features
Custom shopping experiences Shopify Plus is the answer to custom business models. With the ability to take advantage of extended API and SDK access, you can create custom solutions. If you want to use a custom front end, you can replace Liquid templates with a custom storefront built using your preferred languages and tools. If you want to use your mobile apps for commerce, Shopify will allow you to create shopping experiences for iOS and Android devices using the mobile SDKs. Custom sales channels won’t be a problem either. By using Storefront APIs, you can have control over any platform.
You can develop your Shopify store by using pre-built solutions available in the Shopify App Store or creating them yourself using SDKs:
■ JavaScript Buy SDK
■ Mobile Buy SDK
■ Unity Buy SDK
■ Storefront API
■ API REST/GRAPHQL
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 39 Solutions available in Shopify Plus For users of the Shopify Plus plan, the software provider has prepared extensions that give a significant advantage over the competition. The highlights here are:
Wholesale
You can start selling on the Handshake platform or create a separate, password- protected instance. Handshake is a marketplace-type platform for wholesale. To start selling here, you’ll need to submit an application and pass verification. Once approved, you’ll be granted access to Handshake. However, Handshake is only available to companies based in the United States. In a dedicated instance, you can also offer custom pricing to your wholesale customers and handle sales from your store panel.
Shopify Flow
Shopify is all about automation, and this is undoubtedly borne out by the Shopify Flow app. It’s designed to convert the processes found in your business into automation that run according to a designed workflow.
This way, we can achieve more with the resources we have. Every store performs thousands of small tasks that you should spend at least a few minutes on. On the scale of a day, it may be unnoticeable, but if we add up this time, it can be quite a surprise. Without a doubt, this is a factor that consumes productivity. Flow is designed to provide us with what we are always missing, which is time. Examples of solutions:
■ Change prices of certain products at a predetermined time
■ Pull products with stock = 0 and send a message to your team that the product is sold out
■ Tag customers who spend more than the average basket and target them with different marketing content
■ Send an email to a customer when an item on their wish list is sold out
■ Get alerts when demand for low-stock items increases
■ Cancel high-risk orders
Automations can take many forms and are guaranteed to tailor actions to your needs.
Launchpad
With Launchpad, you can plan and coordinate individual sales events, such as Black Friday. You can automate tasks such as:
■ Changing product prices at the beginning and end of the event.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 40 ■ Publishing selected products to sales channels for launch on a selected day at a specified time.
■ Increasing inventory levels at the beginning of an event.
■ Automatically adjust templates to better highlight products included in an event.
■ Password-protecting your online store for a specified period of time before the event begins.
Shopify Scripts
These are small pieces of code that allow you to create personalized experiences for customers in their cart and at checkout. With this functionality, you can create personalized discount codes based on predetermined rules. Shopify Scripts give you powerful discounting capabilities in the form of tiered pricing, customized delivery, or payment methods.
Native tax automation with Avalara
Sales tax automation with Avalara offers a turnkey solution for instant sales tax calculation and worry-free compliance.
Multichannel and globalization With Shopify Payments, you can break down the barrier of cross-border commerce. Selling in multiple currencies is not a challenge, so your offer can reach anywhere on Earth. With a single Shopify Plus license, you can host up to nine independent instances. These can be independent stores or counterparts of your business in additional markets.
Shopify Plus Security Shopify uses a combination of colocation facilities and virtual hosting environments. In both cases, your data is stored in data centers with industry-standard security certifications. Servers are collocated or hosted at data centers with the following certifications:
■ Tier III
■ ISO 27001
■ PCI DSS
Security operation center (SOC) reports for all facilities can be provided on request.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 41 Store owners can set up additional security features. As an account holder you can:
■ Enable multi-factor authentication for staff.
■ Define what personally identifiable information is collected from customers.
■ View activity logs, including recent login activity by the user.
■ Set role-based access levels.
■ Enforce granular API scope permissions.
Composable eCommerce ecosystem Shopify Plus can be used in a microservices-based architecture to power your eCommerce with the following tools.
Frontend: ■ Klarna PIM:
■ Vue Storefront ■ Google Pay ■ Akeneo
■ Apple Pay ■ Pimcore Content management systems: Shipping services: Tax management: ■ Contentstack ■ ShipperHQ ■ Avalara ■ Amplience ■ Sendcloud ■ Vertex ■ Storyblok Promotions: Marketplace: ■ Strapi ■ Talon.One ■ Channable Search and ■ Voucherify ■ Baselinker recommendation engine:
■ Algolia Loyalty: Customer services:
■ Searchanise ■ Open Loyalty ■ Freshworks
■ Syte ■ Talon.One ■ Intercom
■ Growave ■ Zendesk Payment services: ■ Meetsales ■ PayPal Marketing automation:
■ Stripe ■ Klavio Returns:
■ PayU ■ Sales Manago ■ Returnly ■ Adyen ■ Seguno
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 42 Summary of Shopify Plus
■ Fast implementation time
■ No technical knowledge required to operate the platform
■ 24/7 support
■ High level of security
■ eCommerce automation
■ Powerful app store
■ Adaptable to international sales
■ Flexible front-end development and easy implementation of new functionalities
■ Focus on brand development
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 43 As an eCommerce agency, we specialize in eCommerce, cooperating with the fastest growing eCommerce platform Shopify.
Our goal is to create functional online stores and develop eCommerce business.
We are a complete agency, which consists of eCommerce managers, programmers, UX designers, and marketing specialists.
So far, we have completed hundreds of projects from the fashion, ecological, grocery, electronic, and beauty industries.
brandactive.co Product Information Management Akeneo
Bartłomiej Loc, Project Manager at Divante Description
Akeneo is a system that helps with product management. A well-implemented Akeneo system can automate even complicated product management processes. Features like Rules Engine, Rights Management, and Asset Manager can save time for the product management team and other stakeholders.
Features
Every PIM system should have features to help explore global markets. Akeneo did their homework and offer a lot of features that allow companies to localize product data for international markets simply and efficiently. The list is long, but we’ll present a few of the most essential features.
Integration and connections
Files Imports Exports Files
PIM Akeneo DAM eCommerce
ERP Rest API Attributes Products Channels Rest API Catalogue
Assets Languages Categories
The picture above shows what Akeneo architecture looks like. In general, every PIM architecture looks similar, but the most important thing is what’s inside, how easy is it to connect the PIM system with others, and how long it takes.
Above all, Akeneo can connect to almost every system that companies need for existing
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 46 business and to further explore global markets. It has internal ERP system data, eCommerce, mobile apps, print catalogs, and other systems that can create a coherent ecosystem thanks to connectors.
How do Akeneo connectors work?
■ Import Connectors: Apply your data into Akeneo API in an understandable format.
■ Export Connectors: Send your data from Akeneo API to desired eCommerces, mobile apps, print catalogs, etc.
There are two options for connectors that allow you to import or export your data from Akeneo:
1 An option that gives the ability to perform operations directly from the user panel or a specific path in the import/export configuration panel. This allows you to drop the file while executing the command.
2 During data import, Akeneo extracts the data from the file and converts it for saving in Akeneo. During the data export, Akeneo extracts data from the PIM and converts it to push in the specified format to a file or directly to a third-party application.
There are many connectors on the market linking Akeneo with other systems. Some are official and can be downloaded from the Akeneo Marketplace, and some are based on open-source solutions. You can find some of the most popular Akeneo connectors in our eBook on Global Rollouts for eCommerce.
Translation tools Your international business must adapt to create product information in many languages. Of course, it depends on how many web stores you have. The quality of the translation of the product descriptions directly affects sales conversion and the number of customers who will buy your products.
The critical factor is the automation of these processes. Akeneo has the ability to directly integrate translation systems. This makes working with multiple languages much more effective and keeps the quality of translations at the highest level.
Akeneo has many connectors that allow you to connect the system to the appropriate translation system.
Choosing the right system will also include a host of other features:
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 47 ■ Collaboration in the cloud and consistency improvement
Thanks to a cloud translation memory, translators can use the exact source of data about the products. This solution allows working with cooperation and synergy and that helps to reduce turnaround times.
■ Better efficiency with translation memory
Repetitive work can be really boring and inefficient, especially if it has already been done, but there’s no place to find and reuse it. The „Translation memory” function responds to this problem. It allows you to recall previously created translations to reuse them and, for example, change their meaning in specific products instead of recreating them from scratch. In the case of reusing translations, the amount of reused text is up to 80%.
■ Streamline the translation verification process
The review process for creating information and product descriptions can be long and tedious and generate high costs. Translation functions in Akeneo allow for creating the appropriate workflows so relevant people can supplement the verification process.
Revisions are automatically saved and applied to future translations, further reducing how long it takes to get your translated copy live. During the editing process, any change can be tracked, which leads to even better quality translations of product descriptions.
■ Artificial intelligence helps you achieve more
The translation process, as already mentioned, can be long and generate high costs. Artificial intelligence (AI) helps optimize your costs in acquiring foreign markets. Artificial intelligence in translation processes means you can train machines to translate the way you want your translations done.
Summary of Akeneo
■ Ready out-of-the-box PIM system
■ Marketplace with ready-to-install Akeneo extensions
■ Easy to integrate with other systems like eCommerce, marketplace, mobile, print catalogs, and POS
■ Quick configuration combined with ready-made connectors that reduce implementation time
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 48 Product Information Management Pimcore
Bartłomiej Loc, Project Manager at Divante Description
Pimcore is very similar to Akeneo. Both systems give you access to a similar range of features, but they’re different in terms of data management. Pimcore is a master data management (MDM) system that allows you to manage various types of data, like clients, products, networks of distributors, price lists, etc., while staying in complete control of the technology.
Akeneo is a PIM system. This means that it’s only used for products and their descriptions.
MDM platform
Files Imports Exports Files
DAM PIM CMS
ERP Rest API Rest API eCommerce
CRM eCommerce ...
Catalogue
While using Pimcore, the type of data is only limited by your imagination and need. It has a class configurator that allows you to model various types of data.
Thanks to this, you can use Pimcore in multiple projects like, for example, PIM, DAM, CMS, customer data platforms (CDP), and eCommerce.
PIM (product information management) MDM (master data management)
A class of systems specialized only A class of systems for managing in product description management: various types of data: customers, create a record, create a full description, products, networks of distributors, publish a product. suppliers, price lists, etc.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 50 Centralized product management means Centralized data management means your product descriptions can be better different types of data can easily quality, consistent in all channels, and be linked together, and the data itself always up to date. is always consistent and up to date,
Supports the work of people Enables easy access to this data who prepare product descriptions for anyone who needs it inside the by eliminating unnecessary work, organization. Data can be collected increasing productivity, and promoting and then pre-processed and transferred more efficient and more pleasant to other systems: ERP, data work with the system. warehouses, etc.
Features
Probably the most significant advantage of Pimcore is that you can build PIM, CMS, digital asset management (DAM), and eCommerce on one platform. This is very convenient and allows businesses to lower the complexity of their application landscape. Everything is written in the same technology, and you don’t need to integrate different systems.
In Pimcore, “what you see is what you get” is a true statement. Everything is very easy to edit and looks exactly as you intended. There’s no need to hire a front-end developer to make a change in the layout. The whole concept of the Pimcore back-end system is quite flexible but still very easy to get familiar with.
Great for B2B and fashion When you connect PIM with CMS and eCommerce, it turns out that you have just created an ideal platform for fashion and B2B. Luckily, these two are the fastest growing eCommerce segments. You can address these two segments with a complex offer using a single solution.
Workflow management Pimcore fully supports workflow management while processing data. You can map all the internal processes. You can, for example, start with the DAM module and process all photos for the products, organize them, and even edit them. The workflow module can help you take them to the PIM module, where all the products can be paired with the photos that have gone through the editing and reviewing process, and then straight to the eCommerce module.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 51 Customer experience You can build a comprehensive user experience on Pimcore because you have one source of product information, and you also have a set of quite complex tools for segmenting and targeting users. You can personalize content with Pimcore without any third-party solutions.
Flexible but very fast The Pimcore data model comes with an exceptional “connect anything” architecture. It’s agile, hyper-flexible, and highly adept at handling tens of millions of products or master data with thousands of different attributes.
Pimcore’s Datahub provides comprehensive REST and GraphQL APIs to interface with your existing application landscapes.
Pimcore - Magento connector The connector enables Pimcore in your Magento store and synchronizes your Magento data. From now on, you can create new product information, update existing data, and manage it seamlessly from Pimcore’s admin panel.
The user publish new Magento requests Magento requests any additional product in sspecified information about data (e.g.: asset, manufacturer) and product tree product Pimcore sends back parsed data
SEND TO REQUEST TO REQUEST TO MAGENTO PIMCORE PIMCORE
INFORMATION FULL PRODUCT PRODUCT SAVED IN QUEUE SENT TO MAGENTO IN MAGENTO
Information about Pimcore reads data, Magento confirms publication is sent to Magento maps, parses it and correct import and stored in queue send back
The Pimcore - Magento Connector was developed by Divante. Read more
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 52 Summary of Pimcore
■ A complete toolset for building combined projects at once
■ The possibility to create PIM, CMS, CRM, eCommerce, etc.
■ Easy to integrate with Magento through our connector
■ Some features are better than in Akeneo:
■ Creating printable PDF product cards
■ Hosting an e-catalog
■ Built-in photo editor
■ Publishing the product on a set date
Which platform to choose from? Akeneo vs. Pimcore
If you are looking for a PIM system and want to implement it quickly, Akeneo will be better.
If you need to build a dedicated project or would like to undertake several combined projects at once, the Pimcore system might be better for you.
Discover an in-depth comparison of Akeneo and Pimcore
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 53 Enterprise Search Algolia
Bartosz Picho, eCommerce Solution Architect at Divante Description
Algolia is an API first search-as-a-service platform, that comes with front-end libraries for many popular frameworks, allowing you to deliver experiences across traditional web, SPAs, PWAs, mobile apps, in store kiosks, inside business applications, and more, from a single platform.
The right investment in search can deliver huge improvements for your customer experience.
Search is a key headless building block that you can use in your system to take over the search features that usually are time and resources consuming
Algolia helps businesses build and optimize online experiences that enhance online engagement, increase conversion rates, and enrich lifetime value to generate profitable growth.
By bridging the gap between Tech & Business team, Algolia also helps to cut development time, which means lower costs and shorter time-to-market.
Features
AI The first and foremost feature of Algolia is the artificial intelligence that fuels its search and discovery capabilities. With AI, Algolia automates most of the merchandising workload by boosting the most performing results, captures user intent to deliver better results, and powers personalized experiences, while keeping you in control to manually tweak the experience wherever you want.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 55 APIs (search-as-a-service) Algolia has a search-as-a-service option and a full suite of APIs. Their uptime exceeds 99.999%, and they guarantee it with a 1000x payback factor in the event of an outage. It can cover your site, voice, mobile, and geo search queries.
Scalability API search solutions help you dynamically scale the resource-consuming search processes. It’s built to insure your eCommerce against bursts in search traffic during your peak seasons.
Distributed search network (DSN) Algolia leverages DSN to reduce network latency. In practice, this means that their network replicates your data and synchronizes it across over 70 data centers and 17 regions.
When the search query comes in, it’s automatically directed to the closest data center. It helps to keep the latency low and decentralizes your data.
Documentation Algolia claims to be developer-first, and in fact, has detailed documentation.
The integration is relatively easy. It provides 16 API clients, nine client libraries, and five supported plugins to help you build a consistent search and discovery experience. It works across multiple platforms and devices.
Security The Algolia team puts a lot of work into making it safe and secure. The infrastructure is protected by multilayer access control and complies with multiple certifications and regulations, including SOC 2, SOC 3, BSI C5, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, as well as ISO27001 and SO27017.
On top of that, you have fine encryption that includes communications within the same rack. They also keep an open public bounty program on HackerOne.
Wide adoption Algolia is a popular solution. They have over 10,000 customers and serve over 100 billion queries per month. It has an active community.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 56 Summary of Algolia
■ Extensive documentation and guides
■ Low latency thanks to DSN
■ Intuitive search that can boost conversion by 50%
■ Flexible and customizable
■ Great scalability
■ Multi-layer security
■ Active community
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 57 Enterprise Search Constructor.io
Bartosz Picho, eCommerce Solution Architect at Divante Description
Constructor is an enterprise product discovery tool for eCommerce with a strong focus on natural language processing. They use it to decipher intent and present the proper results to drive business results.
It utilizes AI to learn customer intent, optimize results, personalize search, apply autosuggestion, and present customized recommendation results for every user.
It includes eCommerce, mobile and voice search, category navigation, and recommendation solutions.
Features
Natural language processing (NLP) Constructor Search processes users’ queries with NLP and AI to present them with the most relevant results and drive conversion.
It unlocks interesting possibilities like semantic analysis, typo tolerance, synonym detection, n-gram weighting, multilingual support, word importance estimation, and intent understanding.
Machine learning enhanced reranking The machine learning of Constructor learns from the behavioral data of your users how to position the stock to sell your products. It constantly updates the search results and rankings.
Collaborative personalization Collaborative personalization is a strategy that utilizes collective data to prepare personalized search recommendations for every query. The customers of Constructor report up to 6% lift in “add-to-cart” transactions based just on this feature.
Merchant controls Constructor created advanced tools to supplement automated results with the merchants’ expertise. It’s a set composed of analytics, reporting, and tools designed for merchandisers.
Global deployment infrastructure Similar to the previous enterprise search solution, Constructor Search is deployed across a multi-region cloud infrastructure to minimize latency.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 59 Turnkey client libraries Constructor Search includes JavaScript libraries for web clients and mobile SDKs for iOS and Android.
Unification Constructor helps to implement a single search, browse, and recommendations solution across your eCommerce site.
Summary of Constructor.io
■ Advanced AI functionalities
■ Low latency
■ Great scalability
■ Integrating a single solution across the site for search, browse, and recommendations
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 60 Marketing tools Open Loyalty
Kacper Cebo, Open Loyalty VP of Sales at Divante Description
Open Loyalty is a headless loyalty platform for innovators who want to implement personalized loyalty mechanics that cut across multiple touchpoints in finance, retail, petrol, and other industries. The solution is 100% API-first and unlike old-fashioned, monolithic software, it’s easy to integrate with and ensures complete flexibility, speed, and efficiency at all levels.
Built inside Divante by a group of loyalty and tech enthusiasts that believe the loyalty software industry stands in front of the fundamental change. To keep up with the rapid development of software in other areas and be able to constantly gain a competitive advantage using technology, companies need flexible, scalable, and customizable tools. Open Loyalty has made its goal to provide such high-quality solutions on a global scale.
Since 2018, Open Loyalty has been working on its loyalty technology, equipping developers and marketers with the best set of tools for developing personalized loyalty applications. Specialized modules such as Members, Campaigns, Rewards, Tiers, Offers, and Referrals offer a wide range of supported use cases and enormous flexibility in customizing the loyalty offering.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 62 Loyalty blocks
Inside Open Loyalty, you will firm a set of elastic loyalty program modules that will allow you to introduce rich engagement mechanics. Thanks to different loyalty blocks you will be able to introduce components such as points, tiers, rewards, digital wallets, multitenancy, cashback, referrals, coupons, CRM profiling, loyalty cards. Here are the most important modules of the product:
Members The Members module is one of the fundamental pieces of Open Loyalty. It collects and stores all of the relevant customer data that helps Loyalty Managers to personalize all of the targeted offerings, making sure the right triggers act on the right customers at the right time.
The Members module comes with a full Customer 360’ view that provides an outline of the relevant customer data including profile details, transaction history, points breakdown, and more.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 63 The Customer 360’ also includes a customer timeline - a streamlined set of all interactions between the members and the program since the very beginning of their customer journey.
Another powerful piece of the Members area is the Segments sub-module. It allows program managers to run dynamic customer segmentation based on a fully customizable set of conditions and variables to choose from, including average spending, purchasing frequency, transaction source, and more.
Using AND/OR chain links between various conditions, marketers can create complex queries that help them isolate groups of customers based on their profile details or past behaviour. Leveraging customer data makes Open Loyalty a vital part of the whole ecosystem and enables program managers to target specific customers with the right offering.
Campaigns The Campaigns module sits at the center of the functional heart of Open Loyalty. This core module empowers program managers with a customizable rule builder to create engagement triggers based on Transactions and Custom events.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 64 Using a combination of conditions and effects, marketers can easily build campaigns that leverage transactional data as well as custom activities members take in and outside of the loyalty program and then incentivize those actions with points.
Rewards The value members receive from their participation in the program is a fundamental piece of every successful loyalty program. The Rewards module comes handy when crafting the redemption possibilities that are available to the program members.
While configuring a particular reward, managers can choose from a variety of options, including Material rewards, Static/Dynamic coupons and more. Every reward comes with a detailed set of settings and attributes that help to control usage limits as well as activity & visibility of the rewards.
Using a dedicated targeting mechanism, specific rewards can be presented to chosen groups of customers and thanks to the built-in coupon code generator, management and distribution of the rewards becomes a painless experience.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 65 Tiers Lots of the loyalty and engagement programs use Tiers to introduce progress-based incentives and gamify the experience for the program members. Open Loyalty comes with a customizable Tiers module that makes it easy to configure a tier structure together with all the benefits that come with it.
Tiers can be constructed upon customer spending or the number of accrued points, each with specified thresholds and conditions. It’s also possible to supplement any tier with a Special Reward - a one-off or recurring benefit that members enjoy when they gain a tier and move up the ladder.
Summary of Open Loyalty
■ Open Loyalty is a headless loyalty platform that empowers teams with a customizable set of loyalty mechanics they can implement across different channels.
■ A modern architecture and an API-first approach makes the platform flexible and scalable, ready to withstand massive traffic and high volume of interactions.
■ With Open Loyalty, developers and marketers can choose from a variety of modules to create the unique loyalty experience they want the program members to be a part of.
■ Thanks to its robust API, Open Loyalty becomes a vital part of the ecosystem, leveraging customer & transactional data from various sources and being able to fuel marketing tools with relevant information.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 66 Marketing tools Talon.One
Damian Kłaptocz, Business Analyst at Divante Description
Since 2015, Talon.One has grown into the leading promotion engine for businesses operating all around the world. The developers and entrepreneurs behind Talon.One wanted to find the holy grail for digital promotions. They succeeded by creating an all-in-one headless application to build promotions, marketing, referrals and loyalty that can fulfill complex customer needs. It can also be integrated with any eCommerce setup and a host of other business platforms through API.
Talon.One’s Promotion Engine will fit practically any eCommerce business that wants to go headless or composable. What’s more, the creators are open to innovations and custom modifications based on every single customer need.
At the moment, Talon.One is the only true headless promotion tool on the market. It allows you to build complex rules and interactions, with a friendly user experience (UX) and intuitive user interface (UI) at the same time.
Walkthrough
Once you create an account, you can log into the Talon.One dashboard.
There are small and medium enterprise (SME) sample data already created in this example. As you can see on the screenshot above, you’ll find a Discover and Learn section just after logging in.
That’s quite important because, since there are no similar applications available right now, your first steps with Talon.One may seem overwhelming. Despite that, after a few hours, you’ll be able to create advanced campaigns, plan budgets, and monitor your
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 68 customers with ease. You can find how-to guides, use cases, and ideas on the Talon.One website. That’s a great way to start using it in “advanced mode.”
To start, you should add a new application to Talon.One. Applications are basically all the elements that Talon.One has to integrate with. The easiest example will be an eCommerce platform, but in some cases, you may want to use data from your customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to create advanced mechanisms. This is also possible as long as all the applications get their API gateways.
Once you add the application, you should create the API keys for establishing the connection. API configuration can be found in the Settings and Developer Settings section.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 69 You can create an API key for simple integrations or an API key that will also support some third-party components. In this example, we’ll use a simple one.
Talon.One allows you to create many API keys for each project, so it can simultaneously connect it to more than one eCommerce platform.
You can also use this functionality to connect to many different environments of your eCommerce, like test, stage, production, etc.
Now let’s go back to the campaign creator.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 70 Remember that you can run multiple campaigns for each application. However, in this example, we’ll create just one to show the possibilities that Talon.One gives you.
Let’s assume that our campaign will include not only discounts dedicated to some particular customers, but also coupon codes and a referral program.
Once the campaign is created, you can start configuring it step by step.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 71 The Talon.One app suggests five steps in the campaign creation process. You’ll find them in the yellow boxes on the top of the screen.
Details In this part, you can add a description for your campaign. Remember that many users in your company may work with the same application, so adding descriptions might be helpful to organize your work in the best way possible.
Status Campaigns you create have their own status flow. Different statuses will help your team recognize which campaign needs preparation or update, which is currently running, which came to an end, etc. Dots in different colors represent different campaign statuses.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 72 Schedule To set up your campaign’s start and end dates, you can use the Schedule tab in the settings section.
Remember that if no particular schedule is set, the campaign will start immediately and last as long as you keep it active.
Budget If you’re familiar with marketing, you know that each campaign should have its limitations, not only in time but also in the budget your company is willing to spend on it. The Budgets section gives you the control you need. It offers a variety of budget control settings ranging from the total amount of discounts given to the number of coupon creations. In this example, I’ll add some common eCommerce limitations.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 73 Campaign Discount Total will make our campaign last until it exceeds the total summarized amount of discounts. Let’s set it to 10,000 Euro.
Another limitation will make our campaign stop if the number of Coupon Codes Redemptions reaches 500. The third one will stop our campaign if the Total Amount of Discounts Claimed through the referral program reaches 8,000 Euro.
No matter which of those three limits is reached, our campaign will shut down automatically. If none of those are achieved within the given time, our campaign will stop on the date given in the Schedule section.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 74 Coupons Talon.One allows you to use their own advanced coupon generator.
Let’s generate some coupon codes for our customers. I decided to set up a limit of 500 coupon redemptions in the campaign limits, so I will generate 500 coupon codes that will be valid until the campaign end date is reached.
Once the codes are generated, you can export them or use them via API.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 75 Remember that unique, auto-generated coupon codes are only one of the possibilities.
You can set one coupon code for all the customers and set it to be used multiple times or dedicate a coupon code to a specific customer or a group of customers.
Rules Each time you add something to the campaign, its dashboard is updated. When we go back to the dashboard, only one more missing ingredient is displayed in the yellow box.
Define Rules means creating conditions and effects of the campaign.
The tool that allows you to do it, The Rule Builder, is the heart of Talon.One.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 76 Before we go any further, I need to clarify something. Rule building is usually based on predetermined elements. In typical eCommerce solutions, we can build promotional rules based on the list of available conditions.
Talon.One goes a step further and allows you to create your own conditions based on variables you define yourself. In the example below, I’ll use typical data to avoid unnecessary complications.
Instead of creating a single rule for referral and another one for coupon codes, we can create a rule that will work for both.
My example gives the customer 10% off on the whole order, no matter if they’re using a coupon or sharing the referral code with a friend.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 77 The number of rules, conditions, and effects is unlimited, and there are plenty of different options to choose from.
It probably gives Talon.One users the most powerful rule builder available on the market.
Insights Once everything is set up, we can go back to the dashboard and activate our campaign.
When the campaign is active, you can check its performance in the Insights tab.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 78 Data from Talon.One Insights can be exported and used for other purposes like presentations or calculations. There’s no need to connect external analytics tools.
Talon.One loyalty One of the most common issues in eCommerce platforms is the lack of loyalty features. Even after adding some loyalty modules in classic eCommerce solutions, developers must spend a lot of time integrating them with promotions. Talon.One solves that problem by adding a loyalty feature that is strongly connected with promotions. To show how it works, I’ll create a simple loyalty program and then modify the running campaign by adding some loyalty rules.
My loyalty program points will be valid for one year, and each user will gain some loyalty points 14 days after purchase. It should prevent giving points to those who decide to return products after purchase.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 79 Once the loyalty program is added, you can use the Talon.One API to store loyalty points for each user. Now let’s assume we want to extend the group of customers that can get the discount by adding everyone with at least one loyalty point. We go to the Campaign Settings feature to enable loyalty.
Now we go back to the Rule Builder and add one more condition.
By checking the number of loyalty points, we can provide our promotions only to the chosen users. We can pick the ones that already bought something before or performed any other action that results in granting some loyalty points to their wallet, like adding a review, sharing on Facebook, or subscribing to the newsletter.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 80 Done. We now have our campaign connected with a loyalty program.
Obviously, each owner can add users to Talon.One and set their roles. Each role has a set of permissions so you can manage large organizations from a single Talon.One account. To keep control of each user’s actions, Talon.One provides an audit log that groups user actions with a filtering feature.
Finally, there are some tools for developers included in Talon.One that allow everything from creating and managing custom attributes to webhooks and API testers.
All those tools will help developers set up integrations between Talon.One and other applications in the stack.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 81 Summary of Talon.One
■ Talon.One is an all-in-one promotions platform, with extensive capabilities across loyalty, referrals, coupons and much more.
■ New users can dive into the platform immediately, with help from tips, guides, setup and dev documentation, and the Talon.One customer success team.
■ With Talon.One it’s possible to create advanced promotional campaigns for any scenario. The Rule Builder is fully customizable, and even allows you to create your own custom variables to use across campaigns.
■ With full budget, time and redemption controls, as well as an audit log, you can track and fine tune every aspect of your promotional campaigns.
■ There’s also a host of developer tools to help you maximize performance for your own individual use case.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 82 Digital experience platforms Contentstack
Damian Kłaptocz, Business Analyst at Divante Description
Contentstack is a very powerful headless content management system (CMS) designed to manage your content across the entire organization. Multiple features allow Contentstack users to create multilingual and multichannel content using custom or predefined blocks. It also allows for the integration with eCommerce platforms or product information systems (PIMs) to gather product information that can be placed and rendered on the CMS side and then the distribution of it.
Walkthrough
Contentstack was created for large enterprise businesses from the ground up to address the specific needs of business and technical users alike. It can be used for multichannel eCommerce and all other online platforms that need to deliver content through multiple channels across the world. Its primary focus is to provide the possibility to cooperate with multiple employees, agencies, and translators at the same time.
To fulfill those requirements, Contentstack includes advanced, editable workflows and content statuses, and versioning. It also provides for the possibility to search a product database of an external system and has great support for multilingual, multichannel solutions with distribution channels in different timezones.
At the same time, it’s very flexible and extensible. Some really nice integrations are already available out-of-the-box, like, for example, Adobe DAM integration or the commercetools integration that allows for using the commercetools products database while creating content with Contentstack.
Right now, there are two Contentstack datacenters that you can use. One is in Europe and the other is in the United States.
Creating new stack
After selecting one of them and logging into it, the user is welcomed by a clean dashboard and asked to Create New Stack.
Stacks are basically the compositions of data models.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 84 Once the stack is ready, the user is redirected to its Dashboard.
Dashboard
Elements of the dashboard can be shown or hidden depending on the user’s needs, so each user can have an individual look for their dashboard.
Content To start creating content, we need to use the Content tab. The user is asked to create a content type if there are no types available. You can import the content type instead of manually creating it. Depending on the needs, you can create one of four different content types:
■ Single web page. For example, a homepage.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 85 ■ Multiple web pages. For example, blog posts.
■ Single block. For example, a banner.
■ Multiple blocks. For example, a user database.
After deciding what kind of content type you need, it’s time to add some fields to it. Contentstack comes with a large variety of fields that you can use, including group fields, global fields that are used across different types, and custom fields.
Fields are added by dragging and dropping from the left-hand column to the middle one. They are configured in the right-hand column. Nice and easy.
When all the fields are set up, the content type can be saved and added to the Content Types list.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 86 To add some content, simply click on the content type and fill out the form.
Now you can publish the content. Contentstack comes with a powerful publishing scheduler, so instead of immediate publication, you can add it to the release. You can add many different content types to a single release and set the publish date.
Thanks to this solution, you can publish content on many different websites or website divisions simultaneously.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 87 Releases Upcoming releases can be found in the Releases tab.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 88 Thanks to the timezone selector, you can publish your content on many websites worldwide at precisely the same hour local time.
Publish Queue Next is the Publish Queue. It displays all the content release dates. It’s very helpful when you manage many articles at once, especially in more than one timezone.
Assets The Assets tab is the one that displays a simple data assets manager (DAM). Multiple media files can be stored here and grouped into folders.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 89 Settings And finally, the Settings tab. Contentstack is highly customizable, and there are a lot of options in the Settings menu.
Stack General settings and API keys can be found in the Stack sub-page.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 90 Environments Different environments can be created and managed in the Environments subpage.
Languages Contentstack allows you to add many languages for created content depending on the user’s needs. Languages can be added in the Languages subpage.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 91 Roles More on users, roles and permission settings can be found under Roles.
Contentstack allows users to use webhooks for easier integration with other applications. Adding webhooks makes publishing content much easier and saves developers’ time.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 92 Workflows
Workflows included in Contentstack are a powerful functionality that allows administrators to create and manage how content is edited and published. By assigning different users and user roles to each step of the process, owners gain control over content creation and publication.
Extensions In the Extensions section, administrators can extend Contentstack’s functionality. Some pre-built extensions can be selected from the list and added. Developers can also create their own extensions.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 93 Audit log The last element worth mentioning here is the Audit log. Here, administrators and owners can see all the actions performed by all the users.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 94 Summary of Contentstack
■ Excellent for enterprise solutions
■ Great editor experience
■ Advanced, easy to create, custom workflows
■ Publishing scheduler with time zone management
■ The possibility to compose and plan a release for many different content elements at once
■ Publishing queue
■ Pre-built extensions
■ Custom extensions
■ Audit log
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 95 Digital experience platforms Contentful
Damian Kłaptocz, Business Analyst at Divante Description
Contentful helps digital teams assemble content and deliver experiences, faster. It offers an open platform that adapts to how digital builders work to meet business goals, through easy customization and deep integration with any tech stack.
Digital teams deliver value to customers faster by innovating and orchestrating digital experience delivery, at scale by aggregating, structuring and delivering content across an organization’s digital footprint.
With a fully adaptable, open and modular set of capabilities, and portfolio of flexible APIs, Contentful enables cross-functional teams to streamline operations with a customizable set of developer and editorial tools.
Contentful’s open and extensible App Framework offers a programmable interface (with deep UI customization), advanced content automation on the backend and seamless integration with other services — ensuring the platform can be adapted to business needs.
This lets digital teams quickly build the capabilities they need, whether it’s by extending the platform or integrating with existing services.
A content platform enables innovation by scaling content across geographies and business units, while adapting to digital team, customer and market changes. Digital teams using Contentful can feel confident that they’re supported by an ever-growing community, and partner ecosystem.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 97 Walkthrough
Creating new space At the beginning of your journey with Contentful, you have to Create a space.
For the purposes of this eBook, we’ll use the community edition of Contentful and an example of a space for a Photo Gallery.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 98 In Contentful, each organization can run multiple spaces, and each space consists of many data models. Adding a data model is easy. All we need to do is add a name for it and select some fields.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 99 By selecting and configuring different fields, we create a content model (type).
Each field has to be configured before it can be used, and the configuration differs depending on the type selected.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 100 For example, for media files, you have to select single or multiple modes.
Then, there are some Validation options that you can use.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 101 Finally, the user can adjust the look and feel of the field.
Content model We create our data model combining a couple of different fields.
Now you can use the model to create a content database. Here is a preview of Photo Gallery content.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 102 Content To add more content, just fill in the form prepared by Contentful based on your data models in the Content tab.
Media It’s also possible to browse all the media assets used in the database by clicking on the Media tab.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 103 Apps As one of the leading solutions in the CMS world, Contentful can easily connect to the apps from the Apps tab.
Developers can add their own applications as well.
Settings Last but not least is the Settings tab that expands a menu to allow the user to configure the project. Contentful provides a lot of different setups, including:
Extensions that allow for the possibility to create your own extension or use one from Github
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 104 Language options
Users
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 105 Roles and permissions
Webhooks
Environments (up to four in the free plan)
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 106 Content preview and usage statistics
Summary of Contentful
■ Free to use for up to four environments
■ Easy to start working with
■ Excellent UX/UI
■ Clean and readable
■ Out-of-the-box integrations with Dropbox, Flickr, Box, Google Drive, commercetools, Algolia, Cloudinary, and many more
■ The possibility to create your own extensions or use extensions from GitHub
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 107 Digital experience platforms GraphCMS
Damian Kłaptocz, Business Analyst at Divante Description
GraphCMS is a solution for small to enterprise businesses that want to use GraphQL to exchange data.
Walkthrough
Setting up an account What attracts your attention from the very first moments with GraphCMS is the emphasis on performance and a quick response from the server. After creating an account and logging in, you’re transferred to the onboarding screen.
This screen allows you to start a new project from scratch or use one of the starter projects with ready content models, like, for example, to run a blog or an eCommerce store.
Once selected, GraphCMS will ask you to choose a data center to host all the content. Independent of selection, all content is cached across 190+ Edge CDN nodes globally.
Further dedicated clusters in over 70+ data centers are also available on enterprise plans. It also asks you to provide a project name.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 109 Dashboard Another element for which the GraphCMS team should be praised is the emphasis they put on educational materials and the help provided to new users. The Dashboard contains information about how to work with GraphCMS and where to find additional materials about the application, such as API documentation or support.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 110 Schema In GraphCMS, the models are gathered to generate your project’s Schema. Each Schema can consist of Content Models and Enumerations. Adding both models and the fields that are in them is transparent and straightforward. It’s enough to choose the one we need from the available field types and configure it as needed.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 111 Content editing When our content model is ready, we can go to Content editing.
Filling in the form’s fields allows you to add new entries to the database.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 112 Posts The Posts element in the example is worth noticing. GraphCMS allows you to create relationships between different content models. As a result, it’s easy to link two content models within the tool, like, for example, Authors and Blog posts. GraphCMS supports one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many relationships.
Assets The next tab, Assets, contains multimedia files used in content models. By default, GraphCMS supports DAM and treats assets as a default content model that is extendable, like other content models, to add attributes, like title, altText, etc. An essential element here is the ability to version assets and compare them with the published version. It’s only available in paid versions of GraphCMS. Asset transformations are also supported. When fetching assets, you can pass an optional transformation argument to the URL field.
API Playground Developers will surely be pleased with the API Playground, which allows you to build and test queries. Thanks to API Playground equipment in the Explorer tab, even novice programmers or testers will be able to use the tool. The GraphCMS API Playground supports saved queries as well as automatic query generation based on the content models. With GraphCMS Mutations API, there’s full support for GraphQL Mutations, too.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 113 Webhooks Webhooks will allow for the quick integration with other services, such as search engines or messengers. They’ll reduce the time needed by developers to connect GraphCMS with other applications, including the front-end application. Webhooks are available on all plans, including free, in addition to native integrations such as Vercel and Netlify, with more on the way.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 114 Settings The last item is the Settings tab. In addition to basic data, we also find workflow elements, content staging, and in the case of paid subscriptions, the ability to configure multiple environments. This tab is where most project-related configurations occur, including setting API access, setting locales, defining environments, and generating permanent authorization tokens (PATs).
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 115 Summary of GraphCMS
■ GraphQL based
■ A clear UX that is very intuitive
■ A free forever plan for up to five members
■ A quick start guide with tutorials
■ A helpful support team at GraphCMS
■ Multiple data centers to choose from
■ API Playground
■ Webhooks
■ Various environments, workflows, and content staging for premium users
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 116 Digital experience platforms Strapi
Damian Kłaptocz, Business Analyst at Divante Description
Strapi is the leading open-source headless CMS. It’s 100% JavaScript, fully customizable, and developer-first. It’s also one of the few headless CMSs that can be hosted locally.
Walkthrough
Introduction Starting work in Strapi is really easy. The demo and documentation help new users and developers to get familiar with the platform smoothly. The biggest advantage? On top of being open-source, having a flexible content structure, customization capabilities, and Swagger to visualize your API’s documentation. Documentation for the API is generated automatically, and users can test the usability of their data models during creation without high skills or a prepared front end. An additional advantage is a marketplace that allows users to download extensions, including the GraphQL extension.
There are several options for installing Strapi (i.e. CLI, Docker, One-Click buttons) and deployment options for your project or application. You can choose any hosting platform you want: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Render, Netlify, Heroku, a VPS, or a dedicated server. You can scale as you grow, 100% independent.
Dashboard After creating an account and logging in, the user is presented with a clear, simple dashboard for creating content.
In the menu on the left-hand side, you can see the user data collection created by default. In Strapi, we can create many data collections. These are objects that aggregate fields with data in Strapi called Collections.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 118 Content-types builder Content-types builder allows you to create new data models.
From the list of available fields, users can select those needed in a given model and configure them. A set of fields can be saved as a new collection or as a single type. If the model contains only one entry, this is a good solution when creating content, such as for home pages or menus.
Content Manager Another user-friendly solution is the view configurator. Here, we can create a data model and also design its appearance.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 119 The builder is very transparent and easy to use. Creating fields is quick, and it’s easy to edit them afterward. After completing the model, Strapi automatically creates all required endpoints in the API. To see what our model looks like from the technical side, go to the plug-in with documentation.
Internationalization With the free Internationalization plugin installed, it is possible to manage content in more than one language, called „locale”. To manage content in a specific locale, the latter must be added beforehand through the Internationalization settings.
Documentation
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 120 Two elements deserve special attention here. They’re the possibility of updating and versioning and the Open button that takes the user to Swagger.
I won’t describe the Swagger application here so as not to bore non-technical readers. You can find more about it on their website.
Media Library Below is the Media Library. This is a type of DAM that stores multimedia files used in data models.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 121 Marketplace The next tab is the already mentioned Marketplace. It allows you to quickly download and install the necessary plugins.
You can also find a list of installed plugins on the Plugins page above.
Application The last available subpage allows you to configure the Application as well as Authentication for both administrator and end user roles and permissions.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 122 If your Strapi application was configured to allow authentication through SSO (Single Sign-On), you can access the admin panel using a specific provider instead of logging in with a regular Strapi administrator account.
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 123 Providers The last interesting element worth mentioning is Providers, which allows you to manage the available login methods. It’s a kind of social login module that will enable users to use accounts from other platforms to log into Strapi.
Summary of Strapi
■ Cloud and on-premise
■ Easy to start working with
■ Clean and readable
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 124 ■ Automatically created documentation for API plus Swagger for developers
■ A marketplace with plugins that are free to install and use
■ Social login out-of-the-box
■ A free community edition with all major features
■ Flexible content structure
■ Customization capabilities
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce 125 Authors
Headless toolkit: 14 essential tools for the future of composable commerce Tom Karwatka Advisory Board Member at Divante
Former CEO at Divante eCommerce Technology Company. Leading industry voice who believes eCommerce can improve our world.
Co-founder of Vue Storefront and Open Loyalty, angel investor, and founder of Tech To The Rescue. Piotr Karwatka Advisory Board Member at Divante
Before starting Divante in 2008, Piotr was already passionate about opensource. As a CTO, he has not strayed from this path. He co-founded Vue Storefront, the open-source PWA frontend for any eCommerce, which is based on Vue.js.
Piotr’s side project is a CTO-CTO Community where he’s inviting CTO’s, CMO’s, founders to discuss various topics circling around Open Source, Enterprise Software, and eCommerce. Find us at cto-cto. com or on your favorite podcast’s platform (Apple, Pocket Casts, Spotify) Bartosz Picho eCommerce Solution Architect at Divante
Engineering Director and one-man army for solving problems that require a deep and practical understanding of business and technology.
Co-author of The Microservices Book with 10+ years of experience empowering global brands with eCommerce solutions built with technologies like Magento, Shopware, and others. Damian Kłaptocz Business Analyst at Divante
Senior Business Analyst and team leader in Divante. He began his journey in eCommerce development in 2008 as an eCommerce manager and developer. Worked and gained experience for a number of years as an eCommerce manager, project manager, product owner, and finally, as a business analyst cooperating with many well- known brands like Selena, Senetic, Lampenwelt, and Doppler. An agile, scrum, and headless technologies enthusiast. Co-author of Global Rollouts for eCommerce e-book. Bartłomiej Loc Project Manager at Divante
Project Manager at Divante since the beginning of 2020. He started developing his leadership skills in a nonprofit organization in 2015.
He is passionate about agile project management methods and management philosophy.
As a certified Scrum Master and Project Manager, he leads teams creating exceptional eCommerce stores. Piotr Znamirowski Head of Shopify Development at Divante
Experienced consultant and supervisor for eCommerce implementation and integration. Always looking for a way to optimize and automate IT processes.
Conducts pre-implementation audits and analyzes and supervises the implementation of eCommerce systems. Kacper Cebo Open Loyalty VP of Sales at Divante
Open Loyalty Co-founder and an experienced business consultant specialized in advising loyalty solutions to clients from a variety of industries.
Passionate about loyalty & customer engagement techniques, always focused on understanding how the loyalty program design impacts high-level business goals of the organization and drives growth. Has anything caught your eye?
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