Commercetools vs Sap Commerce Cloud – Navigating the e-Commerce Landscape

As the ecommerce industry has become hyper competitive with consumer expectations changing dynamically, businesses find it difficult to stay at par with the transformations and trends. Most businesses fail to understand customer expectations, identify market trends and bottleneck points, strategize product development, test the products subjected to varying factors, and enhance customer experience. As a result, innovation gets stifled with businesses having no solution for the pain points, let alone plans for risk mitigation.

To overcome the challenges, the ecommerce industry has adopted two commerce solutions: SAP Hybris and Commercetools. While SAP is a general commerce suite designed and developed to handle legacy web pages, Commercetools is a far more advanced platform with modern-day features and built-in tools. So, before you migrate your existing ecommerce platform to either one of these, learning about SAP VS Commercetools is imperative. That being said, the following article will illustrate the major differences between these platforms, their benefits and challenges, and other relevant aspects.

What Is SAP Hybris?

SAP Hybris was first released into the market for real-time use in 1997 by the German-based product company, Hybris. It is a comprehensive commerce platform developed to handle large-scale, complex, and legacy-system websites and web pages of different ecommerce platforms. Even though Hybris can be integrated with both B2B and B2C businesses, it doesn’t offer advanced digital experiences.

Hybris is a complete business suite that comes with numerous tools and built-in modules for handling various ecommerce workflows and functionalities. For instance, you can use this platform to enhance customer experience across different digital touchpoints, enhance shopping cart performance, integrate multiple payment gateways, and so on.

What Is Commercetools?

Commercetools is a next-gen commerce platform that empowers businesses with adaptability, scalability, flexibility, and expandability. It is based on MACH architecture, thereby eliminating difficulties of a monolith architecture, enhancing business performance across all touchpoints, improving customer experience, and adapting to the fast-paced market trends and revolutionary changes.

To understand Commercetools in a better way, we have illustrated its working principle.

Microservice-based

All the workflows integrated in Commercetools are decoupled from one another, thereby introducing modularity. Each workflow is handled as a microservice, thereby acting independently and not interfering with any other process service.

API-first

Since the functional workflows are decoupled from one another, service-based APIs are used to establish smooth and streamlined communication. These APIs allow third-party integrations with Commercetools, thereby allowing businesses to work in a better way. For instance, professionals don’t have to make manual entries in the database with this commerce platform. The APIs itself fetch product information directly from the manufacturer’s website and render the same with UI components for displaying them on the screen.

Cloud Native

Commercetools is a cloud-based commerce platform that allows businesses to migrate to the cloud server, function remotely, and scale the resources as per the business requirements.

Headless architecture

The entire architecture of Commercetools is based on a headless concept where the frontend and backend layers are decoupled from one another. So, when a code change needs to be deployed to the frontend, no negative impact will be there in the backend and vice versa. Developers and other professionals can work on either layer independently without having to learn about the other layer in-depth.

SAP Commerce Cloud VS Commercetools: A Parallel Study

Before you select the commerce platform from your business, knowing more about the differences between SAP commerce cloud and Commercetools seems to be a better idea. This way you can make a well-informed decision, without leaving room for further regret.

1. Flexibility Of The Infrastructure

The infrastructure of SAP commerce cloud is quite complex and rigid, with all the APIs and extensions dependent on the core functions. As a result, businesses have to keep the tool updated with every version release. This can cause problems with OS and hardware compatibility, performance, and website management. On the contrary, Commercetools features a lightweight and flexible infrastructure, owing to GraphQL support, APIs, and decoupled frontend and backend layers. So, businesses won’t have to make major changes in the entire ecommerce website just to deliver a change in a specific workflow or process service.

2. Extensibility

Extensibility can be defined as the ability of a platform to accept and adapt with new changes, functionalities, and features. If you manage your business with SAP Hybris, you won’t have enough flexibility and independence to deploy code changes, add new features, or modify the legacy systems without impacting the core commerce. On the other hand, Commercetools is highly expandable as it offers an array of opportunities to extend the existing workflows, add new and advanced features, and enhance the overall performance with minimal risks.

3. Maintenance

Both SAP commerce cloud and Commercetools are continuously upgraded to ensure the bugs are fixed and new features can be released with every version. However, the ease of updating, maintaining, and repairing Commercetools platform is much better than that of Hybris. This is because SAP releases the updates and new features at the core, making implementation of the same more complex. On the other hand, Commercetools releases more background updates that don’t require taking down the ecommerce website from the server, increasing the downtime, and relaunching the entire system once again.

4. Vendor Dependency

Vendor dependency means choosing technology manufacturers and providers to build the complete ecommerce website for a business. For Commercetools, vendor dependency is not quite high because businesses can choose independent tech providers for each tool according to their requirements. The same cannot be said for SAP Hybris because all the features are managed at the core level and replacing them with new tech solutions is a complex process.

5. Time To Market

Commercetools is a highly adaptable and scalable platform that allows businesses to develop products faster, test the same in real-time scenarios, and release the software earlier. The MACH architecture of Commercetools is the primary reason for faster time to market. But if you consider SAP Hybris, the entire architecture is based on a monolithic concept. In other words, you cannot deploy code changes or new features rapidly, especially if you want to keep the server uptime high. With reduced time to market, it might not be a feasible solution for today’s fast-paced ecommerce industry.

6. Omnichannel Behavior

Both Commercetools and SAP commerce cloud empower ecommerce businesses with abilities to deliver uniform omnichannel experience across digital touchpoints. However, the time taken to implement any change through Hybris is way more than Commercetools. Besides, due to low adaptability and scalability, businesses need to plan extensively and work much harder to establish omnichannel experience with Hybris.

7. Customization And Personalization

SAP Hybris doesn’t offer the required level of customization and personalization to the businesses. Whether it is customizing the shopping cart behavior or order management workflow, Hybris is not the ideal solution. So, if you want to deploy commerce features customized to meet the market requirements and trends, Commercetools seems to be the best option. This is mainly because of the higher level of modularity and scalability of this platform, owing to its MACH architecture.

8. Implementation Efficiency

Embarking on a SAP Hybris project entails a time-intensive process, demanding half a day and meticulous system configuration for local installation. Conversely, initiating a Commercetools project is remarkably streamlined — a simple creation of organization, project, host, and API client in the Merchant Centre enables a swift commencement of work.

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed the major differences between SAP commerce cloud and Commercetools, the leading two commerce platforms for B2C and B2B business models. Based on this comparative study, you can make a well-informed decision for migrating your business from Hybris to Commercetools.