commercetools' technology has already received several awards, including 'Leader' in Gartner's renowned Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce in 2022, 2023, 2024 and most recently in 2025. commercetools' target market is particularly in the enterprise segment. Gartner analysts assume that a large proportion of commercetools' customers generate total annual sales of more than 100 million US dollars. Some of the world's largest brands and companies, such as VW and LEGO rely on the powerful, flexible and infinitely scalable software.
As a founding member of the MACH Alliance, commercetools is committed to an open, best-of-breed model that enables companies to act quickly and agilely while always being at the cutting edge of technology. MACH is an acronym made up of the terms microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native and headless.
The idea behind the headless approach is that the backend and frontend are separated from each other and a system can access different frontends. In concrete terms, this can mean, for example, that an e-commerce system is connected to a classic store frontend, an app or another point of sale. The backend provides APIs for users, products, orders, etc. The advantage of a headless system over a classic store system is that it is much more flexible in the design of the front end. The microservices are independent of each other and are provided as Software as a Service (SaaS). This means that they are also maintained and operated by commercetools. This means that commercetools can be used to implement highly customized solutions. In order to map individual business logic, for example, you need to develop your own microservices and integrate them into the commerce landscape via API in the sense of composable commerce.
commercetools is a cloud-based software that follows the API-first principle and therefore offers a high degree of flexibility. The robust and powerful APIs (programming interfaces) of commercetools facilitate the integration of the e-commerce platform into existing system landscapes without interfering with the systems themselves. As a result, the system creates an excellent basis for continuously developing and scaling online businesses.
Compared to locally hosted systems, commercetools as a cloud-native platform has the advantage that there is no need to maintain and service your own servers for the performance-intensive business logic. Commercetools guarantees an uptime of at least 99.9%, and additional resources can be made available flexibly and as required. Traffic peaks can thus be handled without any problems. commercetools is based on a microservices architecture in which components that can be used independently of each other are connected to each other via interfaces (API) and combined to form a complex application. This modular approach allows individual components or microservices to be developed, modified, or replaced separately so that the system can be adapted flexibly and agilely. The CEO and co-founder of commercetools, Dirk Hoerig, is considered the originator of the term 'headless commerce.' Not only the term but also the concept behind it have become established worldwide in recent years, so that the headless approach can now be considered an important basic principle of various innovative commerce technologies such as Shopware or the Spryker Commerce OS. In addition to its headless commerce component, the company now also offers a frontend solution: Since 2021, the front-end application commercetools Frontend (formerly Frontastic) has been part of the commercetools ecosystem. Online stores and apps can be created quickly and easily from ready-made components and seamlessly connected to commercetools. In addition, various other applications can be connected to the system via a wide range of flexible APIs and standard interfaces. commercetools is therefore not only designed for the classic online store, but also supports a wide variety of digital front-ends such as IoT, car commerce and hybrid commerce solutions or mobile apps.
commercetools is a highly innovative SaaS solution that is particularly interesting for medium-sized and large companies as well as Internet pure players that need a powerful commerce solution and want to map complex requirements in a digital commerce platform. Thanks to its API-first and headless architecture, the platform offers a high degree of flexibility that enables companies in the B2C, B2B, and D2C sectors to develop new digital offerings and touchpoints and integrate third-party systems. Thanks to the modular structure of the system, in which microservices can be put together individually as required, users benefit from a fast time-to-market and low total cost of ownership.
Flexible APIs and standard interfaces, for example to the content platform Contentful, enable the commercetools commerce component to be expanded into a comprehensive digital experience solution based on the best-of-breed approach, which can be used to display digital offers in multilingual, multichannel scenarios.
Since November 2025, commercetools has been expanded by two key innovations in the field of AI with the new Agentic Jumpstart offering: the AI Hub and the Agent Gateway. The AI Hub serves as a central control and activation environment through which generative and agentic AI functions can be integrated into the commerce architecture. Via plug-and-play integrations with leading AI models, the Hub enables the rapid launch of conversational or shopping assistants that are seamlessly embedded in the purchasing process.
At the same time, the Agent Gateway represents an infrastructural extension of the system: It converts central commerce functions such as catalogs, shopping baskets, pricing, and ordering processes via MCP (Model Context Protocol) into standardized interfaces that can be directly understood and used by AI agents.
The platform thus integrates agentic logic deep into the workflow, with the aim that AI not only makes recommendations but also actively acts and, for example, places goods in the shopping cart, applies discounts, or initiates orders.
For commercetools users, this means that existing commerce systems can be equipped with agentic AI without the need for a complete rebuild. The architecture of commercetools is already designed for modular, API-based, and governance-capable use so that AI functions can be integrated securely and scalably. All in all, AI Hub and Agent Gateway enable companies to turn their existing infrastructure into the starting point for AI-supported shopping experiences – flexible, future-proof, and ready for the era of agentic commerce.
The cloud-native e-commerce software commercetools is a headless solution that impresses in particular with its fast time-to-market, outstanding performance and scalability, a high degree of flexibility, and low maintenance and servicing costs. As Software as a Service (SaaS), commercetools offers extensive configuration options. In addition to the configuration in the system, we support you as an e-commerce and software service provider by individualizing the system in a separate customizing layer and creating individual frontends to optimally adapt the system to your needs. Connections to third-party systems (PIM, ERP, CMS, CRM) and the creation of middleware solutions are also part of our services.