In this ecommerce podcast, James and Paul interview Kelly Goetsch, Chief Strategy Officer for Commercetools, on the technology leader’s current product strategy and key platform capabilities like B2B.
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Most people consider Commercetools as an enterprise solution, competing against alternative models like Salesforce and Adobe. However, there has been recent discussion about Commercetools product suitability for the SMEs and how the mid-market will become more important from a product strategy point of view.
This episode features an interview with Chief Strategy Officer Kelly Goetsch, a co-founder of the MACH Alliance and respected technology thought leader. We explore the product focus, differentiation from other leading vendors and some of the interesting use cases such as B2B commerce.
Tl;dr
- Commercetool’s current strategy
- Views on the mid-market and Shopify’s recent Components announcement
- Core product focus and key capabilities like B2B
- Pricing and roadmap
Key discussion points
- For those that are new to Commercetools, how does the current Commercetools GTM strategy look like, as in does Commercetools only implement via SI partners, and how did this change during 2023?
- Most people consider Commercetools as an enterprise solution, competing against alt models like Salesforce and Adobe: will the mid -market become more important from a product strategy POV, or is the focus very much on large enterprise?
- How do you perceive Shopify’s move into the enterprise world with Components. Are you worried they could evolve to become a genuine composable competitor?
- One of the biggest bits of feedback we hear on Commercetools is that there’s a lot that needs to be built out, particularly around the admin, comparing against other platforms; can you talk us through what core functions are provided as native vs. things that need to be built e.g. promotions, catalog management, order management / OMS etc.
- Your integrations marketplace appears to have been growing a lot recently – is this a big focus for Commercetools? In terms of bringing in new connectors and making integrations faster for merchants?
- Which 3rd party integrations are most popular with your customer base & which ecommerce capability areas is Commercetools focused on e.g. ERP, shipping, search & merch, promotions, payment etc.
- With the core product there’s definitely a pre-conception that businesses looking at Commercetools need a CTO and engineering team in order to get the best from the platform, what’s your view on this?
- Coming back to the product, how big a focus is B2B for Commercetools in 2023?
- Can you talk us through your native offering on that side: what B2B models do you support through existing APIs and components? Feel free to also reference some example implementations
- Another question we get asked a lot is how Commercetools’ pricing model works – can you talk us through this?
- What other changes will we see from Commercetools and the product this year – which areas are you building more core capabilities/features for?
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