Marketers are responsible for building relationships with end-customers, yet most rely on IT to reach those customers. As consumer expectations and technology changes, marketers need to be even more responsive to customers, without needing to engage IT. To keep up with this new age, commerce platforms need to offer their functionality (orders, carts, inventory, etc) as discrete API-based services that are consumed by various user interfaces and marketing technology.

2. All Rights Reserved @2017 2
Commerce Technology of the Past Stifles
Marketing Organizations of the Future
May 31st 2017

3. 1990’s and 2000’s-era Commerce
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4. How Many Times Have You Heard This from IT?
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I’m sorry, but that
payroll upgrade
comes first. You’ll
have to wait
To get that done,
you’ll need to file a
ticket
That change will
have to wait for our
next build in three
months
Our architecture
committee hasn’t
signed off on that
integration yet
We’ve already used up
our hardware budget
for the year
I’m frustrated that my
important cool new
app is prioritized the
same as payroll

5. “One ongoing project when I arrived was to widen the
product detail page (PDP) and move the Add To
Cart button from the left side of the page to the
right side. This seemed fairly innocuous, but it took
six months and well over one million dollars to
accomplish this task.”
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6. Today’s Dominant Monolithic Commerce
Platforms Emerged in the Mid 1990’s
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1995 1996 1997

7. The State of eCommerce in 1995
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8. Monolithic Commerce Platforms Force
Horizontal Tiering of Organizations
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4-12 weeksDatastore
Infrastructure
Application
User Interface
YourApplication.EAR
Fixed
Non-scalable
Slow

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1995 2017
X Centralized
X Monoliths
X On Premises
X Waterfall
X Quarterly Releases
X Horizontal Teams
X Project-based
Decentralized
Microservices
Cloud
Agile
Hourly Releases
Vertical Teams
Product-based

10. Customer Behavior is Rapidly
Changing
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11. Large Gap Between Physical and Digital
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“Commerce” “eCommerce”

12. Commerce Now Comes to You
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13. Consumer Experiences Are Increasingly
Mediated
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14. A Vision for the Future
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15. Single APIs Should Power All Channels
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“The Business”
API-based Commerce Platform

16. • Marketing owns
engagement with
customers by
building
experiences
• IT exposes data
and functionality,
without regard to
how it’s consumed
Experience Separate from Data/Functionality
16

17. Many Now Expose APIs Publicly
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18. APIs Are the Future of Commerce
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Digital commerce is rapidly evolving
and the future landscape will include
API orientation at its core. Businesses
embracing this approach will be well
positioned to embrace the API
economy, conversational interfaces,
and other capabilities that could confer
business advantage.
Gartner
IT Market Clock for Digital Commerce 2016*
“
”
* Gartner IT Market Clock for Digital Commerce 2016, Mike Lowndes, 29 September 2016

19. Moving Towards Consuming Software as Lego
Blocks – Not Large Applications
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Products
Pricing
Profiles Authorization
Carts
Inventory
Categories
OrdersPromotions
Search
Building
Block
Building
Block
Building
Block
Building
Block
Building
Block
Building
Block
Building
Block
Building
Block
Building
Block
Building
Block
Building
Block
Building
Block
api.vendor.com

20. How To Start?
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21. Start by Extending the Monolith
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Application
Database
Infrastructure
Developer
PO
DBA
Ops
2-15 people. Standard is 7 +- 2

22. Start With Non-transactional Workloads
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Non-transactionalTransactional
95% Product/Category Pages
70% Marketing Pages
10% Customer Pages
5% Order Pages

23. Break Out Pieces Into Separate Microservices
Landing
Categories
Products
Application
Datastore
Infrastructure
Application
Datastore
Infrastructure
Application
Datastore
Infrastructure
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24. Case Studies
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25. • Rapid iteration is at the
core of Amazon
o Deploys 50 Million
times a year
• Originator of “two pizza
team” concept –
“Service Teams”
o Roadmap
o Development
o Ops
o QA
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26. 1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through
service interfaces
2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces
3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no
direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory
model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via
service interface calls over the network
4. It doesn't matter what technology you use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom
protocols -- doesn't matter
5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up
to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able
to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions
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Jeff Bezos’s Mandate
2002

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• Started with browse-only
site for outages
• Broke out browse from
.com – 90%+ of traffic
• Extensive use of
“aggregation” services –
30-50 services
• Public cloud for front-end
• Now 100% custom

28. All Rights Reserved @2017 28

29. www.commercetools.com
Office Munich
Adams-Lehmann-Str. 44
80797 Munich
+49 89 99 82 996-0
Office Berlin
Sonnenallee 223
12057 Berlin
+49 30 67 24 21-20
Office Durham, US
American Underground | Crowe Building
406 Blackwell Street, Suite B034
Durham, NC 27701
+1 212 220 3809
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