Commerce Factory: Breaking the Rules in eCommerce Performance

Jeff Larche

Commerce Factory: Breaking the Rules in eCommerce Performance

An adage, popular in business and marketing, goes “Quick, cheap, high quality: Pick any two.” It’s a reminder that in life there are tradeoffs. For instance, that Halloween costume you ordered from a drop-shipper? It arrives in time for the party and costs next to nothing, but don’t expect it to survive to next year’s party!

There is, however, a paradox to this rule when you need a better, smarter B2B eCommerce platform. It’s the surprising benefits of a new concept in cloud-based software: headless, composable eCommerce. To describe it, we’ve coined the term Composable Commerce as a Service, or C-CaS. The paradox is it seems to check all three boxes of quick, cheap, and high quality. Here’s how.

Built as 'Quick' as 13 Weeks

Commerce Factory is a foundation Credera has built, upon which we assemble bespoke end-to-end eCommerce capabilities for our clients. It’s built in Acquia’s flavor of Drupal, integrated with commercetools. No two eCommerce sites are alike, but because we’ve already “framed the house,” so to speak, all that’s left is the finishing work.

That means our clients can go from signing the SOW to a fully functional eCommerce site in as little as 3 months.

C-CaS Costs Less Because 'Time Is Money'

With so much of the work already done “in the factory,” when we move the foundation to our clients’ cloud instances, our implementations require fewer developer hours. It also helps that many or most of those hours are from highly skilled engineers based in India.

The result: The delivered cost is literally comparable with business models where the site you get seems to be a bargain but then you’re dinged with ongoing, odious transaction fees.

The difference with Commerce Factory? Our clients own the site and owe us nothing in ongoing fees.

Rock-Solid Quality

To complete the paradox, consider how our C-CaS sites are built. Between Acquia’s Drupal and commercetools’ Java, a Commerce Factory site uses two of the best-supported and stable languages available. That translates to a quality system that’s easy to maintain.

Something IT and Marketing Can Both Get Behind

Our client’s IT teams love the fact that our C-CaS sites require little maintenance. Conversely, Marketing prioritizes the speed and ease of product-related updates. Thanks to Site Studio, Acquia’s low-code front end, adding or changing product details or other content is as easy as filling out an online form or clicking and dragging objects.

Site Studio even provides a robust and customizable workflow, so Marketing teams can ensure quality while getting new selling opportunities in front of customers fast.

And Something for Finance

A byproduct of the quick construction timeline is the speed with which our Commerce Factory sites start generating new revenue. That means their CFOs can see a positive return on investment in record time. They also love that there is no margin erosion in the form of transaction fees.