Digital Commerce Technology Update – Sep. 2014

Back from my holiday and after catching up on a lot of things I want to give a brief update on what happened in the last month and what I think is very important for rethinking E-Commerce architecture. But before I do that I want to thank all of you for the great feedback and mentions I have received from you about my thoughts. This is very encouraging for me to move forward!

Commercetools was acquired by Rewe Digital

Commercetools is the company behind sphere.io, an e-commerce platform-as-a-service provider, and was recently acquired by Rewe Digital. sphere.io is a very interesting product as it fills the role of the component which stores the essential commerce data and offers a very performant API. This enables to use very lean front end applications which do not have keep essential commerce data redundantly in an own persistence layer. In fact they don’t need a persistence layer at all.

Rewe Digital belongs to the REWE Group, which is a very large German retail group operating in Europe with over 50 billion euro annual turnover. Why REWE thinks it is a good idea to own such technology? I personally think that it was a smart move and will write some deeper thoughts about this soon.

eBay Enterprise announces the Commerce Marketing Platform

eBay Enterprise has introduced its Commerce Marketing Platform to enable merchants to optimize their conversations with individual customers. To do so, the Commerce Marketing Platform offers a number of different applications. This nice marketing video shows, where the journey is heading to: http://vimeo.com/106129707

I’m very excited if the Commerce Marketing Platform services enable us to personalize our conversations with customers on the level shown in the video and if we have to give Ebay our precious data in exchange. As soon as I have deeper insights I will give you an update!

Project A Ventures announces Cryllo

I have mentioned Yves & Zed in my previous post. Yves & Zed is a an e-commerce platform which from what I know more or less follows the four axioms in its core architecture. It was developed by Project A Ventures, a German startup incubator, which has announced to release Yves & Zed under the name Cryllo (the article is in German).

On it’s page Cryllo is listing it’s main advantages and the most important one for me is that it is “customer centered” and sees the catalog and the ERP system as pure suppliers only. Can’t wait to get my hands on it! I’ll keep you posted.