Commercetools vs Shopify: The Platform Comparison

We would say Commercetools and Shopify are among our favorites the eCommerce platforms these days. Shopify has long been a popular software to build online stores with more than 820,000 users and over 500,000 active stores. Even though offering plenty of great features, Commercetools has yet to be chosen by businesses. In this article today, we will take a glance at Commercetools vs Shopify to see what services they have and which one is suitable for your online store. 

Commercetools vs Shopify: Overall Description

Established in 2006, Commercetools is an international software company that provides cloud-based eCommerce solutions. The platform provides API to separate frontend and backend, giving more flexibility to brands and retailers. Commercetools is a REWE Digital GmbH organization branch and has its headquarters in Munich, Germany, along with many offices in big cities worldwide, such as Amsterdam, London, or Durham. 

Shopify was founded in Ontario, Canada in 2004. The platform has been known for its ease of use while offering sophisticated features for online stores, including abandoned cart recovery, inventory management, or customer management. Without any coding experience, merchants are still able to set up an impressive interface for their own website in a few clicks on Shopify. 

Commercetools vs Shopify: Product Management

Within Commercetools, there are two channels designed to support product management that users should look into: the Merchant Center and the Dashboard. 

The Merchant Center acts as the middle point between maintaining retail channels and touchpoints and modeling the business setup. As users expand their businesses, they can add more stores to the Merchant Center, whether the store is online or offline, mobile apps, or smart appliances. Retailers can manage multiple of their stores all at-a-glance with an interactive interface. Especially, international stores can be managed here as well with different currencies and tax settings. 

An overview of the businesses is provided in the Dashboard. There are various categories available in which retailers can choose what they want to see. Merchants can have a sense of which products bring more sales and which do not. Hence, they can direct their resources towards these items, and stock up inventory rather than spread their budgets thinly across their store. 

Shopify offers a full range of product management tools where it is easier to track stock levels, monitor orders, and update your product listings. Low-stock notifications are made available on this platform. When your store is about to run out of stock on an item, the system will send messages on the backend to let you know about this. On the frontend, the item will be labeled out-of-stock so that customers know and avoid adding it to their shopping cart. 

On Shopify, it is easy to create product variations based on size, colors, material, and more. Users can also set different prices for different variants – for instance, a red high heel, which is more trendy these days, would be more expensive than a plain black version. Furthermore, Shopify allows users to add an unlimited number of products to their store without affecting the website speed. 

When selling a large number of products, it is important to make it as easy as possible for shoppers to browse the store and find the product they are looking for. Hence, Shopify supports users by letting them organize products by category, price, or type within a few clicks. 

Commercetools vs Shopify: Discount Management

Promotion is an important factor that affects the buying decisions of shoppers. It is suggested that 64% of consumers wait for seasonal promotions to purchase stuff. Hence, Commercetools and Shopify both offer the discount management feature built-in or through third parties. 

In the Commercetools Merchant Center, it gives you advanced discount management capabilities across all the retail channels from one place and includes an overview of all active product discounts across stores. Both individual discount codes and discount code groups can be created to be applied to specific channels, countries, and customer groups. 

Retailers can set rule-based promotions and configure discount codes to be customer-specific. Many types of discounts are available, such as free shipping, percentage discounts, buy-one-get-one-free (BOGO), or multi-buy. 

Shopify is not built-in with the discount management functionality. Instead, a third-party will be used in this situation. Shopify Apps Store offers many great apps for discount management and loyalty which can be installed with one click. 

Commercetools vs Shopify: Apps And Integrations

The Commercetools Marketplace is divided into topics so that users can easily find what they want, including the accelerator, core technologies, optimization, and release management. The Commercetools platform most likely is not built-in with all the features needed for your eCommerce store to operate smoothly. Therefore, adding extra functionality through apps and integrations is significantly important. 

The majority of the apps on Commercetools Marketplace are free to install. However, depending on the app developers, it might charge a monthly fee or premium subscription in order to use its advanced attributes. 

Shopify App Store contains over 1,200 apps, both free and premium, for areas of business such as email marketing, shipping, or social media advertising. The Shopify options are considerably polished and free to install within a few clicks. With so many choices of apps, users should check the star ratings or user reviews before downloading anything to avoid wasting time on unnecessary apps. 

Commercetools vs Shopify: Payment Processors and Transaction Fee

Payment processors are an important part of online businesses as it enables stores to accept online payments and make online shopping possible. Fortunately, Commercetools and Shopify make connecting stores with a payment processor easy in just a few clicks. 

Commercetools has the most popular payment gateways offered on their Marketplace for users to download. With these options, retailers can take payment from whatever payment methods (credit card, debit card, direct payment, etc) and anywhere in the world. 

Depending on the processors’ developers, the payment gateway might include transaction fees on every single transaction made at your store. Hence, users should put into serious consideration when deciding which payment gateway to use. 

As for Shopify, it has its own payment processor called Shopify Payment, which charges no transaction fees. Shopify supports over 100 payment processors on their App Store all of whi\ch come with a transaction fee imposed by Shopify to encourage retailers to use the Shopify Payment app. 

Commercetools vs Shopify: Point-of-sale

With the development of technology, retail is not limited to only one platform. Instead, multiple channels (online store, mobile app, international store, etc)  are utilized to bring products as close to consumers as possible. Hence, the need for a strong POS system that offers real-time inventory synchronization, customer management, staff management, reporting function, and many more hands-on features is highly in need. While Shopify has its own POS app called ShopifyPOS, Commercetools totally relies on third-party developers to provide the POS service.

Shopify POS syncs with Shopify to track orders and inventory across retail locations, online stores, and other active sales channels. The platform also enables real-time synchronization for orders, compatible with both PC and mobile devices, and provides 24/7 support. 

ConnectPOS offers both Commercetools POS and ShopifyPOS systems for retailers to consider. Please visit our website for further information!

Wrapping Up 

Through this article, we hope to help you decide whether Commercetools or Shopify best fit your store. Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions!