White Paper

Future-Proof Your
E-commerce Solution

The 9 Reasons to Choose Spryker Cloud Commerce OS
Content

Business Introduction

This summary is supposed to provide a valuable snapshot of overall commerce trends as well as comprehensive insights into technology and innovation design.

In order to best utilize the information given in this document, it is beneficial to have an advanced understanding of information technology and basic insight into digitization.

 

The environment we operate in

Businesses operate in a constantly changing market environment. However, the velocity is constantly accelerating. In addition to universal trends, each economic sector develops its own dynamics. As a result, there is no uniform solution for commerce. Every business model and every solution is unique.

The rapid developments in the market have a direct impact on organizations. Those changes lead to the requirement of new business capabilities, which in turn result in necessary modifications in the IT capabilities. These adjustments are only effective and economic, if the IT infrastructure can enable them.

As a consequence businesses require a technology layer, which enables them to adapt faster than the competition. Simultaneously technical applications provide the organization with data and insights, that can be facilitated to identify and understand market adaptations and built solutions, which are solving arising customer needs.

Why Spryker is the best choice for a future-proof technology

Strong focus on best of breed e-commerce, not on a product suite

The environments we operate in are changing significantly: New customer needs, channels and technologies are shaping the new era of commerce, which cannot be mastered with outdated legacy tools. Succeeding in this next phase of digital commerce requires modern, flexible technology proven at scale.

The Spryker Cloud Commerce OS uniquely focuses its business offering on accelerating growth and strengthening business-consumer relationships. Our reliable, scalable online commerce system offers a configurable commerce solution, which is centered solely around enabling limitless business success in e-commerce. Spryker natively supports B2B, B2C and Enterprise Marketplace business models. As a single API-based, headless and modular platform, we ensure an exceedingly fast time to market and rich customer experiences. Spryker commerce solution is designed to strengthen your business by centralizing it around a powerful online sales channel and a single data hub or source of truth.

With best of breed platforms like Spryker, you can build your solution based on robust, tailored to-your-need features and independent add-ons, you would like to utilize for your e-commerce experience. With this unique combination, we have already empowered 150+ companies to level up their digital business in over 200 countries – including brands such as Siemens Healthineers, Hornbach, Ricoh, Redington, Sourceability, Metro, Hilti, Toyota, and Jungheinrich.

"We made a decision to have single flexible, future-proofed E-Commerce platform across multiple markets and business model with internal development team supporting the agenda, and Spryker proved to be the right choice and foundation for our E-Commerce Growth in years to follow." – Peer Review for Spryker Cloud Commerce OS on Gartner PeerInsights
Reason 01

Spryker Meets The New Requirements For Commerce

Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel. There are a lot of features around digital commerce that are fundamental from the beginning. Spryker provides the complete set of expected features out of the box and fully supports B2C and B2B business models. This enables clients to start projects extremely fast as the platform provides the complete commerce foundation.

In order to accommodate different target audiences, many brands split their B2C and B2B offerings into distinct silos. In the early days of e-commerce, that decision made sense as platforms were not flexible and powerful enough to provide both types of businesses. However, in modern digital commerce the boundaries between B2C and B2B are becoming increasingly blurry. Business models cannot be strictly separated anymore. Additionally, having separate systems for different business models often leads to inefficiency, wasted effort, and time spent duplicating and maintaining separate e-commerce infrastructures.

Spryker Cloud Commerce OS is the only platform on the market that can natively support both B2C and B2B businesses, along with more sophisticated models like omnichannel or enterprise marketplaces in a single platform. It is designed this way to provide our customers with consistent UI at a single cost helping you improve commerce efficiency, agility, and innovation across your organization. By unifying the commerce experiences within a single solution, you can share data and insights between them, helping you make more informed decisions across all product ranges even if the teams operate independently. In terms of digital commerce, with Spryker, enterprises can consolidate its heterogeneous system landscape and provide one platform for B2B, B2C, and enterprise marketplaces.

B2C B2C
B2B B2B
Marketplace Marketplace
Ready to Go
B2C
B2B
Marketplace
Live in 1 week
B2C
B2B
Marketplace
Feature-Complete
B2C
B2B
Marketplace
Fully customizable
B2C
B2B
Marketplace
Operated in Spryker Cloud
B2C
B2B
Marketplace
Reason 02

Spryker Constantly Enables New Digital Business Models

Digital commerce is not limited to B2C and B2B online shops any more. Nowadays, it is not unusual for businesses to have both corporate customers and regular end consumers, or to implement a business model that combines online and offline channels or even recurring revenue streams like subscriptions.

Spryker generally allows you to define your business models, but will also enable you to easily hop on one of the emerging trends by providing the general feature sets out of the box. During Corona, we have successfully integrated omnichannel as well as Click & Collect models to our general product portfolio in just a matter of a few weeks. This was crucial to support offline players in the food, DIY or automotive industry to keep their businesses alive while their stores had to stay closed. Also, we are enabling brands to offer reach to partners in marketplace environments.

Generally, we are in constant discussions with our clients about emerging trends, new requirements, and general improvements of our offerings. This way we can ensure we are customer-centric, providing the best value for our customers while empowering them to build extraordinary experiences for their customers. In terms of business innovation, Spryker outpaces any other platform in the market.

 

With Spryker, we found a perfect partner who was able to deliver the new e-commerce sales platform that we needed while sticking to the challenging timeline of less than three weeks.” 

Jens Brech, Director of Customer Experience and Network Quality at Toyota Germany

B2C Online Shops

  • Provide beautiful, inspiring, engaging experiences to your various target audiences aroundthe globe.

B2B Online Shops

  • In professional environments, it’s more about facilitating regular recurring orders. Help your customers to work in teams and provide extra-ordinary customer service.

Click & Collect

  • Order online, then pick up goods in your local shop. Combine the best of both worlds by providing great digital experience and efficient local logistics.

Unified Commerce

  • Combine online and offline by presenting local stock and prices, and enable customers to click & collect or shop from store.

Enterprise Marketplace

  • Offer your reach to partners, extend your portfolio to customers, and become the go-to player in an industry as an enterprise marketplace.

Customer Self-Service

  • Provide powerful and convenient self-service and self-management tools to your clients. A win-win as everybody becomes more efficient!

Subscription

  • Winning customers is expensive. Provide them with convenient services that make them stay and provide a constant flow of recurring orders.

and many more...

Reason 03

Spryker Offers The Latest Technology For Endless Innovation

The only constant in digital business is change. Customers are always interacting with companies in new ways. They are expecting new levels of customer service and improved commerce experiences online and offline. It is clear: Companies that know how to serve customers better, have a competitive advantage in the digital age.

The change and speed of innovation requires new ways of management, new methodology and new technology. This means companies need to shift from stagnant legacy applications to platforms that embrace the digital commerce mindset. They need to support companies to evolve and innovate faster and to support real differentiation in customer service. The future of applications moves away from monolithic platforms to tightly interconnected best-of-breed services.

Spryker was built for speed of innovation and provides the new best-of-breed standard for commerce technology. Go live in a couple of weeks, continuously improve experience based on real customer feedback, and grow the business both online and offline is in our DNA. In terms of feature set and supported business models, the Spryker Cloud Commerce OS evolves light-years faster than any other commerce platform in the market – faster than the outdated legacy dinosaurs in the industry.

Spryker enables enterprises to constantly experiment on new channels, new business models, new markets or new features. Spryker also enables enterprises to continuously win new customers, stay close to them and keep them happy.

Three principles of Return on Investment

Total Cost of Ownership

  • Modularity results in a lean system, efficient development, and overall lower Total Cost of Ownership.

Time to
Market

  • Short release cycles and Front-End independence enable faster development and quicker time-to-market.

Increased
revenue

  • Faster market entry and testing of new functionalities, systems, and touchpoints result in faster positive ROI.
"Against its competitors, Spryker ranks first for composable commerce, and in the upper midrange for the B2C commerce, B2B commerce, and B2C and B2B commerce on the same platform use cases." – Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce, Gartner, Inc., 10 Aug, 2022
Reason 04

Spryker Supports Multiple Business Models In A Single Platform

To get ahead in the changing world of commerce, you need a fast, stable and scalable commerce platform designed for today and tomorrow’s commerce environments and innovative digital trends. It is not just about getting automatic updates; it is about having a modern and future-proof platform for innovation.

Legacy systems were built with an outdated mindset to cover static online shop use cases, mostly driven by internal needs to offer products online. Customer-centricity and the consequent pace of change were not the focus of these systems. Often, they relied on heavy-weight technology stacks that were built for stability rather than agility and innovation. They slowed down companies digital growth, both from technological and organizational reasons.

Spryker is flexible, agile, reliable, and scalable at all stages of the platform lifecycle through principals like native modularity, API-based, and headless without proprietary technology or huge up-front investments to get new initiatives off the ground. It’s also based on the most common technology stack of the world wide web, PHP.

Choosing technology built with the latest advancements has a lot of advantages for brands all over the world. First, it helps to keep track of rapid change. It allows for new interfaces and trends. It enables you to experiment with new ideas and concepts, react to real customer feedback, and helps you find the right talent to make your digital business grow.

 

“We can’t know today what our B2B platform will need tomorrow. That’s why we need a commerce software that guarantees us this flexibility and creates the best conditions for future developments. That’s why we think we’ve made a good decision with Spryker.” 

Niels Bungenstock, Head of Digital Innovation at Lekkerland

Reason 05

Spryker Has The Most Modern Architecture

Most commerce platforms were developed more than 15 or 20 years ago – this is the definition of legacy in an industry changing rapidly. They are all based on proprietary tools and languages and often contain multiple acquired technologies patched together in one offering. Basically, all legacy systems are monolithic systems built before modern digital commerce including mobile commerce or open APIs were even thought of. This results in lots of limitations and a massive lack of speed and flexibility, making it extremely hard to fuel real innovation in digital commerce projects.

Before it was even a product, Spryker’s architecture was crafted and tested within dozens of digital projects to provide extreme scalability in two ways: growing technological and organizational requirements. It proved Spryker's technology could handle huge data sets and an increase in orders, all while growing teams continuously extended the platform’s feature set.

This is achieved through several basic principles:

  1. Separation of back- and front-ends to enable different types of developers to work in parallel and provide multiple different front-ends to make use of the same business logic.
  2. Real modularity to provide the ability to pick and choose from existing functionality and leave out everything not necessary for the use case. Additionally, this also allows extensions of the system without ending up in maintenance hell.
  3. Disciplined use of enterprise software patterns and conventions like SOLID to ensure readability, extensibility and maintainability, also constant focus on measurably better code quality.

There is a common understanding in the industry that headless and API-based approaches are the new de-facto standard in digital commerce architecture. This is proven by the fact that all legacy vendors are trying to adapt the ideas into their existing platforms. The result is great marketing with poor execution of real projects as it is extremely hard and costly to change the core of a system’s architecture. Deep inside the systems, despite the flashy marketing message, legacy systems are still legacy systems.

Based on Spryker’s superior architecture and code quality, our customers can create applications tailored to their target audiences’ specific requirements and desires without having to fear future updates and maintenance.

Spryker knows how to...

... scale our Spryker commerce applications, horizontally, vertically and automatically

... secure your data and comply with global standards and regulations

... adapt and run different front-ends and customer interfaces on top of our APIs and Headless applications

... handle modularity in container-based hyperscale environments (AWS, Azure, GCP)

... continuously improve Spryker development workflows (CI/CD) and software quality

... monitor, log, tune and trace our Spryker commerce applications

Reason 06

Spryker Has Proven Scalability

In our modern economy, it is all about growth, and successful digital platforms will allow for that growth now and in the foreseeable future. Online shops not only cater to their local communities but must-have technology that allows for a growing product catalog and the ability to scale to meet the needs of several different markets around the globe. More customers mean the business must be able to shoulder the growing number of orders, potentially involving many different parties to fulfil them, while allowing their organizational and technological platforms to grow holistically.

Legacy systems were built in a time when digital commerce was still in its infancy. Nobody would have imagined the level of importance and the scale at which we are doing digital business nowadays. Especially for platforms built close to back-office systems who are now having a hard time providing the expected level of performance in large scales. They were simply not intended to work in today’s environments – and even more so, work on that scale in a cost-efficient way.

Spryker has shown its ability to scale time and time again. Moreover, there are many different dimensions it has been used to scale in real projects. There are platforms with more than 500 million products, multiple billion customer-specific prices, or hundreds of thousands of orders per day. A Spryker platform has never been down on Black Fridays despite monstrous traffic and transaction numbers. No matter how high your growth expectations are, Spryker will enable you to provide the best customer experience at any scale at reasonable total costs of ownership.

 

“Thanks to Spryker‘s flexible and modular architecture, we were able to implement the launch and further development using an agile MVP approach. We could not find any other provider that had the solid API-first approach with the combination of mobile app and merchant platform in this form, and we are excited to be able to now fully dedicate ourselves to Durst‘s growth.” 

Matthias Steinforth, Founder at Durst

Reason 07

Spryker Is More Efficient And Ensures Lower TCO

As previously discussed, Spryker provides a lot of potential for growth in the digital business. But at the same time, it also gives you the means to ensure better total costs of ownership (TCO) in digital commerce projects. The reasons for this are diverse:

  • Top-notch features out of the box: Being able to rely on more than 900 proven modules and a growing feature set that cover all basic requirements of B2C and B2B commerce will automatically boost time-to-market and reduce costs massively.
  • Lean system: using only necessary modules or features will lead to a lean system resulting in lower costs during implementation, operations and maintenance.
  • 100% efficient development & customization: modern system architecture, measurably better code quality as well as proven performance and scalability will result in higher developer and maintenance efficiency, allowing for more features in the same timeframe or fewer people working on them.
  • API-based & headless approach: New customer touch points and frontends can be easily tested and introduced based on existing business logic due to Spryker’s headless approach.
Spryker provides us with a variety of business value: it allows us to expand our tech-stack autonomously, built relevant custom business cases and is fast enough to keep up with our growth strategy. – Marian Paul, Chief Marketing Officer at Kapten & Son
Reason 08

Spryker Works With Leading Consulting Firms

It is always important to have the right partners on your side. In terms of business consulting, there are a couple of global players in the business.

We lead a strategic partnership for the digital transformation of business models in all industries making use of new technology with a high degree of individualization. Our common goal is to enable corporations around the globe to digitize transactional business models making use of the highly competent and efficient consulting approaches. With Spryker, leading consulting firms like Accenture, PWC, Roland Berger, KPS and Digitas Pixelpark are expanding their software portfolio with a new and flexible generation of technology that significantly accelerates digital developments and new market access for retailers and manufacturers.

Compared to legacy solutions, Spryker enables extremely fast results and interface integration – for complex commerce and transactional business models such as B2B2C shops, marketplaces, mobile apps, voice, or Internet of Things technologies. Among other things, the advantages of the “headless” and “API-first” approaches are effective here as they allow new ways of communication with customers. New and established customer interfaces can be implemented quickly and in line with emerging requirements at any time in order to keep pace with new technological developments.

 

“Spryker Cloud Commerce OS is an extremely user-oriented technology because it is the result of many commerce projects in a wide range of industries and business models. Spryker has already proven itself in well-known companies. Above all, the high degree of individualization of the modular architecture enables innovative and tailor-made customer solutions.” 

Michael Graf, Partner Advisory at PwC

Reason 09

Spryker Offers Guidance From Start To Finish

We like to partner with our clients because we truly believe we can all learn a lot from each other. We are dedicated to our customers’ success at all stages of the project lifecycle and provide all the support they need to keep the project on track with their goals and vision. At the same time, we also learn from our customers what challenges they have to overcome, which trends are emerging and how we can make use of our internal resources to provide the maximum business value to our clients.

With our wide range of service offerings, Spryker Expert Services can help you manage every phase of your project – from planning to implementation to operations – to ensure your success and peace of mind. With our tailored portfolio of services, we help you achieve a faster time-to market, increased project quality, and a better ROI. Working closely with our product development, Spryker implementation teams, and our experienced partner ecosystem, we help you to develop the best implementation strategy for achieving your business goals.

Additionally, on top of our network of solution and consultancy partners and expert services, we also make sure to ramp up your own team if necessary, by providing world-class documentation, training and customer success programs. We will even support your HR team to hire the right talent to push your digital experiences to the next level.

During a project, you have the freedom of choice between:

  • Our Spryker Expert Services, especially in early stages of the project, to get you started quickly and help you getting your team started.
  • Our network of experienced Solution and Consultancy Partners that can help you in different ways including strategy consulting and user experience design.
  • Our trainings and academy help ramp up your own team and do the heavy lifting in-house to take over technology ownership for the best possible cost efficiency in the long run.
  • A combination of multiple services.

It’s all about getting started quickly and we will make sure you are ready to go live in no time.

Make the Smart Commerce Choice with Spryker

With a proven history of innovating in the e-commerce space, you can count on Spryker to help you make the most of modern transactional online business – freeing you to focus on innovating in other areas.

  • Future-proof your business – Break the vicious circle of risky and expensive upgrades with the last commerce platform you will ever need. Create forward-looking customer-centric use cases, responding to increasing device variety and user journey complexity.
  • Improve customer experience – Plan, design, and deliver outstanding digital commerce experiences that will help you grow your business. Use the chances of digitization and experiment with new business models like Click & Collect for your Omnichannel strategy.
  • Faster return on investment – The quick development and testing of new customer-centric business models is a central theme and can be a real challenge. Achieve a faster time-to market, increased project quality, and a better ROI with Spryker.
  • Support in a single platform – As business models have evolved, separate systems have led to inefficiency, wasted effort, and time spent maintaining separate infrastructures. Use Spryker as a single comprehensive platform for B2C, B2B and marketplaces.
  • IT productivity – Monoliths and legacy systems can be very cumbersome to operate. Due to our architectural principles such as clean code, modularity, and separation of front-end and back-end, software developers can work more efficiently, and projects are done faster. Be more productive and focus on the things that matter.
  • Architectural fit – As pace of innovation and rising customer expectations accelerate, technology architecture is more strategically important than ever. Use Spryker and its tool set to make sure any of your third-party IT-systems such as ERP, CRM or PIM will be integrated properly.
  • Reliability & partnership – With disruptive change happening at an unprecedented pace, you need strong partners. Our objective is to provide best-in-class services and help you manage every phase of your project, so you can focus on your core business.

A truly unified platform, Spryker can offer everything you need to delight customers, improve brand engagement, and generate more revenue and loyalty. And as everything is owned and managed by Spryker, you can be sure you’ll get a predictable cost.

About Spryker

Spryker is the leading composable commerce platform for enterprises with sophisticated business models to enable growth, innovation, and differentiation. Designed specifically for sophisticated transactional business, Spryker’s easy-to-use, headless, API-first model offers a best-of-breed approach that provides businesses the flexibility to adapt, scale, and quickly go to market while facilitating faster time-to-value throughout their digital transformation journey. As a global platform leader for B2B and B2C Enterprise Marketplaces, Thing Commerce, and Unified Commerce, Spryker has empowered 150+ global enterprise customers worldwide and is trusted by brands such as ALDI, Siemens, Hilti, and Ricoh. Spryker was recognized by Gartner® as a Visionary in the 2023 Magic Quadrant™ for Digital Commerce and was also ranked as a Strong Performer in The Forrester Wave™: B2B Commerce Solutions, Q2 2022. Spryker is a privately held technology company headquartered in Berlin and New York. Find out more at spryker.com

Spryker Website