Five tips for selecting a partner to support your eCommerce system

Enterprise Times met up with Kelly Goetsch, Chief Product Officer at commercetools and Co-founder & President of the MACH Alliance. commercetools say they invented headless commerce in 2013. The company’s focus is on core commerce, which they define as everything related to orders, customers and products. The MACH Alliance promotes the value and flexibility of microservices, APIs, Cloud-natives and headless technologies. Enterprise Times asked Kelly to share 5 tips for any organisation looking to select a partner to support their eCommerce infrastructure.

Here is Kelly’s advice.

1. Select a partner who understands cloud very thoroughly. Ideally, you should appoint a partner who is a first-class citizen of cloud with plenty of cloud expertise. For instance, any systems integrator interested in joining the MACH Alliance, must have at least 100 certified cloud developers in AWS, GCP or Azure.
2. You need a partner that embraces a more agile mindset of releasing every minute. Some organisations are still stuck in a waterfall mentality – let’s do a monthly release. Unfortunately, this approach doesn’t work anymore.
3. Ensure you have the organisational change in place to support this new working model. In many organisations, the operations teams are in different teams from the front end UX teams and are different teams from the back-end people. However, with this new way of working, you tend to have smaller vertical teams, rather than big horizontal teams. That’s important because whenever you have big horizontal teams, there are barriers to working. This tends to slow progress.
4. Focus is on quality not quantity. With this new approach, you don’t need hoards of developers creating custom code. You just need to handful of cloud developers creating code to consume APIs.
5. Know what to build and know what to buy. Businesses need to be more strategic when considering whether to buy off-the shelf from a third party. Or building from scratch. If you are building from scratch, then you need a clear true understanding of the effort and resources needed.