Create ecommerce experiences with commercetools and Google Cloud Application Integration

The world of digital commerce is rapidly evolving. To stay competitive, businesses need the ability to integrate their commerce systems with a wide array of applications and services. Furthermore, customers expect targeted and personalized experiences. Google’s AI and data solutions create an opportunity to deliver a personalized experience for customers within your ecommerce solutions. This can be done by implementing AI powered search capabilities, product recommendation, AI chatbots, content creation with AI and more. As organizations start to implement these capabilities, being able to connect Google Cloud services to commercetools, a cloud-native, headless commerce platform, offers significant value. 

Google Cloud’s Application Integration is an Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) solution, offering tools to streamline data connectivity and management across various applications and services. We recently launched the commercetools connector (currently in public preview) to empower users to accelerate the integration between their ecommerce platform and Google Cloud solutions as well as other platforms available in the library of 80+ connectors. By leveraging the commercetools connector to integrate commercetools data with Google Cloud services such as BigQuery and Vertex AI, users can unlock a wide range of analytics and machine learning capabilities within their ecommerce. For example, users can use commercetools data as a model's prompt in order to generate personalized insights or leverage the commercetools data fed into BigQuery to create and execute machine learning models with BigQuery ML. 

In this blog we will explore different functionalities of the commercetools connector and some of the use cases where you can leverage it to improve your customer experience.

Connect your commercetools platform with Google Cloud

commercetools provides a composable commerce platform, giving 450+ companies the components required to run outstanding shopping experiences across digital and physical touchpoints. commercetools equips some of the world's largest businesses with tools to future-proof digital offerings, reduce risks and costs, and drive revenue growth.

The commercetools connector can unlock a new level of integration, bringing numerous benefits:

• Simplified integrations: Establish connections between your commercetools platform and the rich ecosystem of connectors, tasks and services available on Google’s Application Integration. The pre-built connectors make it easier to integrate with Google first party services such as BigQuery, Vertex AI, Pub/Sub, Cloud Spanner etc. as well as third-party systems for which we have connectors. You can let Application Integration handle the integrations for you while using data mapping tasks to easily address data transformation needs.This translates to faster time-to-market and reduced development costs.

• Enhanced data flow: Enable powerful data analysis and machine learning for your ecommerce using Google Cloud services like BigQuery and Vertex AI with the pre-built connectors and the vertex AI prediction task. Use the integration tasks to orchestrate and transform the data flows between these applications. You can use the integration flows you design to drive business insights, intelligent product recommendations, personalized promotions, and more.

• Accelerated innovation: Reduce the technical overhead of building and maintaining custom integrations for your ecommerce platform. Using application Integration to build your integrations between commercetools and Google Cloud with the drag-and-drop interface frees up developer resources and lets you focus on creating innovative customer experiences.

The commercetools connector facilitates a number of use cases, such as: 

1. commercetools data to BigQuery: 
The commercetools connector helps organizations transfer real-time data from commercetools to BigQuery in order to leverage their customer data and unlock insights to improve customer experience and increase conversion rate.  

The following example shows how you can push product data from commercetools to BigQuery. The integration is triggered by an API call, although we could use any of the available triggers, including a scheduler, a pub/sub message and more. Then, Application Integration fetches product data from commercetools and proceeds to an iterative processing loop. This loop will call a sub integration for every product that will collect and store all the products in BigQuery.

With the commercetools data in BigQuery you can make informed and data-driven decisions combining data from your ecommerce and other diverse data sources. 

2. On-demand AI-driven Insights: 
Power your ecommerce by generating on demand predictions with Vertex AI. You can use events to trigger a prediction and get a real-time answer from your Vertex AI model, whether this is generating a reply to a text prompt, generating a product recommendation or predicting the demand of a product.

In the example below we use a pub/sub message to trigger a Vertex AI prediction using the Vertex AI task in Application Integration. We extract the commercetools product data and use it as the prompt for a Vertex AI model to generate product descriptions for the ecommerce products. We could take this a step further by updating the product in commercetools with the AI generated product description.

An integration flow of this kind helps you to connect your ecommerce platform data to extract AI insights directly from Vertex AI. 

3. Ecommerce personalization: 
Users are now connected to many devices and reach several digital interaction points before making a decision. For example, buyers tend to search both on websites and search engines before buying. This means that delivering personalized experiences across different channels has become increasingly important. With commercetools we can achieve an omnichannel ecommerce strategy by keeping data consistent across channels. The commercetools connector helps you to take this strategy one step further by integrating commercetools with customer data platforms (CDPs) and recommendation engines on Google Cloud and creating a centralized hub of customer data to fuel consistent personalization across different channels.

By combining the power of these two leading platforms, businesses gain the tools to create exceptional customer experiences that drive growth and success. Get started now: Find commercetools available in the Google Cloud Marketplace, visit the commercertools and Google Partnership page, and read more about Application Integration and the commercetools connector.