Commerce Village: an interview with André Roitzsch
How did the idea come about to depict the e-commerce world as a city?
André: In architecture consulting we usually talk about the "IT landscape" or, to put it more pointedly, the "e-commerce landscape." In the end, though, that's always just a system diagram and not a real landscape. At some point the idea grew out of that: to depict such a system diagram as an actual "landscape" and to offer visual orientation through metaphors, so that connections come across more clearly.
Was it clear from the start that your landscape would be a city?
André: No, not right away. In the first step we had things like the "Monolith Mountains," the "Commerce Clouds," or the "Data River" in mind. As we worked out the concept, Commerce Village emerged. No longer a landscape with a map, but a small town with a city map. But the idea of orientation and guidance through a visual map stayed.
Does Commerce Village also have something to do with the role clients have increasingly been assigning to you lately?
Absolutely. The idea and the ambition come from the fact that, for some time now, we've increasingly been seen and approached as guides through the e-commerce tech jungle.
It used to be less complex, because a typical system landscape was assembled from relatively few, monolithically designed building blocks. But as cloud services have spread and grown more capable in recent years, a wide range of more granular solutions has emerged, microservices, that enable far more flexible architectures. The keyword is Composable Commerce.
As part of this trend, the importance of smartly curated architectures grows for service providers like us, and with it the importance of architecture consulting. And that's exactly where a map like this can help.
Who is it meant to help?
In principle, anyone who wants to get an overview of the "landscape." Of course we're primarily addressing companies asking themselves how to smartly evolve their existing IT landscape. For that, you first need an overview of what exists at all and which solution can handle which tasks. Commerce Village now provides exactly that.
In the next step, you naturally want to know what the differences between the vendors are and where their respective strengths lie. We can already deliver that through Commerce Village today by linking to the vendors' websites.
So it's all easy, then, or are there still challenges to overcome?
One challenge is definitely that vendors naturally don't volunteer where they're not so strong. Or they hide their offering behind promotional platitudes like "We future-proof your e-commerce." In Commerce Village, our short descriptions already give a tiny glimpse of where the systems are strong in our experience. In a stage of expansion that's already planned, we'll go quite a bit further and stick our necks out more.
With that direction, Commerce Village can really help not only the companies we designed it for, but also newcomers, career changers, and the trade press.
What does that mean in concrete terms? Do you bring Commerce Village into client meetings?
That will certainly happen when we want to illustrate a particular relationship between different solutions, or different options for how an architecture could be built.
For example, depending on where and from how many sources your product data as a retailer comes from, and into how many channels you want to distribute it, a particular PIM or a middleware might be the way to go. Or both.
In Commerce Village, middleware solutions are symbolized by the road network, and PIM systems by the lock that adjusts levels in the "data stream." Especially for decision-makers who aren't technical, the metaphors can help them see the connections.
What's in it for a vendor or partner of yours to be part of Commerce Village? After all, for every vendor we also learn who their competitors are.
First of all, it's good for a vendor to be included. That becomes clear if you flip it around: imagine all your competitors were in there and only you weren't.
Beyond that, I believe it also makes a solution provider credible to visit or point to Commerce Village with a prospective or existing client. They face the fact that competitors simply exist (which they need not fear), and they get the chance to explain where they see their own advantages by comparison, right up to the opportunity that comes from highlighting where they're unique. I think every company should be able to say something about that, and I'm always glad when I'm asked.
Not least, by using Commerce Village a vendor can also signal that it's not only about selling licenses or commissions, but that the business and the success of their clients matter to them. That's why they also take an interest in adjacent systems that sit elsewhere in the same value chain and contribute to a client's success. How do you expect to sell your product if you don't know the environment in which it's meant to be used successfully?
New partners enter the market, others drop out: how do you decide which companies appear in Commerce Village, and how do you keep pace with developments in the market?
First of all, Commerce Village reflects our view of the commerce world as it has emerged from our daily consulting and implementation practice. We make no claim to include every single solution seamlessly and to fully represent its entire range of capabilities.
Because we also had to make simplifications and assignments that may differ from a solution provider's own self-image, just so we could categorize a solution that perhaps covers very broad requirements at all.
And in the future, will there be updates to Commerce Village?
Commerce Village will evolve in two ways going forward. For one, we'll continuously develop, adapt, and modify it based on our hands-on work with the various solutions. For another, there's the "Bauland" (development land) district, where anyone who feels something is missing, or who finds a solution categorized or described incorrectly, can leave suggestions. If those suggestions are good and aid orientation, we take them on board.
You didn't highlight any partners, even though you surely have a standard set of partners you always use, right?
Yes, we aim to advise in a vendor-agnostic way, so we made an effort to present all solutions as neutrally as possible. Because in the end, the conditions on the client's side determine whether a particular solution is "good" or "bad" for them. We can't claim that across the board and without context for any solution.
At most, we make a kind of "assessment" when we simply don't include a particular solution at all. For example, the "1-2-3 shop kit" from a hosting provider just isn't relevant for the companies we work with. We have no experience with it, and it simply plays no role in our consulting and implementation projects. Here, too, there will surely be retailers for whom that's exactly the right solution. But that's just outside our orbit.
What does the technical setup look like?
The app itself is written in VueJS, and the frontend is hosted on Vercel. To manage the content, we use Storyblok as our CMS.
All three solutions also have their place in Commerce Village.
So we went for a simple headless/cloud architecture, because we no longer have a large internal IT department in-house and therefore simply don't have the capacity to own and maintain our own tech stack. We needed something lean that we have experience with and that can be run without much effort. Those were our requirements, and that's why it became this stack. Other companies in a different situation might have found a different stack, and that one might have been very good too, for that company. 🙂
Do you already have ideas for how you'll expand Commerce Village in the next step?
Yes, we definitely want to introduce a second layer where we describe the strengths and use cases of the solutions as we've come to know them. We also already have ideas for additions like a language school or a tour group (automated translation tools), a club with a bouncer (cookie bots), or a lighthouse (analytics tools).
And of course we're curious to see which ideas come rolling into the "Bauland" district.
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