Commercetools

Commercetools is a cloud-based headless commerce platform that utilizes a microservices based architecture that powers the next-generation B2C and B2B commerce capabilities.

General Questions

1. As per profile and experience, what questions do we ask?
2. What questions are related to current roles and responsibilities?

Commercetools Basics

3. What is an organization and a project, and how can we create them?
4. When and where can we define currency, language, countries, zones?
5. How do you restrict different teams and users for specific access to, for example, Products, Orders, Customers, etc., with options like read-only, edit, or both?
6. What is an API client in commercetools, and where do you get the API client from?
7. What is a builder in commercetools, and have you used this?
8. What is the difference between category and product type?
9. What is a Custom Object, and why do we use this?
10. Do you know what a product projection is?
11. How does product status work in commercetools?
12. What is your experience with creating customizations or extensions in commercetools? What are API Extensions?
13. What is your understanding of commercetools' API, and how do you interact with it in your development work?
14. What do you know about the 'API Playground'? Where do you use this?
15. How do you customize the API in commercetools?
16. What is OAuth in commercetools, and where did you use this?

Product Management

17. How do you handle product catalog management in commercetools?
18. How do you create a product? Is it required to have a product type for creating a product?
19. What is a master variant? Do you know what a saleable product is?
20. How do you set up a product for a specific store? Product Selection?
21. Write pseudo code for customer creation in case we have first name, last name, and email?

Pricing and Discounts

22. How does price work in your project?
23. How many types of prices are available to use?
24. Do you know about Volume pricing and Tiered pricing?
25. How would you approach implementing a complex pricing strategy in commercetools?
26. Do you know how discounts work in commercetools? Can we apply, let's say, five product discounts to a product at any given time?

Order Management

27. How does Order management work? How do you do Order Refund and cancellation?
28. If we need to add an attribute for an order, what steps will you follow to do that?
29. What are Frozen Carts, and when do we need this?

Payment

30. Do you know how capture and authorize work in payment?

Shipping and Zones

31. Can we create different shipping rates for different countries?
32. Steps to create a shipping method in merchant center?
33. How do you use predicates to define Shipping Method eligibility for Carts?
34. What are Zones and countries, and how are they related?
35. We have three countries to set up for shipping methods (Belgium, Germany, and Sweden). In this scenario, we have two currencies. Could you please explain how you would approach setting up the shipping rates?
36. Is it mandatory to have a zone for any country?

Integration and Extensions

37. Have you integrated commercetools with any third-party services or systems? If so, can you describe the integration process and any challenges you faced?
38. What integrations have you worked on in commercetools?

Advanced Topics

39. How will you implement the multi-country rollout in commercetools?
40. Theoretical question: understanding of MACH architecture and other commerce-related topics?
41. How do you decide which price to consider? Let's say we have to define 500 prices for one product variant and also, in some other requirement, we need to define 60k prices for a variant product?
42. What are some strategies for handling large-scale data migration in commercetools?
43. How do you ensure data consistency and integrity in a distributed microservices architecture like commercetools?
44. Can you explain how you would implement a custom workflow for order processing in commercetools?
45. What are some best practices for optimizing API performance in commercetools?
46. How do you manage versioning and backward compatibility in commercetools APIs?
47. What is composable commerce?
48. Why is everyone talking about composable commerce?
49. What are the 3 key benefits of composable commerce?
50. Can composable commerce reduce complexity and costs for businesses?

Other Related Technical Questions

51. What features and modules have you worked on, and what relevant questions are related to them?
52. What is Composable Commerce?
53. How do you set up a new commercetools application in Spring Boot?
54. Let's say we want to develop an end-to-end service/page in Spring Boot. Please explain all the layers and the source files, methods, and annotations you will create.
55. What is Mockito framework?
56. How do you implement performance testing in a project?
57. CI/CD pipeline experience and implementing a testing framework in the pipeline?
58. If any service is having an issue, what steps do you follow to resolve the issue?
59. How do you set up a new pipeline?
60. Some basic questions on Java/Hybris, especially if they have less experience in commercetools and previous experience in Java/Hybris?

 

THE BACKBONE OF COMPOSABLE COMMERCE: MACH® ARCHITECTURE

Microservices-based: As granular and independent services, microservices make it easy to implement new features, touchpoints and more. 

API-first: Bridge the dialog between your frontends and a centralized backend with APIs. 

Cloud-native: Commerce services hosted in the cloud eliminate server dependencies while enabling automatic updates and auto-scaling. 

Headless commerce: Architecture that decouples customer-facing frontends from internal backend operations provides maximum flexibility and speed. 

 

What is composable commerce? 

Composable commerce is a component-based solution design approach that gives companies flexibility and freedom to build and run outstanding shopping experiences. A composable system combines three core traits: It should be cloud-native, component-based and tech-agnostic. 

 

Why is everyone talking about composable commerce? 

Traditional eCommerce solutions, also known as legacy or monolithic platforms, are indivisible blocks of standardized software that are hard to customize and slow to update. 

Every time you change or update something, the entire system must be retested and redeployed, which may cause issues or even a complete system crash. 

This inherent lack of flexibility and agility doesn’t compute at today’s accelerated pace; consequently, companies struggle to innovate and even hire and retain talent (unsurprisingly, top engineers aren’t eager to work with old technologies). 

Plus, the cost of running monolithic infrastructures has become prohibitive due to additional fees for upgrades, integrations, etc.

 

What are the 3 key benefits of composable commerce? 

True composable commerce provides businesses of any size or industry with three main benefits:

Benefit #1- Infinite scale: 

You can run multiple brands, expand to new markets, bring in new channels and even try out business models with ease. Also, autoscaling enables you to respond to new influxes of traffic and customers in real-time, so your business is ready to monetize on Black Friday-like moments. 

Benefit #2 — Unlimited flexibility and agility: 

Change a component, not the platform. When something doesn’t work, you can easily replace it or drop it. Composable commerce is all about freedom and adaptability: With modular iterations and best-of-breed, you can add, remove or switch functionalities without vendor lock-in. Innovate faster and adapt customer experiences on the fly, and release new features up to 8x faster than legacy tech. 

Benefit #3 — Lower cost: 

When you invest in financial and technological flexibility, you achieve higher cost efficiency and eliminate technical debt. A true composable system optimizes commerce investment because you can select the components and solutions that meet your requirements. With a versionless solution, you no longer have to pay for forced upgrades you don’t need or that don’t drive value for your business. You can effectively say goodbye to maintenance fees and backward compatibility testing, too. 

 

Can composable commerce reduce complexity and costs for businesses? 

As the composable approach is a relatively new technology, it’s common for executives and tech professionals to express misconceptions surrounding complexity and high costs. 

These concerns stem from the misperception that implementing best-of-breed solutions would result in an overwhelming number of vendors, as well as compatibility and interoperability issues. 

Another worry is whether composability requires a large team of developers, which could incur additional personnel, recruitment and training expenses. 

However, composable commerce is actually able to reduce complexity and costs: 

Simplified commerce architecture: By leveraging modular and interchangeable components, composable commerce makes the architecture easier to manage and maintain. 

Seamless integration: The adoption of new cutting-edge solutions, such as search and AI tools, becomes faster and more efficient without incurring additional integration costs. 

Real-time updates and maintenance: True composable systems are versionless and continuously updated and maintained in real-time, which eliminates technical debt and renders version upgrades obsolete. 

Scalability: With a cloud-native SaaS solution, businesses no longer need to manage their own servers or handle capacity increases. The system offers infinite scalability to handle a large number of products or increased online traffic. 

Increased developer productivity: Working with modern tech means developers become more productive, enabling the company to innovate at a faster pace. 

An ecosystem of composable commerce vendors: Vendors like commercetools offer extensive partner networks and accelerators that simplify implementation timelines and enable businesses to leverage best practices. 

These advantages of composable commerce alleviate complexity and costs, providing businesses with a more streamlined and efficient approach to their commerce operations.