Integration is where commerce projects stall

The best-performing commerce stacks are assembled from best-of-breed parts: A commerce engine, connected to a search provider, a promotions engine, tax, payments, content, and more. This flexibility is the whole point. But there’s a common issue in bringing this to life: Integrating those systems and ensuring they’re in sync, a step that’s often built from scratch on every single project.

It’s no wonder then that wiring commerce to connect all of those services is one of the most time-consuming parts of any implementation. It’s frequently cited as a major reason projects take months to complete.

Worse, the same work is reconstructed every time. Each customer-facing surface — web storefront, mobile app, AI agent — tends to get its own backend-for-frontend service, and each one stitches the same systems together in a slightly different way, leading to inefficiencies and overhead. It is undifferentiated work that sits on nobody’s product roadmap, yet it has to happen before any customer-visible feature is available.

For the business, these issues show up in three critical ways:

Launches miss their window. Integration sits on the critical path for any implementation, so campaigns, market expansion and new channels go live well after the moment they were built for.
Competitors capture the demand. While integration is in progress, the roadmap stops moving and somebody else picks up the revenue you planned for.
The bills never stop. Someone has to own, deploy and maintain that middleware across every environment, patching it with each upstream change. A one-off build becomes a permanent engineering line item — and the glue code is what breaks under traffic spikes.

In short, every month spent on plumbing is a revenue impact you don’t get back.

Introducing the Commerce Integration Layer

Back in June, we announced the upcoming Commerce Integration Layer to solve these issues. Alongside commercetools for Builders, the Commerce Integration Layer accelerates implementations and, as a result, time-to-value.

This is possible because the Commerce Integration Layer centralizes integration logic behind customer-facing experiences. Storefronts, mobile apps and AI agents all connect the same way, on a unified layer hosted and maintained by commercetools. This means you can model your integrations once, and every experience or channel can be added on top without additional integration work.

Five capabilities are provided from day one:

Experience API: One GraphQL API to power all storefronts and agents, supporting the journey from browsing through to checkout.
Command-line interface: Tooling for your developers — or their coding agent — to extend the Experience API, adding integrations and custom logic.
Merchant Center: An admin UI for non-technical teams to configure and supervise the layer.
Platform Insights: End-to-end observability and health monitoring, streamed into the APM tools you already use.
Managed hosting: We host, scale and manage everything. No infrastructure cost, no ops headcount, no upgrade projects.

What further sets the Layer apart is that it’s purpose-built and managed by commerce and cloud experts, eliminating all operational overhead. Plus, it’s included with commercetools Sphere at no extra cost, saving you from the hefty bills and custom builds required by alternatives.

The payoff: integration leaves the critical path

Build the integration plumbing once. One integration path serves every experience, so engineering capacity shifts from rebuilding middleware to building what sets you apart. Our system integrator partners benefit as well, as they don’t have to build the same foundation for each client, and instead differentiate in vertical expertise, experience design and delivery.

Faster rollouts and faster results. Because commerce capabilities are baked into the Layer from the get-go, you can get everything integrated faster. As a result, you can launch initiatives, such as a new market expansion, in a fraction of the time it took before.

Save maintenance costs and upkeep. Because we host and maintain the layer, bundled with commercetools Sphere, you don’t have to worry or pay for middleware upkeep. You own the customizations within your integrations, not the entire infrastructure that supports them.

How our partners are leveraging the Commerce Integration Layer

Every composable commerce project comes with the same hidden cost: The glue. Before a partner can build the experience a client is paying for, someone has to wire commercetools to search, content, tax and payments, then host that layer, keep it running and upgrade it. Most partners solve this with a starter kit they copy at the start of each project. It works, but every copy starts drifting from day one, and keeping it current becomes the client’s costs or the partner’s.

What the Commerce Integration Layer does is centralize the layer with commercetools, which takes care of orchestration via a single Experience API that, when extended with integration code, enables our partners to write using a type extension model. Whenever fixes or new capabilities are in place, they’re automatically integrated into every project.

For our partners, the benefits are clear: There’s no integration layer or BFF to create or operate, so they can focus on architectural decisions, vendor selection, project delivery, vertical expertise, and, of course, the customer experience.

Leading agencies such as IONA and Zaelab were granted early access to the Commerce Integration Layer and have begun building new projects with it.

We refactored our existing BFF onto the Commerce Integration Layer in a matter of weeks, and anything the Commerce Integration Layer didn’t cover natively, we exposed to the frontend as an extension rather than as another service to build and run. On future builds, the backend foundation we’d normally spend the first weeks constructing is simply there, so we can start on customer-facing features immediately.

Mikko Mantila

CEO and Founder, IONA

In short, the Commerce Integration Layer gives our partners a stable base to build that expertise into reusable extensions, apps and vertical solutions, instead of rebuilding the same plumbing on every project.

Finally, it prepares partners for agentic commerce. With the upcoming Experience MCP, generated from the same Experience API the storefront uses, shopping agents and storefronts share one set of contracts, and no partner has to build and maintain that layer on their own.

One Commerce Integration Layer to rule them all

Integration is crucial for every commerce program and, until now, it’s been solved on a case-by-case basis. Today, it’s possible to solve it once and centrally, changing the issues that led to lengthy and costly implementations.

Our recommendation: Treat the Commerce Integration Layer as a default in your next build — be it a new storefront, a replatform, a new market, brand or channel – with a date already committed. The Layer you create for that first experience becomes the blueprint for every experience that comes after, including the AI-driven ones still on your roadmap.

Ready to go deeper? Explore the Commerce Integration Layer. And keep an eye on the commercetools for Builders library: We’re working on a skill that will help your teams implement the layer itself, taking yet another slice out of your time-to-live.