New Acquisition Deal Puts Headless Commerce in Driver’s Seat for 2020

In the latest Headless Commerce Update, Elastic Path has Acquired Moltin; The Deal is Expected to Create the Only Commerce Solution That Puts Microservices-Powered Digital Innovation Into the Hands of Every Business Leader

Both Moltin and Elastic Path are leaders in the headless commerce ecosystem. Together, the headless commerce industry leaders would provide unmatched business user experience and technical agility to accelerate digital customer experience innovation.

What is Headless Commerce Platform?

Headless Commerce platform is an independent architecture that independently exists and operates as a link between the front-end and back-end of an e-commerce application. The links can be established using APIs, experience management platforms, and tools such as Heroku and Mulesoft. Modern Content Management Systems (CMS) have a limited layer of headless features– meaning, front-end and back-end retain their reciprocal properties during the dynamic/ live applications and A/B testing.

According to Salesforce, choosing a headless commerce platform entails e-commerce teams to pair their online customer experience with other verified digital touchpoints. These touchpoints could be any of these–

• mobile/app experiences,
• in-store experiences,
• social media,
• user-generated content,
• product information, recommendation and experiences —
• gaming

AI and Machine Learning are at center of headless commerce capabilities. The modern e-commerce teams can fully leverage the power of the “Now-and-Later” tactic to drive home with a higher volume of online sales and sustained loyalty. 

New Headless Commerce Dea will Transform Digital Experience across Various Channels

Elastic Path’s roadmap for the headless commerce market is very clear. The company intends to fulfill the growing global demand for extensible, flexible, and scalable enterprise commerce solutions.  Moltin will add fire to Elastic Path’s mission to empower businesses to transform every customer interaction. These interactions could span within and beyond the traditional and contemporary customer base across B2C, B2B, B2B2C, and B2B2B use cases.

We have finally arrived in the realm of creating unique and engaging digital commerce experiences using headless commerce solutions.

Ready-to-use Experiences for Mobile, AR VR, and IoT Devices

Through easy-to-use business user tools, a comprehensive library of ready-to-use commerce experiences, and the ability to extend commerce functionality with ease, Elastic Path can now help brands, manufacturers, and retailers deliver digital customer journeys that are fully tailored to their businesses.

At the time of this announcement, Harry Chemko, co-founder and CEO at Elastic Path said —

“Our customers want secure, battle-tested solutions that provide the flexibility to cover every commerce experience possible, ranging from websites and retail stores to mobile apps, chatbots, VR and IoT.”

Harry added, “We have been committed to leading the charge in commerce innovation since our founding, and with the talent and technology Moltin brings to the table, Elastic Path enables every business to deploy revolutionary commerce experiences faster, easier and at greater scale than any other solution in the market.”

Time to Maximize Digital Initiatives and Monetize Personalization Efforts

Elastic Path has redefined its new and improved Elastic Path Commerce Cloud platform around five key tenets:

Easy-to-use business user tooling

Maximize the monetization of digital initiatives with intuitive and robust business user tooling, which provides all the necessary commerce capabilities to launch and iterate on personalized and contextually relevant experiences in real-time.

A comprehensive library of pre-built and ready-to-use commerce experiences

Launch new revenue channels on-demand using the most comprehensive library of ready-to-use commerce experiences including multiple website experiences, a progressive web application (PWA), Alexa Voice Assistant, Facebook chatbot, social login, self-checkout for retail stores, Zendesk customer service, magic mirror, augmented reality, self-checkout for pop-up events, IoT, embeddable cart and checkout buy button, and more.

Future-proof extensibility

Set up and update integrations with any third-party solution quickly and easily. There is no tangled web of customized plugins that locks businesses in and stifles innovation.

Choreographed microservices

Deliver digital experiences that are fully tailored to business requirements with the most flexible headless microservices architecture that can be consumed modularly.

Combined with Elastic Path’s Cortex API Orchestration layer, Elastic Path provides businesses with the agility and control needed to deliver fit-for-purpose experiences across any digital channel.

Enterprise-grade scalability

Grow confidently by leveraging the expertise Elastic Path has gained from supporting an unmatched scale and mission-critical digital commerce for more than 300 of the world’s leading brands, manufacturers, and retailers, including Intuit and T-Mobile.

Pioneering a New Chapter in Headless Commerce Ecosystem

Elastic Path pioneered the “headless” approach to digital commerce nearly a decade ago as a way for companies to gain more flexibility as compared to legacy commerce platforms.

As businesses strive to differentiate themselves in increasingly crowded markets by delivering unique commerce experiences, a microservices-based architecture has proven to be unmatched in terms of the flexibility it offers.

In a commerce environment, a microservices-based architecture leverages decoupled services that are easy to update or replace based on the needs of a particular touchpoint, such as a complex B2B website, mobile app, or physical kiosk, allowing a business to be more agile in its approach.

To date, however, microservices have been out of reach for most businesses given the technical sophistication required. By acquiring Moltin, Elastic Path has created the only solution that makes it fast and easy for every business leader to unleash the power of microservices.

Elastic Path is now the only commerce platform to provide secure, enterprise-grade deployment options across multi-tenant SaaS, single-tenant SaaS, private cloud, and on-premise. The advantages of the new unified platform are available to customers immediately.

Is Headless the Future of Digital Commerce?

“We believe that headless, microservices-based solutions are the future of digital commerce,” said Art McManus, Chief Technology Officer at FitForCommerce.

Art added, “This acquisition brings together two industry-leading companies with a highly complementary technology that will address the challenges organizations face when delivering innovative commerce experiences.”

All of Moltin’s global employees have joined Elastic Path, including engineering, customer support, sales, marketing, and operations. Elastic Path has also maintained Moltin’s U.S. and U.K. offices in Boston and Newcastle. With complementary development and customer support operations locations, Elastic Path has expanded its time zone coverage for current and future customers operating globally.

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