Leading furniture retailer, Koala is the latest Australian business to sign on with commercetools to move to a cloud-first, headless commerce platform. Koala joins other major retailers including Kmart and Cargo Crew.
Koala was seeking increased flexibility for its end-to-end customer experience and to expand its product suite.
Koala vice president for digital product and technology, Geoff Kwan said, “Koala undertook a search for an ecommerce platform that could meet a core set of objectives – ideally it would be modular, extensible and based on a headless, microservices architecture, but what stood out for Koala was commercetools’ API extensions, GraphQL coverage, scalability of the platform and flexibility around the data model.”
“We were also impressed with the way commercetools could fit and integrate with Koala’s infrastructure, system environments and business applications, allowing us to create a class leading ecom experience.”
commercetools Asia Pacific territory director, Joshua Emblin added: “We are thrilled to add Koala to the commercetools’ family and are proud to be building a strong business in the face of mass business disruption and uncertainty.
“The fallout from the pandemic continues to challenge online commerce environments in ways never before seen. Suddenly, businesses need new levels of scalability and flexibility, and MACH Architectures (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless) are fast defining what the future of ecommerce will look like.”
commercetools’ focus for 2020 largely centred on the Australian retail sector and looking forward that will expand to other industries including manufacturing, FMCG and other B2B categories.
“It’s been widely accepted that Covid has accelerated the transformation in the way consumers engage with brands across various channels, and the same is true for the methods in which products are delivered to consumers,” Emblin said.
“Consumers’ expectations will only continue to change – as an example, things like same day delivery and additional services increasingly included with online transactions – and we look forward to helping businesses meet those expectations head-on and with ease.”