Two major eCommerce conferences occurred last week, with commercetools Elevate event in Miami and BigCommerce’s EMEA BigSummit in London, and both companies made new product announcements during the festivities. 

commercetools collaborated with PayPal to introduce access to the newly launched Fastlane by PayPal to commercetools customers to help provide a faster checkout experience.

“At commercetools, we prioritize customer empowerment by offering flexibility in provider and payment method choices, unlike some competitors who restrict consumers by locking them in with more narrow payment options,” said commercetools CEO Dirk Hoerig. “With PayPal as a leading and trusted authority in commerce, our partnership aims to enhance shopping experiences and enable enterprises to capture greater wallet share.”

Elsewhere, BigCommerce unveiled ‘The Next Big Thing,’ which includes 100+ significant platform enhancements, features, and integrations, including a new composable storefront framework, Catalyst, and an easy-to-use visual page editor, Makeswift.

Featured Stories

• BigCommerce Unveils The Next Big Thing: “From groundbreaking composability upgrades and our vision for BigAI to our omnichannel, global selling and B2B enhancements, everything we do is about providing our customers and partners with the flexibility to do commerce however is best for them.”

• Hygraph Partners with Shopmacher: “Our partnership with Shopmacher is a solid alliance aimed at helping eCommerce businesses in the DACH region to build up or strengthen their digital presence.”

• IMPACT Awards Insights: How Coveo Takes AI for CX to the Next Level: “Coveo Relevance Generative Answering works to restore trust in search results through targeted data ingestion. Our generative AI model returns the best answer from datasets you tell it to ingest data from.”

• Umbraco 14 Release Candidate: “Umbraco 14 is right around the corner. It brings a fully rewritten Backoffice with a new architecture, a purpose-built Extension API, and a corresponding Management API.”

New RFPs From DXP360

• [New] [RFP Value: $86,500] UK College Website: A UK college is “looking to work with a web development and digital marketing agency/supplier to undertake a full redevelopment of current website.”

• [New] [RFP Value: $123,500] Scottish government website development: The Scottish government has put out a tender asking for assistance with a new public-facing website build.

• [New] [RFP Value: $25,000] US-based WordPress Website Development: A startup in the US wants a slick WordPress website and needs an agency to work closely with their internal team to get the job done.

• [New] [RFP Value: $111,000] UK-based Company Seeks Website Development: The company is seeking a web development supplier to support continued design, development, and maintenance of the company’s primary web presence and development of associated project platforms.

Stories that caught our eye

1. commercetools 2024 Partner of the Year Award Winners: EPAM, Contentful, and Algolia among the recipients. 

2. BigCommerce 2023 Partner of the Year Award Winners: PayPal, Pixafy and Trellis were among the winners. 

3. Investing in Headless Commerce: The owner of the White Claw and Mike’s Hard Lemonade brands is diving into headless. 

4. Boohoo Group and Bloomreach Partner: Boohoo will introduce AI-powered search and merchandising from Bloomreach across its brands.

5. From CMS to DXP: A look at the evolution of the technology. 

6. Composable Architecture More Appealing to Young Buyers? Some B2B companies seem eager to move away from legacy.

The word on the street…

1. [LinkedIn]: MACH Alliance’s expansion: Optimizely CEO Alex Atzberger shares his thoughts on the criteria for expansion. 

2. [LinkedIn]: Universal CMS race to the apex: VP of Product at dotCMS Preston So discusses this phenomenon. 

3. [LinkedIn]: Why is structured content hard for writers to understand when it delivers so many benefits?: Michael Andrews tries to answer the question.