commercetools x diconium

Telco Accelerator Kit

Wie geht es jetzt weiter?

Ihr Kontakt bei diconium

Michael Sommer

director partner management

+49 711 2992-373

michael.sommer@diconium.com

Linking individual products, contracts and services into an orderable product bundle is one of the central challenges of commerce platforms. Especially when different payment modalities of several legal entities have to be taken into account.

We have developed extensions based on the e-commerce platform Commercetools, which are specialised in the configuration of bundles and its pricing: The Telco Accelerator Kit.

The kit consists of three components:

the bundle configurator,
the price configurator
as well as the backend services.

In the combined bundle and price configurator, all product combinations including the corresponding prices can be created through a user interface that can be operated by any shop manager, thus avoiding any IT effort.

How the Telco Kit works

Telco Accelerator Kit

Create bundles quickly and update them easily

Times when online shops only had to display and sell products that were independent of each other are over. Today, many industries offer complex bundle products whose components are interdependent and where pricing is influenced by many factors. In addition, more and more different business models have to be represented online. This is only possible if the online shop becomes a shopping platform.

Let's take the purchase of a mobile phone contract as an example: the price of the subscription changes depending on the term, the mobile phone and various additional services and partner offers. In the end, an order is placed for a term contract over several years with regular payments, a hardware order with a one-time additional payment and perhaps another subscription with a partner (e.g. a publisher). And all that with one order.

It is less about solving the complexity in the first place – it is more about ongoing adjustments and creating new products and bundle variants as easily, quickly and error-free as possible. But even the best modern shop system does not provide the best solution "out of the box" for all use cases. That's exactly why we thought about it and developed a solution that makes it possible to create really complicated bundle products and manage them in the shop. The API-based microservice architecture of the Telco Kit offers the necessary flexibility. The balancing act between the greatest possible flexibility and standardised, modular systems is complex.

How does the Telco Accelerator Kit work?

As described, the linking of individual products, contracts and services with different payment modalities from several legal entities to an orderable product bundle is one of the central challenges of commerce platforms.

The first extension offers the possibility to create buyable bundles from individual products very flexibly via a user-friendly backend interface. Individual articles, certain variants or even complete categories, such as smartphones, can be combined with each other.

A second Merchant Center extension enables the configuration of the prices of the bundle components or the total price. By decoupling the creation of bundles from price maintenance, enormous flexibility is created to map all price dependencies. The mobile phone price can be reduced depending on the volume of the term contract and increased again by adding further services.

In the combination of bundle and price configurator, all product combinations including the corresponding prices can be created via a user interface that can be operated by any shop manager, without any IT effort.

Bundle Configurator: Taking variants to the next level.

With the Bundle Configurator, products can be combined with other products to create bundle offers. Product references are stored in JSON format as a custom product attribute.

Price Configurator: Putting a price on anything.

The price configurator allows flexible pricing of bundles and product variants and even supports periodic and tiered pricing. The respective bundle price depends on the configured product reference.

Technical Details

The Telco Accelerator Kit consists of three components: the bundle configurator, which allows bundles to be created from individual products, and a price configurator, which decouples prices from the products and also supports one-time or recurring fees. Both components are implemented as extensions of the Merchant Center. The third component bundles the backend services.

Backend I Commercetools

Configurators I Merchant Center Extensions

Middleware I Java / Spring Boot

Frontend I HTML, CSS, React, Node

And how does it look? It looks the way you want it to.

If you, as the operator or person responsible for an online shop, are faced with the challenges of optimising your operating processes, saving costs when integrating new products or shortening your time-to-market when implementing campaigns, then we can most likely help you. We work with the most popular enterprise shop systems and bring 25 years of e-commerce experience to our projects.