The Operating System for Circular Commerce
When choosing software for your business, you are often forced to choose between a rigid "all-in-one" platform that dictates your workflow, or a complex web of disconnected tools. In this clip, Karri and Tuomo explore how TWICE Commerce 2.0 bridges this gap by adopting an Operating System (OS) mentality.
What is the OS Approach?
TWICE comes equipped with everything you need out of the box—online store, inventory management, cataloging, CRM, order management, and payments. However, the true power of the OS lies in its flexibility. You are not forced to use every module. At its core, TWICE is API-first, allowing it to function as a headless inventory engine within a larger composable commerce stack.
User Experience: "What do you want to do?"
Tuomo compares the user experience philosophy to Dungeons & Dragons. Instead of a linear video game that forces you to "do X, then Y, then Z," we aim to start the conversation by asking what you want to achieve.
- Want to upload inventory?
- Need to record maintenance for a used bike?
- Want to create a sales listing based on usage hours?
The OS is designed to facilitate your specific business cases rather than restrict them.
The Complexity of Re-Commerce
This flexibility is vital for re-commerce and circular business models. Every operational flow is highly contextual—dependent on your specific product, grading standards, and service levels. By utilizing the TWICE API, businesses can build custom interfaces (like in-store scanning apps) or integrate complex logic that off-the-shelf vertical applications simply cannot handle.
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Karri: So it sounds like TWICE Commerce comes with everything that you need if you want to utilize TWICE Commerce to run your business. That's possible. So you get the online store, inventory, catalog, customer, a CRM, and then order management and online payments and all of this. So you are able to run everything on TWICE, but you don't have to use everything. And I think at the core of the OS approach is also the API-first mentality and the possibility to utilize Twice also as part of your composable stack or headless inventory or so on and kind of pick what you want or have everything and do these integrations and maybe MCP connections and all of this. So that's also part of the OS approach.
Tuomo: Yeah, it's like if we've done our job well—and what we aspire to do—is that instead of your experience with TWICE when you start... you don't be like, okay, us telling you next do this, then do this, then do that. And in order to do that, do that, do that, do that. But rather we start the conversation with the user by asking: what do you want to do?
It's like Dungeons and Dragons. We kind of ask you, what do you want to do? And it's your like, if you have a use case in your mind, you can probably usually ask like, "I want to do this." And then it's our job to help you then tell you that, okay, this is how you can get it done. But we're not saying that here's a list of things that you can do, pick the next one you want to do.
So it's really kind of if you have a business case, you usually have already a problem that you want to solve. "I want to upload my inventory." All right, you do it here. "I want to record a maintenance for this bike." All right, this is where you do it. "I want to publish a sales listing for my used bike." All right, go here, create a listing at this price and make sure that you point to this stock item. Or if it's a generic resale listing for your bikes, just define that the bikes that you want to sell need to have more than 1,000 hours of usage.
And we're not telling you that this is the steps to go about it and this is how you should run your business. We are trying to engage in a conversation that always starts by what's your problem and how can we help today. And that's really kind of the OS approach. And we of course hope that we've been able to do good, so good of a job that when you tell what you want to do, we shouldn't have to say that, "Oh, you can't do that because that's against how we think you should do things."
The only thing that we might be able to want to say is that, "Hmm, that's interesting, a very complex thing that you want to do. This is how you pull it off. May we suggest an easier setup? Like we can remove these steps if you do that." But again, if you want to do it in the way how you describe, go ahead. You can do very complex things on OS also.
Karri: I guess the sky is the limit when everything is accessible by API. So even if you have a super complex thing, it might be that, hey, you might not end up actually doing it inside TWICE, but maybe you code a smartphone app that you are actually using in-store. And that's where you actually feed the data to, let's say, this stock item that you scan with your phone, and then you just take a photo of it or something like that. So you can create interfaces or anything like that, or have it be part of your other more wide composable commerce stack.
Tuomo: Exactly. That's, and I think that's at the root of everything. That it's true to all commerce, but it's even more true to re-commerce. That every operational flow... it's so contextual to where you are, who you are, who you're working with, what's your product, what's your know-how, what's the level of service you want to provide. That it's very hard for you to find a solution from the market that would fit that exactly if it's a very opinionated vertical application. But with an OS, you can define your own flow and evolve it as you grow and work forward.