Elevate your business: Discover composable commerce advantages

Highlights

You’ll learn about the composable commerce benefits:

• Provides freedom from vendor lock-in
• Lowers total cost of ownership
• Makes your business scalable
• Improves performance and security
• Enhances customer relationships
• Enables experimentation and optimization
• Allows for granular-level development
• Provides consistent journeys across touchpoints
• Increases personalized customer interactions
• Reduces the time-to-market
• Speeds up deployment

Understanding the advantages of composable commerce for your business can help you make an informed decision. Go composable today to experience a flexible and scalable e-commerce store. 

Keep reading to learn more!

A traditional e-commerce platform combining user-facing storefronts and consumer data may give your business a good start. But, as your business grows, you will face potential bottlenecks. 

That’s why companies rely on composable commerce. 

Think of composable commerce as creating a combo meal. You choose your favorite pizza with a special seasoning from one store, move to another with a special-flavored garlic bread and finally settle for a milkshake from the third store. You shop for the best from multiple stores rather than buying the combo meal from the same store. 

Composable commerce enables businesses to work in the same way. It uses an application programming interface (API) and other software integration to build a tech stack comprising all the best-of-breed solutions. 

Read on to explore why composable commerce is important and its implementation challenges. 

9 Composable commerce advantages for businesses

The transition to composable is a strategic investment in the future of your e-commerce business and can greatly enhance your business outcomes in these nine areas.

Freedom from vendor lock-in

Monolithic e-commerce platforms create a dangerous dependency on a single vendor. Sudden problems in the vendor’s products, changes in project scope and price increase can leave you in a dilemma. You have no choice but to accept the vendor's terms.

With the best-of-breed modular platforms, you select vendors based on your business needs and customer preferences. For instance, you don't buy an entire system if you only need an inventory management system. You can purchase other functionalities like payment processing gateways and order processing systems from another vendor. 

So, don’t let a single technology provider hold your growth back. Add, remove or modify functionalities without worrying about anything else. In a composable approach, the vendor cannot cause any hurdles in your new initiatives.

Lowers your total cost of ownership

A monolithic approach locks you in fixed monthly or yearly contracts. The problem arises because you don’t use all the features you pay for. Fixed-price contracts are costly and make it challenging to switch vendors. 

But under a composable commerce model, you pay for services you use, lowering your total cost of ownership (TCO). Migrating to composable commerce is less expensive because you identify specific solutions that fit your business requirements and changing customer demands. 

For example, you can focus on enhancing the customer checkout experience and allocate more resources to a payment processing system.

Helps you grow and scale without limits

When your business grows, your e-commerce store needs to scale up. Otherwise, you will face issues like slow website loading speed and poor customer experience. In a composable commerce architecture each modular component handles the load separately without affecting your system's functionality. 

Your store handles the load seamlessly, even during peak periods and high traffic. A modular strategy fulfills all your growth needs. This is true, especially if you intend to expand your store with thousands of products or venture into new markets. 

How did Contentstack help Emma scale its operations and ensure a faster campaign launch?

Emma®—The Sleep Company, experiencing hypergrowth, faced challenges with its legacy IT systems, slowing down its expansion. Embracing composable architecture and MACH technologies (microservices, API-first, cloud-native and headless technologies), Emma adopted Contentstack for its flexibility, efficiency and ability to scale. This enabled faster campaign launches and improved collaboration between tech and business teams. The strategic shift allowed Emma to overcome technical and business hurdles, enhancing its ability to expand and innovate.

After using Contentstack, Andreas Westendörpf, Chief Technology Officer at Emma, said, 

“The beauty of headless commerce is that it not only delivers short-term results but also that it opens an elegant, logical long-term set of options for the future. This is what we have found with Contentstack and MACH-based technologies.”

Read the complete case study here.

Increases performance and security

In e-commerce, every millisecond matters because it creates customer loyalty and increases your reputation, giving you a competitive advantage. With the bounce rate increasing by 32% as page load times go from one second to three, composable commerce improves your business performance.

This is because composable architecture doesn’t depend upon a single server to host the entire platform or component. The approach uses different servers, increasing security. By using functionalities from different vendors, you get a faster and more secure website.

As a result, your online store is less susceptible to cyberattacks because each component has a built-in security feature. Moreover, an attack on one component doesn’t impact the others. 

Improves relationships with your customers

Generic e-commerce experiences can soon lose appeal against brands offering tailored product recommendations and relevant content. On the other hand, composable commerce offers business efficiency and improves customer relationships. Using a commerce platform, you offer personalized products, content and discounts based on your customers' likes, dislikes and preferences. 

With 86% of customers willing to pay more for superior customer experience and 32% going away from a brand because of a single bad experience, providing personalized experience improves your relationships. 

Embracing a composable commerce approach provides highly personalized experiences and helps you make changes based on customer demands.

Helps you innovate

Composable commerce allows you to change your tech stack, creating an environment that fosters innovation. The ability to mix and match different components helps you experiment with new features and test new environments. As a result, you create business models without disrupting your services. Your development team can experiment at granular levels, helping you optimize your offerings. 

Offers seamless omnichannel experiences

The modern customer journey is more like a maze, with customers switching from one platform to another. A customer may start the interaction on your website, search for different products on your app and purchase from your physical store. To provide such a seamless experience, your e-commerce business should be omnichannel-ready.

Providing an omnichannel experience means delivering a consistent shopping journey across various touchpoints, like:

• Mobile
• Web
• Chat
• Social media
• Voice search
• Physical stores
• Smart devices and kiosks

An omnichannel presence helps you meet your customers where they are and provide personalized and customized offers.

Composable commerce achieves this flexibility and integrates different services and systems into the core commerce functionality of your e-commerce store. For instance, you can integrate functionalities like:

• Customer relationship management
• Content management systems
• Enterprise resource planning
• Project management
• Inventory management

Reduces time-to-market

The modular e-commerce stores combine and enable pre-built components, reducing the need to create every component from scratch. By putting together and organizing all ready-made components, you choose your own digital experiences. This reduces time and effort compared to a traditional e-commerce environment.

Composable commerce can reduce time to market by allowing you to integrate with existing systems and third-party services. Digital commerce's flexibility makes your business agile, helping you make quick adjustments based on feedback and market trends. This reduces the time to market for new features.

Makes your online store modular

Composable commerce makes your online store modular by offering a flexible architecture. It allows you to break down your functionalities into modular components. Adopting a composable approach separates functionalities into different components, helping you manage and scale specific features. Businesses can create reusable modules that serve various purposes across different parts of their ecosystem.

The modular nature customizes various components to meet specific business requirements without impacting the overall system architecture. Moreover, being modular facilitates third-party services and systems. As a result, you can expand the capabilities without compromising the existing infrastructure.

Challenges to implementing composable commerce

Implementing composable commerce brings several challenges that you may need to address:

Digital maturity

Achieving a high level of digital maturity is crucial for implementing digital commerce. To integrate a composable approach, you need a solid foundation in technologies and processes.

Skilled IT resources

Having skilled IT resources makes it easy to navigate digital commerce's complexities. You need dedicated professionals who understand the modular approach and can work with agility.

Complex integration

Integrating multiple solutions within a composable commerce framework is often challenging. Planning and executing integration strategies to ensure functionality across all components is essential.

FAQs

What are the drawbacks of implementing composable commerce?

One drawback of composable commerce is the initial complexity and investment required to integrate multiple systems and platforms. This increases upfront costs and demand for skilled professionals. 

Why is composable commerce a better solution than traditional platforms?

Composable commerce is a better traditional platform because it makes your business flexible and scalable. A modular approach helps you adapt to market changes without facing the limitations of a monolithic platform. When your business is adaptable, you deliver personalized customer experiences and drive growth.

What is composable commerce?

Composable commerce represents a modern e-commerce approach that makes your business flexible and scalable. When you integrate a composable approach, you select and integrate various best-in-class services and technologies. The composable approach works on the principles of MACH architecture. 

What is the difference between headless and composable commerce?

Headless and composable commerce are two different systems with different architectures and purposes. In headless commerce, the presentation layer is separate from the back-end functionality. With a headless approach, you can modify your user interface without changing your back-end systems.

Conversely, compatible commerce uses packaged business capabilities, APIs and cloud infrastructure to create modular systems. You can update or replace every component, including the front and back end. This modular architecture makes your business flexible, helping you meet changing market demands and customer expectations.

Learn more

Composable commerce gives you full control over your current e-commerce environment. E-commerce businesses that embrace a modular approach make their business flexible and agile while improving customer satisfaction. 

Although the journey toward composable commerce presents numerous obstacles, the strategic significance is immense. To explore how composable commerce can transform your business operations and foster unparalleled growth, request a free demo with us.