Measurable impact: Why composable commerce matters

Highlights

You’ll learn about:

• Flexibility and customization: Composable commerce enables you to customize your online shopping experiences. As a result, you meet customer requirements
• Scalability: A modular approach scales your operations and helps you stay competitive by building open ecosystems and integrating the best solutions
• Future-proof strategy: A composable approach can future-proof your e-commerce operations, making your business agile

Go composable to transform your e-commerce landscape, enhance customer experiences, and drive business growth. Start your composable journey without wasting any time.

Keep reading to learn more!

Remember the disc players in the late 2000s? Today, no one cares about them. The same applies to monolithic systems. Businesses no longer want to work with one-size-fits-all platforms, and that too from a single vendor.

These legacy systems no longer meet the needs of small and large brands. Legacy systems are famous for being cumbersome, expensive, unscalable, and inflexible. So, what’s the alternative?

Enters composable commerce architecture.

Composable commerce architecture which witnessed explosive growth over the past few years. Unlike in the early 21st century, composable is no longer a buzzword. A composable approach is necessary for large enterprises and startup e-commerce businesses. But why?

Composable commerce takes headless commerce to another level, making it easier for you to make changes without a developer.

Read on to explore why composable commerce matters and explore some strategies for building a digital commerce strategy. 

What is composable commerce?

Composable commerce is an e-commerce approach to building flexible online shopping experiences. Businesses can choose and combine different services and applications based on their needs. Composable commerce involves using application programming interfaces (APIs) to communicate and microservices to achieve scalability and flexibility. 

These microservices are the packaged business capabilities (PBCs). Each PBC is a separate capability or feature representing a third-party software. For instance, packaged business capabilities could be inventory management software, a checkout process, or a shopping cart. 

In short, a composable approach uses different vendors offering best-in-breed software components rather than relying on only one vendor to create a standard functionality. 

Key components of composable commerce

Composable commerce works on the MACH architecture (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headlesstechnologies):

• Microservices: These are small services or components that create a customized application. When you change one part of the service, it doesn't impact the whole application. This keeps your application running smoothly and helps you grow over time.
• API-first: An API-first approach ensures all components and services communicate using a well-defined API. APIs help your business achieve greater e-commerce agility and scalability. 
• Cloud-native: A cloud-native approach means your applications and infrastructure run on cloud infrastructure. Such an approach makes your e-commerce business scalable, resilient, and agile, helping you respond to market changes.
• Headless technologies: The composable commerce approach decouples the front-end presentation layer from the back-end content management system (CMS). With a headless CMS, you can create and manage content and present it across multiple channels and devices. 

Composable commerce vs headless commerce

Why composable commerce matters

E-commerce businesses and retailers should be agile to meet changing customer demands and needs. Retailers who cannot change or add new functionalities when new technologies come face challenges in attracting new customers. Meeting specific business needs with composable commerce is easy. Those who adopt a composable commerce system can react to market changes. With composable commerce, they spend less money on acquiring new customers. 

Here are the benefits of composable commerce in modern e-commerce:

Reduces vendor risks

Composable commerce lets you pick the top vendors and integrate them into your business operations. You're no longer restricted to using any particular vendor. The flexible nature of composable commerce architecture allows you to choose your tech stack. Whether you want to use a new tool, update an existing one, or replace an outdated one, you can do it without any hassle.

Enhances customer experiences

A composable commerce solution creates personalized and engaging customer shopping experiences. Customizing your online interactions leads to higher satisfaction and increased brand loyalty.

Provides omnichannel experiences

Composable commerce provides an omnichannel experience on different channels, like:

• Mobile,
• Web,
• Print,
• Social media, and
• Even voice searches.

Going composable helps your business personalize and customize customer interactions across these touchpoints. Additionally, such businesses combine online and in-store shopping by using different components, ensuring customers have a good experience.

How did Contentstack help Bol.com provide an omnichannel experience?

Bol.com wanted to enhance its content management and provide an omnichannel experience. So, it used Contentstack’s composable commerce for its flexibility, ease of integration, and ability to support multilingual content and localization. It rolled out the migration step-by-step. Bol.com moved from HTML-based updates to a more dynamic system where content and images render across channels, providing an omnichannel experience. 

Contentstack's features have streamlined content creation, particularly for storytelling, and facilitated better content and commerce integration. This shift improved website performance, increased click-through rates, and enhanced accessibility.

After using Contentstack, Lennart Billekens, IT Architect at Bol.com said

“We just wanted to use content across the channels, and for that headless is the way to go.”

Read the full case study here.

Increases business efficiency

Composable commerce makes your e-commerce business scalable, allowing you to expand your operations without disruptions. Streamlined processes and optimized workflows increase efficiency, drive growth, and ensure cost-effectiveness.

Reduces reliance on IT

Composable architecture makes your business user-friendly, helping you manage and operate without requiring in-depth technical skills. Businesses going composable reduce their reliance on their IT team and infrastructure. Because of this, non-technical users can perform the necessary tasks like updating and publishing content.

Ensures a modular commerce system

Customer relationship management, inventory management, shopping cart technology, and data analytics make your e-commerce store modular. You can deploy and interchange them based on your specific business requirements.

Creates an open ecosystem

Going composable empowers you to assemble and compose best-of-breed solutions using third-party and custom-built apps. You no longer face the limitation of using multiple non-efficient software and components from a single vendor. Also, you only pay for the components and services you use. 

Gives you a competitive edge

In the fight against build vs. buy, retailers who buy from third-party vendors fall behind competitors who build custom applications. With 70% of large and medium-sized enterprises using a composable approach for new application planning by 2024, going composable gives you a competitive advantage. 

Implementing composable commerce strategies

Switching from a monolithic platform to a composable system takes time, and these steps:

Assess your existing infrastructure and tech stack

Assess your existing environment and tech stack. Use this step to identify dependencies, making it challenging to integrate composable commerce. After identifying the limitations, ensure your existing commerce platform supports an API-driven architecture. Before going composable, ensure your platform is modular and integrates with new technologies. 

Select the appropriate modular components

Based on your requirements, choose the MACH components that form the building blocks of your composable commerce platform. Consider each component's role because they help you meet your business requirements. For instance, you can select:

• CMS,
• Payment processing gateway,
• E-commerce platform,
• Order management system,
• Inventory management system,
• Shipping provider and
• Marketing automation tool.

Choose your technology partners and vendors

Partner with technology providers like Contentstack, which can deliver composable commerce solutions. Prefer vendors that offer flexible, scalable, and easy-to-integrate components. Before selecting, ensure these vendors align with your long-term vision and can support your business.

Plan your implementation strategy

Developing an implementation strategy is necessary because your business may use various components. Before a full-scale rollout, focus on a pilot to test the integration of your new components. This ensures they work with your existing systems. Use this planning stage to adjust and optimize your performance without impacting your entire system.

Train your staff for change management

Provide training on the new platform and its components to prepare your team for the transition. Effective change management practices reduce resistance and ensure a smoother transition.

Scale your implementation and integration

Implement your composable commerce components step-by-step, starting with the most critical component. Based on customer feedback and performance metrics, add more components and functionalities.

Assess your new components

Composable commerce is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution. Track your platform's performance and make adjustments. Keep current on new technologies and trends to improve your composable commerce ecosystem.

The future-proof e-commerce strategy

With changing customer demands, developing an e-commerce future-proof strategy is essential. Businesses can make customers happy and meet their needs by being flexible, adaptable, and offering personalized services.

A future-proof e-commerce strategy involves assessing:

• Market trends,
• Consumer behavior analytics and 
• Technological advancements. 

Companies should be agile and adopt new technologies to improve their customers' experience. For example, customers need a speedy and effective transaction process when purchasing an online store.

Your business can succeed using:

• Artificial intelligence,
• Machine learning,
• Predictive analytics,
• Advanced personalization methods and
• Other technological advancements.

A future-proof e-commerce strategy helps you design a stable, flexible, responsive platform that meets your customer needs and keeps up with technological advancements.

FAQs

Why is composable commerce important? 

Composable commerce offers the flexibility and scalability necessary for businesses to adapt to market changes and customer needs.

Why is composable commerce a better solution than traditional platforms? 

Composable commerce is better than traditional platforms because it enhances customers' shopping experience. These platforms make your store flexible and easy to use while making it agile.

What is composable commerce?

Composable commerce is a way to choose and assemble different parts of an online store.

What is composability, and what are the benefits? 

Composability allows you to reuse, add, and mix components to make your business more flexible, scalable, and innovative.

Learn more

By adopting composable commerce, companies can become more flexible, resilient, scalable, and agile. Going composable helps you navigate through complex systems. A modular approach can help you stay one step forward and tackle new challenges

Request a free demo to see how going composable can help your business stay ahead and improve your retail strategy.