Composable Commerce:

What’s all the hype about Composable Commerce?

Let's understand composable commerce using a simple analogy:

In the world of commerce platforms, a monolithic approach is like using a pre-designed blueprint for building a house. While it provides convenience, making changes or customizations can be complex and costly. On the other hand, composable commerce takes a modular approach, allowing you to select and integrate independent components to create a customized platform.

With a monolithic platform, modifications require extensive changes to the entire system, limiting flexibility and responsiveness. In contrast, composable commerce enables easy adaptability and scalability. You can add, remove, or replace modules without affecting the entire structure, just like assembling a house using modular components.

By choosing best-of-breed components or services, composable commerce empowers organizations to swiftly adapt to market demands, integrate new technologies, and deliver personalized customer experiences. It offers the flexibility and agility that a monolithic platform lacks.

Composable commerce is like building a house with modular components, providing the flexibility, adaptability, and scalability needed in today's dynamic business environment.

Understanding Composable Commerce

Gartner had stated, "Sustaining and maximizing favorable business outcomes for the accelerating digital industrial age requires that enterprises shift to a business design that maximizes the potential of digital technology. A key aspect of digital technologies that affects all areas of business is the ability to compose and recompose various elements of business rapidly and inexpensively. A business design that allows for such composability is necessary to both capitalize on opportunities and address threats from continuous disruption. This design should work along with other societal, cultural, and economic factors that affect the economy and business landscape."

What Is Headless Commerce?

Headless technology detaches the front-end presentation layer from the backend of technologies like CMS or search functions. Unlike traditional systems, it uses a modular architecture with an API layer for data access and communication. This enables businesses to customize and evolve their commerce solutions easily. Headless technology unlocks possibilities and fosters a flexible commerce ecosystem by separating the frontend and backend.

What is Composable Commerce?

Composable commerce is a paradigm shift in commerce architecture, driven by MACH principles: microservices, API, cloud-based SaaS, and headless technologies.

It allows organizations to strategically design their ecosystem by selecting and integrating specific microservices for various business functions. Instead of relying on a single vendor, composable commerce empowers brands to choose the best tools for their needs. This approach fosters agility, scalability, and adaptability by assembling a tailored ecosystem of microservices that communicate seamlessly through APIs. Composable commerce enables businesses to optimize operations, drive innovation, and deliver exceptional customer experiences in the ever-evolving retail landscape.

Benefits of Composable Commerce

The adoption of a composable approach is driven by five significant benefits: speed, flexibility, scalability, cost efficiency, and compatibility. These distinct advantages serve as compelling factors motivating our customers to embrace this approach.

Rapid adaptability in a dynamic market

In today's fiercely competitive digital commerce market, enterprises need to respond quickly to global pandemics and emerging competitors. However, traditional monolithic systems hinder rapid front-end changes, taking weeks to implement due to the need for deploying the entire system and lengthy release cycles.

In contrast, a Composable commerce platform leverages modern DevOps principles, enabling rapid releases. With a decoupled architecture, small changes can be shipped without a full platform deployment.

For example, modifying and deploying a standalone Progressive Web App (PWA) front-end separately allows continuous user experience enhancements, keeping businesses ahead of the curve.

Enhanced flexibility

Monolithic all-in-one suites provide comprehensive functionality, but businesses often outgrow or find certain features inadequate. Re-platforming is a time-consuming process that hampers business capabilities for years. Additionally, evolving needs like improved search and merchandising require flexible solutions.

In a Composable commerce setup, the solution is straightforward: replace outdated components. The decoupled architecture simplifies this process compared to traditional re-platforming. It enables greater flexibility, empowering designers to deliver tailored commerce experiences across channels and devices.

Leveraging APIs, functional capabilities can be reused and adapted for new scenarios, ensuring businesses keep pace with evolving demands.

Easy scalability

While monolithic platforms offer cloud options with improved accessibility and reduced maintenance costs, scalability remains a challenge. Limited platforms can dynamically allocate resources based on demand, resulting in unused resource costs for businesses.

In contrast, modern MACH applications leverage hyper-scalers' capabilities to achieve true dynamic scaling. Resources can be easily adjusted in real-time, optimizing efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Cost savings

Suite customers often find themselves paying for components they don't use, leading to frustration. With an all-in-one suite, you might be charged for an Order Management System (OMS), Product Information Management (PIM), and Content Management System (CMS) even if you only need one.

In contrast, MACH applications offer different license models. You pay for what you actually use, measured by factors like API calls or incoming orders. These models allow selective usage of specific platform parts or services. For example, you can utilize just the checkout functionality of a commerce platform without paying for the entire suite.

Simply put, MACH applications ensure your payments align with your usage, providing flexibility and cost efficiency.

Continuous upgrades

Monolith platforms release upgrades with new features and bug fixes every few months or twice a year. However, customers often delay implementing these upgrades if they don't benefit from them.

This approach leads to compatibility issues and, eventually, a major upgrade becomes a time-consuming project.

In contrast, multi-tenant SaaS applications are regularly updated by vendors, ensuring customers always have the latest features and fixes. Customers don't need to deploy custom code, avoiding disruptions caused by upgrades.

Conclusion

Transitioning from a traditional, monolithic or headless platform to a composable commerce model doesn't require abandoning ship all at once. The true advantage lies in the ability to make the shift incrementally. Adopting a modular mindset across the organization is the crucial initial step before embarking on the journey towards a fully composable commerce ecosystem. Once a fleet of interchangeable, best-of-breed applications is deployed, be prepared to outpace the competition with agility and innovation.

However, transitioning from a monolithic / headless platform to a composable commerce approach is a significant endeavor that demands specialized expertise. Without the right know-how, there's a considerable chance of surpassing your budget, setting impractical deadlines, and implementing the new infrastructure in an inefficient manner.

Therefore, if you lack the necessary in-house expertise, look for certified partners and soon your business shall become synonymous with scalability and transformation.