Composable Commerce: The What, Why, and How

The future of business is composable. – Gartner

Being from the eCommerce space, you might already be familiar with JAMstack and Headless Commerce.

Composable Commerce is a new addition to the pack.

It is a modern eCommerce development approach that uses the best-of-breed technologies to help you customize, scale, and innovate your business processes seamlessly.

According to a Gartner report, by 2023, organizations that have adopted composable commerce will outpace the competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation.

In this blog post, we will discuss everything you need to know about this approach and how it can help you take your eCommerce business to the next level.

Ready? Let’s get started.

What Is Composable Commerce?

Composable commerce is a development approach that lets you build unique eCommerce experiences by combining suitable technologies.

To put it simply, it is an architecture where every component is pluggable, scalable, and replaceable at any moment without affecting the other parts of the application.

You can select and assemble your commerce capabilities as per your specific business needs instead of force-fitting the standard out-of-the-box functionalities.

The fundamental principles behind this architecture are:

Modular

Each component is a self-contained system that can be interchanged and deployed independently.

Open

Each module can be integrated with any third-party app and proprietary API services to customize the solution.

Flexible

It can leverage MACH (microservices, APIs, cloud, headless) and JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, markup language) technologies to build suitable infrastructures.

Business Centric

It offers full control to develop software and web apps that fit the changing needs of businesses and can be customized accordingly.

Why are Businesses Embracing Composable Commerce?

Today, modern eCommerce businesses are moving away from monolith solutions, and for the right reasons.

Owing to the rapid digital transformation initiatives, businesses’ needs have outgrown the all-in-one marketing solutions.

Now, they need specific technologies that specialize in a certain aspect or functionality such as content management, analytics, email marketing, CRM, live chat, and personalization to best serve their users.

Composable commerce provides them with the flexibility to mix and match these specific capabilities to meet their growing business needs.

So, for instance, if your business goal is to improve search to increase average order value (AOV), you can add an AI-powered search solution. Or, if you want to introduce new revenue channels, you can integrate live video shopping into your eCommerce application.

How Is Composable Commerce Different From Headless Commerce?

Headless commerce is the first step toward composable commerce. It is the development approach where the front end is decoupled from the backend and the two operate independently via APIs.

Composable commerce takes this a step further and decouples the various business components that compose the application, for example, search, payment, and fulfillment. Composable Commerce achieves this through Packaged Business Capabilities (PBC). Each PBC represents a feature or a business capability that is built around a specific business function.

Now, since each component of the application works independently, it’s easier to update, change, or manage it without impacting other parts of the system.

Advantages of Composable Commerce

Composable commerce has several advantages that include but are not limited to –

Flexibility and Freedom

With composable commerce, everything is customizable. You can select and work with any frontend and backend technologies you want and make changes along the way. So, you are free to build what you need with the best-of-breed solutions.

Faster Development

Building an eCommerce store using the composable approach is fairly easy and seamless. Since it uses independent components, any changes made in one component of the application won’t affect the functioning of other parts of the system. Moreover, the programming processes also run much faster and full-stack upgrades are relatively smoother.

Cost Reduction

Composable commerce allows businesses to work with only the resources they need. This helps prevent vendor lock-in which reduces operational costs significantly. Furthermore, by incorporating low and no-code tools, you can reduce the dependency on development resources which can lead to more savings.

Future Proof Approach

Composable commerce enables businesses to be adaptive to the future. You can leverage cutting-edge technologies like AR, VR, and IoT to create futuristic applications. Moreover, you can easily upgrade any individual component as per your evolving requirements or to gain a competitive business edge.

Disadvantages of Composable Commerce

Now that we know the key advantages of composable commerce, let’s also take a look at some of the challenges businesses face with it.

Managing Multiple Systems

For every new capability in your eCommerce system, you would need to partner with a vendor. This means more negotiations, service level agreements, and other contingencies. Managing all this is a lot of work and will require dedicated resources of its own.

Functionality Overkill

Though the composable commerce approach provides you complete control over your system functionalities, it can make operations more complicated. So, if you run a business that just needs basic functionalities, you would be better off with an out-of-the-box solution.

Higher Learning Curve

To leverage your eCommerce stack to its full potential, you can add new and cutting-edge technologies to your system. However, this will demand a higher development skill set. Your development team would need to learn entire new technologies, their capabilities, and compatibilities to ensure smooth business operations.

Getting Started With Composable Commerce

Going composable could be a game changer for your eCommerce business. However, there are multiple factors you need to consider before making this decision. For starters, ask yourself –

• Is your business constantly evolving and requires user-centric experiences that can be deployed quickly?
• Does your eCommerce stack contain a set of complex applications that are challenging to update and manage?
• Do you have the technical expertise to work with modern technologies and integrate components with an API-first approach?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then adopting composable commerce might just be the right solution for your business. But to go down this road, it’s best to start with an incremental approach.

So, instead of replacing your legacy architecture all at once, identify your business’s immediate goals and start from there. Pick a platform that provides you the flexibility to mix and match PBCs that can fulfill your specific business needs. Establish a foundational layer that is scalable, secure, and acts as a single source of truth.

Last but not the least, choose a technology partner that understands your needs and matches the technical requirements of your team.

Closing Thoughts

The JAMstack approach and headless commerce have already changed the way we build the web. And composable commerce is now the next step. With evolving technology, growing consumer expectations, and rising business competition, every fast-scaling business should consider composable as it can be the go-to solution to deliver well on all levels.

Interested in Learning More About Composable Commerce for Your Business? Get in Touch.