Composable Commerce

What is Composable Commerce?

Composable was initially used by Gartner, referring to a modular digital commerce approach. It is a development strategy that involves selecting best-of-breed commerce components and combining (or 'composing') them into a unique application designed to meet a specific need. A composable approach, rather than relying on multipurpose offerings, consists of a collection of vendors and technologies that provide a powerful, complete capability for the one thing they do.

To understand Composable Commerce, let’s look at the current norm of adopting a MACH architecture:

• Microservices are autonomous, modular, and tightly scoped software components that focus on a single serving of a larger application.

• APIs - Entry points for these capabilities/services to be linked together, allowing IT teams to build new ones while reducing development effort duplication.

Cloud-native - using public cloud services to provide a system easily scalable and reliable when deployed across different data centers. Furthermore, organizations can employ an application service as a whole or simply the components they require on demand.

• Headless - Provide consistent customer journeys across numerous digital and traditional touchpoints (web, mobile, in-store, IoT devices, etc.) while allowing complete freedom in user-interface design using front-end technologies.

This approach lets developers choose and use different available commerce solutions to meet specific business needs. Examples of these systems are CMS, OMS (order management system), CRM, ERPs, a/b testing, hosting, payments integration, inventory management, PIM (product information management), recommendation engine, tax management, search, and so on.

Composable commerce ultimately addresses the challenges of the modern brand, whether it means expanding into new markets, providing a more seamless customer journey across touchpoints, becoming more responsive to market changes, or enhancing performance.

Rather than creating solutions from the scratch, developers might search for discrete elements that already exist and are trusted. These existing components are merged to provide a strong consumer experience. According to Gartner's Composable Commerce Must Be Adopted for the Future of Applications. By 2023, API-centric SaaS services will account for 50% of new commerce capabilities and the companies that have adopted a composable approach will surpass the competition by 80% in new feature implementation speed.

How can Composable commerce benefit your business?

Integration that is seamless

There is no need for large-scale re-platforming here. One of the primary advantages of Composable Commerce is the ability to integrate different PBCs into your existing IT architecture, allowing you to easily adjust to market changes and handle difficult challenges.

Advanced adaptability and scalability

Do you want to try something new? Add new functionality to your applications and impose precise control over your own commerce stack. Composable Commerce revolves around flexibility and scalability.

There is no chance of vendor lock-in

You won't be limited to a single vendor producing standard functionality as a one-size-fits-all offering if you can switch in/out components on demand over time as needed. Customers can be 'locked in' to an inferior product or service as a result of this difficulty, which many organizations fail to overcome owing to budgetary restrictions, a lack of technical competence, or an attempt to minimize business disruptions.

Business and operational coherence

A happy business is one that works well together. Cross-functional teams, business leaders, and stakeholders can now reframe their objectives and align their PBCs to create a unique experience. As a result, new business models and solutions can be introduced more quickly for success.

Many merchants believe that if Composable Commerce was not a consideration for their future technical platform, they would be at a disadvantage. Remember that agility is not a luxury, but rather a requirement for most organizations in order to be competitive now and in the future.

Who is the composable approach best suited for?

The composable design may not be appropriate for all businesses. Certain factors must be considered:

Size of the business: small firms do not have sophisticated business requirements that require a composable solution

Digital maturity: a well-established digital presence and in-house technical expertise are good signs that a business will profit from a scalable commerce solution. Otherwise, an out-of-the-box solution may be a better option

Complexity: a requirement for the scalability and functionality of composable commerce may be overlooked if a company has a simple product catalog, does not intend to expand, or runs only on D2C or B2C.

Conclusion

Composable Commerce provides increased site security, performance, and flexibility, resulting in more customer-centric experiences for your brand.

Because this strategy allows you to design for and update your system modules individually, you get more flexibility in how frequently you can run feature tests and upgrades, have less downtime, and have greater confidence in the future viability of your tech stack.

When creating a reusable ecosystem, you must guarantee that you have a great partner or the organization needed to make the necessary modifications. Otherwise, you will miss out on numerous important advancements, and the reversible setup will not perform to its maximum capacity.

Do you want to make the switch to Composable Commerce? We at FocusReactive would be delighted to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of Composable. Reach out to us today and we will cooperate to make your projects fly!

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