Composable commerce is a powerful term that symbolizes building a bespoke eCommerce experience for modern users by combining the technologies that best align with their goals and mission. This term was first coined in a Gartner report back in 2020 and involves selecting the right technologies in order to create memorable online experiences for their users.

We can perceive composable commerce somewhat as building a home. When starting the process, you may choose to use an out-of-the-box design created by a developer, which is standardized and makes things go smoother and faster. However, this can result in a one-size-fits-all solution that is not truly appreciated by your customers.  Conversely, building a completely custom solution, or a “dream home”, will certainly make your clients happy.

With composable commerce, organizations of all sizes can satisfy the exact business requirements of their target niche instead of trying to force a standard solution. The great news is that rigid architectures that prevent companies from customizing their services’ capabilities are a thing of the past. Savvy and dynamic businesses can now capitalize on modern approaches and technologies such as APIs, microservices, headless, and cloud-native, to adapt to the changing market dynamics. By adopting a composable commerce approach, you’re ensuring that your today’s solution can stay up to date with tomorrow’s demands.

Traits of Composable Commerce

Using composable commerce enables your business to match and mix specific capabilities that would allow you to achieve your business goals. For instance, if you want to boost your average order value, you can capitalize on the power of a bespoke AI-powered search solution. On the same note, if your goal is to uncover new, improved revenue channels, you can start leveraging live video shopping on your site.

In case your business’ aim is to grow your company from a single distribution center to multiple centers spread across several time zones, you can utilize a potent API-first order management system.

The four main traits of composable commerce are:

1. Utilizes open standards: composable commerce uses integration patterns along with open standards and extensibility models to encourage a whole new level of customization. This modern approach focuses on the customization of proprietary API services and third-party.

2. Modularity: each component is self-contained and can be deployed independently of others

3. Flexibility: composable commerce is highly flexible and utilizes potent technologies such as APIs, microservices, headless, cloud, and Jamstack (markup language, JavaScript, API) architectures.

4. Company-centric: composable commerce includes all the necessary capabilities teams need to “compose” independent features and services into high-end solutions that address the complex needs of modern businesses.

What are the Benefits of Composable Commerce?

In the past, monolithic software applications were considered to be the norm. With these, the data access code and user interface were combined to work together on a single platform. This was single-tiered and independent from other applications. What this meant is that every new functionality, be it a chatbot or a mobile self-checkout, had to be hard-wired into the system. Needless to say, this was extremely tedious and time-consuming.

On the other hand, composable commerce allows you to mix different components together in order to achieve specific business goals. Thanks to modular applications, you’ll only have to change the logic and services’ APIs. The independent components of a composable commerce platform can be swapped in and out as desired, and can also be applied to specific experiences for maximum impact.

Thus, one of the biggest benefits of composable commerce is the flexibility it gives you to stay ahead of your customers’ expectations and deliver highly personalized, superior commerce experiences on any touchpoint during their journey. 

It’s important to mention another key benefit of composable commerce, which includes its ability to enhance operational efficiencies, enabling your business to leverage faster development cycles and benefit from minimized interdependence across teams.

Is Composable Commerce the Right Choice for you?

Probably the only argument against going with composable commerce is that it involves extensive costs and it’s a time-consuming process. Nevertheless, one should also look at the long-term costs of not staying up to date with the latest technologies. The costs of not changing can supersede the costs involved in transforming a monolithic architecture into composable commerce.

Composable commerce is mandatory for your business if:

• You are part of an innovative industry where things are changing rapidly and your target audience requires person-centric experiences
• Your company runs on a complex set of applications that require a huge effort to change or improve
• Your business has an ecosystem of open-source, simple integrations that you want to improve along the way
  If you need a reliable partner that can help your business leverage the perks of composable commerce in 2023 and beyond, we invite you to discover our retail services.