Composable Commerce

In the modern business landscape, organizations prioritizing speed, innovation, flexibility, and scalability increasingly adopt modern e-commerce solutions based on headless and microservices architecture. These solutions, often referred to as MACH (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless) architecture, strongly emphasize composable architecture. By embracing a modular and best-of-breed approach, businesses can leverage the benefits of these platforms to create highly customisable and adaptable e-commerce experiences.

Composable commerce emphasizes the flexibility and modularization of various business components in the e-commerce architecture. It involves assembling and integrating different best-of-breed services, APIs and microservices to create customized and scalable business solutions.

Composable Commerce enables businesses to decompose their business infrastructure into modular components, mixing and matching different services according to their specific needs. These components include shopping carts, product catalogs, pricing & promotion engines, payment gateways, inventory management systems, and order management systems.

Composable commerce accomplishes this by combining or composing Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs), which are individual features or capabilities of the application typically provided by third-party software components. For instance, PBCs can include functionalities like shopping cart and checkout, promotions, or business user features.

The composable approach emphasizes leveraging different vendors who specialize in providing robust and comprehensive functionality for specific areas rather than relying on a single vendor to offer a one-size-fits-all solution. This allows businesses to assemble a tailored commerce ecosystem by selecting the best components from various vendors, ensuring each component excels in its specific domain.

By adopting a composable business approach, enterprises can flexibly select and integrate the most appropriate innovative services for each specific business function. This modular architecture allows for faster development, easier customization, and the ability to adapt to changing business needs.

Composable Commerce increases enterprise agility, scalability, and time-to-market (TTM). It enables them to leverage the benefits of MACH to create seamless and personalized customer experiences across various touchpoints, including web, mobile, social media, voice assistants, and IoT devices.

Traditionally, e-commerce platforms were built as monolithic systems with tightly coupled features and functionalities. This made it challenging to modify or add new capabilities without significant effort. Composable commerce addresses these limitations by breaking down the e-commerce stack into smaller, independent building blocks or services. 

By transitioning to composable commerce, you mitigate the risk associated with purchasing off-the-shelf, standard capabilities, and gain greater control over the functionality and performance of your application.

Composable Commerce is:

Flexible: Businesses can choose the most suitable components for their specific needs and easily replace or upgrade them as required. It allows for a more tailored and adaptable e-commerce solution.

Scalable: Composable architecture enables businesses to scale their e-commerce infrastructure by adding or removing individual components based on demand. It provides the flexibility to expand or optimize specific areas without affecting the entire system.

Faster and Agile: Composable commerce facilitates faster development and deployment cycles since components can be developed and updated independently. It enables businesses to quickly adapt to market changes and implement new features or integrations.

Best-of-Breed: With composable commerce, businesses can select the best services or components from different vendors or providers based on their strengths and expertise. It allows for a more specialized and competitive e-commerce ecosystem.

Modular: Deploying each PBC independently in a composable commerce architecture eliminates the risks linked to tightly coupled services and provides the flexibility to replace modules gradually as needed.

Open: Composable commerce is founded on open standards, integration patterns, and extensibility models, fostering seamless integrations and effortless customization.

Business-oriented: Composable commerce provides all the essential tools and capabilities for both business buyers and development teams, granting complete control over the iteration and innovation process while reducing costs and risks.

Integrated with ecosystem: Composable commerce encourages integration with other external systems, such as PIM (Product Information Management), OMS (Order Management System), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), or marketing automation tools. It promotes an unified and cohesive customer experience across various touchpoints.

Let’s say you have a composable commerce shop. In this setup, you could utilize different solutions for various aspects of your business, such as payment processing, shipping and e-commerce subscription management, and website content addition. Even though these solutions come from different vendors, your customers perceive them as a unified e-commerce store experience.

The concept of “composable commerce” gained prominence through a Gartner report published in 2020. According to the report, Gartner predicted that by 2023, companies embracing a composable approach would surpass their competitors by 80% in terms of the speed at which they implement new features.

Nowadays, the majority (95%) of e-commerce professionals strongly endorse the adoption of the composable commerce approach as the most suitable strategy to pursue.