Understanding Composable Commerce: The Future of Agile, Scalable Business
Gartner, a leading market analyst, coined the term “composable commerce” and predicted that this modular approach would become the new paradigm in building technology systems. Since then, composable commerce has evolved into a component-based, cloud-native, and tech-agnostic ecosystem that enables companies to become more agile and embrace constant change as an opportunity.
This article addresses composable commerce, explores its advantages, and explains why it is poised to become a lasting trend.
What is Composable Commerce?
Composable commerce is a component-based solution design approach that gives companies flexibility and freedom to build and run outstanding shopping experiences. A composable system combines three core traits: it should be cloud-native, component-based, and tech-agnostic. Let’s delve deeper into each of these characteristics:
Cloud-Native
This means the software runs in the cloud and all its functionalities are natively integrated with core components of major cloud providers, such as Google Cloud and AWS. Cloud-native architecture reduces maintenance costs, offers exceptional scalability, and ensures faster time-to-value, enabling brands to boost performance without limits and constantly respond to new influxes of customers.
Component-Based
A composable system combines independent and interchangeable components, also known as packaged business capabilities (PBCs), like search, cart, or checkout. These components communicate via an API-first approach and can be added, swapped, or dropped at any time. This modularity allows businesses to mix best-of-breed services from third-party vendors and homegrown applications, creating a customized technology stack tailored to their needs.
Tech-Agnostic
Businesses are not bound to any specific technology or vendor. This approach offers complete freedom in selecting, coding, integrating, monitoring, and managing applications without requiring new languages or certifications. Existing talent can be utilized to extend the tech stack, ensuring businesses can innovate without the burden of proprietary systems.
Why is Composable Commerce Gaining Traction?
Traditional ecommerce solutions, also known as legacy or monolithic platforms, are indivisible blocks of standardized software that are hard to customize and slow to update. Every change requires retesting and redeployment of the entire system, which can cause issues or even complete system crashes. This lack of flexibility and agility doesn’t align with today’s accelerated business pace, making it difficult for companies to innovate and retain top engineering talent. Additionally, the cost of maintaining monolithic infrastructures is prohibitive due to additional fees for upgrades and integrations.
Composable commerce addresses these challenges by offering maximum flexibility in technology stacks, allowing companies to adapt quickly to changing market conditions. For example, sportswear giant Nike leveraged composable commerce by adopting a microservices architecture and an API-first strategy to enhance personalization and scalability, delivering seamless and tailored shopping experiences across multiple channels.
Key Benefits of Composable Commerce
Infinite Scale
Composable commerce allows businesses to run multiple brands, expand to new markets, and try out new business models with ease. Autoscaling enables real-time response to new traffic influxes, ensuring readiness for peak moments.
Unlimited Flexibility and Agility
Components can be added, removed, or replaced without vendor lock-in, allowing businesses to innovate faster and adapt customer experiences on the fly. This flexibility enables releasing new features up to eight times faster than with legacy systems.
Lower Cost
Investing in financial and technological flexibility leads to higher cost efficiency and eliminates technical debt. Composable systems optimize commerce investments by allowing businesses to select only the components they need, avoiding unnecessary upgrades and maintenance fees.
Reducing Complexity and Costs
Despite misconceptions, composable commerce reduces complexity and costs. By leveraging modular and interchangeable components, businesses can simplify their commerce architecture and streamline integration of new solutions. Real-time updates and maintenance eliminate technical debt, and cloud-native solutions offer infinite scalability without the need for managing servers.
Impact on Customer Experience
Customers today expect seamless, omnichannel journeys and personalized experiences. Composable commerce enables brands to meet these expectations by integrating best-of-breed ecommerce components tailored to specific customer needs. Fast-loading pages, mobile-first capabilities, and personalized recommendations enhance the shopping experience.
For example, beauty retailer Trinny London added a component to deliver a tailored checkout experience by presenting customers with sample options that complement their purchases. BMW Group used composable commerce to auto-scale online capacity during traffic peaks, enhancing omnichannel sales.
B2B organizations are also benefiting from composable commerce. Camera lens manufacturer Tamron created a direct-to-consumer solution, allowing photography enthusiasts to purchase directly from the company.
Enabling Omnichannel Experiences
Composable commerce allows businesses to manage touchpoints and device responsiveness, creating seamless, shoppable experiences across various channels. By decoupling frontends from the commerce backend, businesses can easily add, manage, and drop touchpoints. A single commerce backend serves as the source of truth for data, enabling real-time and consistent data exchange.
Starting Your Composable Commerce Journey
Embracing composable commerce doesn’t require an immediate overhaul. Brands can start by addressing specific pain points or missed opportunities incrementally. This phased approach, known as the strangler pattern, allows businesses to gradually replace their monolithic platform with single components, optimizing constantly and minimizing disruption.
For example, global sportswear giant Adidas used a composable commerce strategy to enhance its e-commerce platform. Starting with the checkout system, Adidas incrementally replaced components, continuously optimizing and ensuring minimal disruption. This gradual rollout allowed Adidas to improve the customer journey and stay on top of its migration roadmap effectively.
Composable Commerce vs. MACH Architecture
While composable commerce and MACH architecture are related, they are not identical. MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless) serves as the technical backbone for composable commerce, allowing brands to tailor experiences to their exact needs. Composable commerce uses MACH principles to create flexible, scalable, and agile commerce solutions.
The Future of Commerce is Composable
The exponential growth of composable commerce is driven by constant change, rising customer expectations, and outdated legacy technology. Gartner predicts that by the end of 2024, composable commerce will become the new paradigm, with 70% of large and medium-sized enterprises incorporating composability into their application planning. Composable commerce enables businesses to embrace change, innovate rapidly, and respond to market demands efficiently, making it the future of commerce.
Conclusion
The success stories of IKEA, Amazon, and Sephora showcase how composable commerce is poised to become the dominant force in ecommerce. By leveraging its inherent flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency, businesses can navigate an ever-evolving marketplace and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Spurtcommerce, an open-source API driven eCommerce solution, exemplifies how companies can adopt a composable commerce approach. By providing modular and customizable components, SpurtCommerce allows businesses to create tailored solutions that meet their unique needs, demonstrating the powerful potential of composable commerce in driving the future of digital retail.
