Composable Commerce 101: What It Is and Why It’s Here to Stay
Posted by Alex Samuely on Sep 12, 2023
Deliver modern, mobile-first shopping experiences that delight your customers. Drive ROI back to your business across all customer touchpoints—in-store, online, and on mobile. Book a time with our team to learn how we can help transform your business with our omnichannel solutions.
*Privacy Notice: By hitting "Submit," I acknowledge receipt of the NewStore Privacy Policy.
Composable commerce may sound like the retail lexicon’s latest buzzword. However, it relies on one of the most fundamental aspects of successful commerce: the power of personalization.
In today’s digital era, consumers have grown accustomed to receiving personalized services and interactions on any device. They seek convenience, and they also look for customized item suggestions, up-to-date inventory information, and an array of payment options. To stand out in a competitive marketplace, brands must invest in solutions that will meet customers’ standards.
The best return on investment? Choosing a platform that enables brands to cherry-pick a variety of best-in-class components. That will help create a comprehensive commerce solution – also known as composable commerce.
Below is a guide to composable commerce’s four key concepts and the MACH standard for architecture. Learn more about what composable commerce is and how MACH is helping it change the game for retail brands and their customer experiences.
To dive deeper into composable commerce 101, it’s important to understand companies’ complex needs. They must quickly adapt to the latest digital experiences, develop new strategies to retain their current customers while attracting new ones, and provide easy browsing and checkout options. This all must appear seamless to the consumer on the front end. On the back end, it requires much more coordination for retailers.
Composable commerce gives companies the ability to choose from a variety of commerce and vendor options that work best for them. This ultimately creates a customized, digitally-forward omnichannel experience in lieu of a one-size-fits-all solution.
These components may include an open ecosystem, extensive customer support options, APIs to help adapt to changing market conditions, modular architecture, immediate software updates, and more.
The world of composable commerce mimics the concept of elasticity: stretching and evolving to meet new market conditions and demands. Composable commerce is also similar to building blocks; by choosing a variety of different tools and platforms on which to build a base, brands can create something layered and monumental.
Composable commerce centers on four key concepts:
Business-centricity: By investing in customizable components, companies can eliminate friction from their shopping experiences, which benefits customers. This also helps lower in-house costs because of fewer technical problems.
Modularity: In a modular system, each component can be deployed on its own. This provides greater flexibility down the road if companies want to swap out a feature or combine several services. The end result? A much more agile experience.
Openness: An open ecosystem yields more integration and customization options, which could include third-party applications to complement best-in-class business strategies. As the sheer number of options is so vast, this provides brands with even more flexibility.
Flexibility: Composable commerce’s popularity hinges on arguably the most important component of all – flexibility. By cherry-picking various commerce solutions, brands can remain nimble as new customers and channels enter the marketplace.
As markets evolve, technologies follow suit. Many companies are leveraging new architecture built on MACH principles. While composable describes the type of commerce solution, MACH details how it brings that solution to life. The acronym stands for:
The commerce ecosystem encompasses many services – including but not limited to:
Companies can plug-and-play with these crucial touchpoints of the customer journey to create one seamless back-end experience. This then broadens their reach to a much more global scale.
That’s why a customizable commerce platform is paramount to enhancing the customer shopping journey. This spans the back end (via omnichannel cloud and order management services) to the in-store experience (through store fulfillment functionalities) to full-fledged mobile shopping capabilities.
These days, all brands must future-proof their commerce capabilities. This practice allows businesses to serve specific customer needs while simplifying their own commerce architecture. Below are the top two benefits of composable commerce for brands today.
1. Easier Collaboration Among Employees
In using a composable commerce model, front-end and back-end developers can operate independently of each other without impacting their respective scopes, which wouldn’t be possible with a full-stack engine. Developers can also make changes to the system much more easily, yielding fewer IT dependencies.
2. Information Technology Cost-Savings
Investing in composable commerce is cost effective. Brands can mix-and-match the capabilities they want to deploy, and they can quickly remove a redundant capability. If they require certain functions to be deployed at a specific time, composable commerce allows for that type of customization as well. Overall, composable commerce represents a lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and is a far more efficient solution than fully re-platforming.
Of course, there are many other benefits, too. Gartner previously predicted that by 2023, organizations that adopted a composable commerce approach would “outpace their competitors by 80% in terms of speedy implementation of new features.” Having that kind of edge in a crowded retail industry can make or break a brand.
The crux of composable commerce 101 is simple. It enables companies to innovate and scale at a much faster rate than they would while using a monolithic platform. By leveraging packaged business capabilities found in composable commerce systems, businesses can employ a modular approach to their software and handpick the features that will best serve their customers – and provide easy customization options for their developers.
Once brands invest in a decoupled, modular architecture and begin deploying customized features, their likelihood for a higher return on investment will increase. Then, it’s time to evaluate for best-performing features and for those that may need adjusting. As brands continue customizing their own journeys, customers will experience a reflection of that high level of personalization.
Ultimately, composable commerce is here to stay as a staple in the omnichannel digital ecosystem. It’s up to brands to continue paving their way toward the future of commerce. If they do, they’ll stay one step ahead of rapidly evolving customer expectations for a truly best-in-class brand experience.
To learn more about how your company can deploy a composable commerce solution, reach out to one of our experts today.
