What Is Composable Commerce?

Composable commerce is a modern approach to ecommerce that provides businesses with the option to choose best-of-breed technologies to build their ecommerce stack. Business capabilities are bundled as separate microservices enabling enterprises to separate concerns and reduce complexity.

For example, a monolithic ecommerce solution might provide an ecommerce platform that includes features for managing a product catalog, processing payments, initiating delivery, and more. While it may be convenient to have all of this functionality together, a company might find another alternative on the market that provides more options and flexibility for each specific task. Composable commerce allows them to leverage these services and create an ecommerce stack that is customized to their needs.

Traditional monolithic platforms don’t allow organizations to break their rigid molds. While the out-of-the-box functionality may keep things simple, companies are left with a cookie-cutter approach to building their commerce experiences. The headless commerce approach provides more freedom, but it comes with the cost and effort to build new frontends and requires businesses to have talent on staff to get the most out of it. On the other hand, composable commerce can provide both freedom and simplicity.

Why Composable Commerce Is Necessary

Many organizations are now considering the composable commerce approach due to their need to embrace content commerce or content-driven commerce, where content is strategically integrated into the customer experience and throughout the entire customer journey to give customers a high-quality shopping experience.

According to Gartner, ‘application leaders responsible for digital commerce should prepare for a “composable” approach using packaged business capabilities to move toward future-proof digital commerce experiences.’

Turning to composable commerce helps companies integrate content marketing tools into their sales processes, leveraging a CMS, personalization tools, CRM, and more to enhance the experience.

The customer journey has pivoted from brick and mortar stores and spans several digital channels. However, the experiences on these channels and several ecommerce shops were once limited to simple product information and SEO text. Nowadays, customers want to be informed, inspired, and entertained throughout the buying process. Traditional commerce platforms can place limitations on the experiences created, and while headless commerce makes it easier to embrace these additional channels, business users still need extra tools at their disposal.

Businesses want to capitalize on the benefits of creating modern ecommerce experiences, including product differentiation, increased customer loyalty, and engagement, more sales, and an overall positive customer experience.

 

Implementing Content Commerce With Composable Commerce

Embracing the composable commerce approach allows businesses to implement a content commerce strategy. The right CMS enables them to manage both; however, organizations need to have the fundamentals in place at a technical and marketing level to cater to developers and marketers.

Technical Features

Modular and Open Architecture

The most important aspect of implementing composable commerce is an open, modular platform that enables businesses to package different services into components and swap them as necessary.

Robust APIs

A composable commerce platform must have robust APIs that enable the seamless integration with other systems and various frontends channels, facilitating a content-driven commerce strategy. By separating the frontend from the backend, organizations can deliver to a wide range of digital touchpoints.

Flexible Integrations

One of the drawbacks of monolithic architectures and suite systems is that integrations can be complex and challenging. Composable commerce systems need to support flexible integrations so that organizations can choose the tools that fit their tech stack, including those that are yet to be created.

Marketing Features

Composable commerce is meant to help businesses create better shopping experiences for their customers. The marketing features necessary to enable this include:

Intuitive User Interface

Marketers shouldn’t feel like they need to consult their IT teams every time they need to create landing pages, microsites, or other content experiences. A composable commerce platform should provide visual, WYSIWYG editing and facilitate fast and easy content creation and editing.

Content Reuse

Headless and composable commerce provide access to new frontends to publish content. Marketers need to be able to create content once, then publish and reuse it across various mediums.

Localization

Content and ecommerce experiences need to cater to worldwide audiences. Content translation and localization is necessary to adapt to different culture, language, and audience requirements.

Analytics

Marketing teams need access to analytics to gain insights about incoming traffic and know whether or not their visitors are converting into buyers.

Personalization

Marketers need to be able to tailor content based on behaviors and previous purchases, as well as define segmented audiences to create personalized experiences.

How Composable Commerce Helps Unify the Customer Journey

Composable commerce lets businesses reap the following benefits:

Gives Freedom to Choose Best-of-Breed Tools

With composable commerce, companies have the freedom to choose the best-of-breed tools that are the best fit for a particular job. For example, rather than being restricted to the personalization capabilities provided by a monolithic platform, they can choose the best software on the market. Or, as their ecommerce shop grows, they may need to change how they ship products. Composable commerce allows them to select an emerging SaaS solution that simplifies the shipping process if they so wish.

Offers More Flexibility and Adaptability

Composable commerce gives retailers and merchants increased flexibility. Without being locked into a suite vendor, they can quickly adapt to changes in technology and the marketplace. By using an API-first or microservices-based approach they can respond to market trends, integrate new channels, or leverage new data more easily.

Increases Scalability

Implementing composable commerce enables businesses to add tools and scale as necessary to cope with increasing demand on their ecommerce stores.

Omnichannel Content Experiences

Creating an omnichannel shopping experience becomes much easier for marketing teams as organizations embrace composable commerce. They have the flexibility to create marketing campaigns that span websites, mobile applications, digital kiosks, and more.