Navigating the challenges of implementing composable commerce

Highlights

You'll learn:

• How to add new features and keep up-to-date with an evolving market.
• How to personalize the shopping experience, increasing customer contentment.
• How to create an e-commerce platform tailored to your requirements.

Keep reading to learn more!

Every e-commerce business is unique, and so is its business model. Then, how can all e-commerce businesses use the same platform? If they do, they wouldn’t offer any uniqueness and would probably offer the same experience to all their customers.

That’s where composable commerce comes in.

In this article, we explore composable commerce and why it’s a must-have for every e-commerce business to adopt this approach.

What is composable commerce?

Composable commerce is a modern approach for e-commerce businesses, allowing them to select and integrate the best tools and features to build their online store. This flexibility allows e-commerce businesses to adapt to market change and customer needs and offers a competitive advantage.

With 72% of U.S. retailers using composable commerce, this modular approach will likely revolutionize the e-commerce industry.

How does composable commerce work?

Composable commerce works by allowing you to build an e-commerce platform. It first identifies your specific business requirements. After delineating the components, select those you want. You can select from a range of reusable components.

The application programming interface (API) connects these components as a communication channel.

Composable architecture ensures that changes in one part of your platform don't affect the other. As a result, your e-commerce platform will become more stable and reliable. Additionally, it empowers you to upgrade or replace each component independently. When you adopt a composable approach, you get an e-commerce platform that is future-proof and flexible.

Composable commerce vs headless commerce: Which is better?

While composable and headless commerce offer flexibility, they differ in many aspects.

Definition

Headless commerce is an approach that separates the front-end from the back-end. It places an API between them. The separation of these two layers is essential as it helps them operate independently of each other. This means the back-end doesn’t rely on the front-end framework to deliver services.

Composable commerce uses a slightly different strategy to provide more flexibility. It allows businesses to break the e-commerce platforms down into individual services. The component-based architecture allows you to choose, replace, or update specific functionalities per their business requirements.

Ideal for

Headless commerce is advantageous for businesses requiring more design choices, faster load times, and the ability to serve content from different channels. Meanwhile, composable commerce needs strong flexibility in the front-end and back-end and across all business lines.

Composable vs headless commerce: Advantages and disadvantages

While composable and headless commerce offers several benefits to e-commerce platforms, they have certain drawbacks.

Advantages of headless commerce

• Ensures intelligent creation irrespective of the back-end system used.
• You can replace the front-end for the back-end or vice versa without disrupting the workflow of each layer.
• Updates are smaller and independent, and problems in one tool don't impact the entire tech stack.

Disadvantages of headless commerce

As you use more than one system, the complexity of the entire system increases. While you can be more creative and innovative to provide a superior customer journey, building, managing, and maintaining multiple functionalities adds to unnecessary costs.

Advantages of composable commerce

• Use best-of-breed commerce solutions and modules rather than off-the-shelf software bundles.
• Provides a more flexible, scalable platform for multichannel selling.
• Choose the tools and suppliers you prefer.
• It gives you control over costs and prevents you from wasting money on functionalities you don’t require.

Disadvantages of composable commerce

With composable commerce, the number of vendors you use increases. As you work with different components, you need to manage each and create a comprehensive interface for their management.

The architecture of composable commerce

The architecture of composable commerce depends on modularity. Its architecture is as follows:

PBCs

The building blocks of composable commerce are packaged business capabilities or PBCs. These are different elements and services of the composable system. PBCs are atomic components that encompass a single business capability or functional area. It easily fits into the e-commerce system through the APIs. 

Payment options and processors, content management, inventory, and customer relationship management systems are examples of PBCs. These components make your e-commerce scalable, interoperable, and modular.

API-first approach

The API-first approach delivers integrated and optimal solutions. As a result, you build a tech stack based on your business needs. You are no longer dependent on ready-made or prepackaged plugins or software.

Cloud-native

The cloud-native principle means that the commerce is delivered in the cloud or as a SaaS model. This empowers you to use commerce services as a whole or as separate components as required without deploying or re-deploying solutions. 

Also, when you deploy services in the cloud, you can quickly scale them to meet peak demand and support long-term business growth.

Because of this architecture, e-commerce companies can build customized, flexible, and scalable stores, ultimately positioning them to address evolving customer demands and market trends effectively.

What are the benefits of composable commerce for e-commerce businesses?

Composable commerce has the potential to transform your e-commerce business processes and overall performance. Here are the benefits of composable architecture:

Freedom to customize your e-commerce platform

Composable commerce empowers businesses to customize their solutions to meet market and business requirements.

It lets you customize your commerce platforms, from changing the appearance and atmosphere of your storefronts to adding fun features.

Using the modular commerce approach, businesses can create personalized customer experiences, integrate legacy systems, and implement complex workflows.

Enhances user experience

With composable commerce, you can choose best-in-class components, such as a content management system (CMS), email automation platform, or marketing automation software.

Incorporating these features into your e-commerce platforms allows you to deliver individualized digital touchpoints for contacting customers and tailored products or content to customers.

Imparts agility

Composable commerce lets you quickly build and roll out new experiences and features. With this modular approach, you can deploy and develop components independently. It reduces time to market. The ability to handle agility and speed without heavy IT dependency is another critical reason e-commerce technology is beginning to take off in the e-commerce sector.

Allows your business to scale

Getting scalability and flexibility with a traditional platform is impossible because it imposes a rigid architecture that resists change. As everything is fixed, starting from plugins, front-end themes, and back-end customizations, it becomes challenging to scale your operations.

On the other hand, monolithic platforms provide an open architecture offering scalability and flexibility. This helps you scale your operations and provide experiences that resonate with customers.

Removes heavy reliance on IT

Because of the user-friendly approach, managing and operating open architecture is easy. Using this architecture doesn’t require in-depth technical skills from developers. Even non-technical employees can perform important tasks without knowing the technical aspects.

Makes your operations more efficient

E-commerce technology enhances operational efficiency by allowing you to streamline your processes. When choosing the necessary components, you remove the complexity and cost of buying fully-fledged software.

As a result, you’re better at maximizing resource utilization and achieving unparalleled operational efficiency. It even reduces wastage as you pay only for required software or components.

Provides real-time inventory management

Composable commerce's modular nature allows real-time inventory management. With real-time inventory management, you can maintain accurate stock levels, prevent overselling, and optimize your supply chain processes.

When you instantly update and reflect changes in inventory levels across all sales channels, you provide up-to-date product information to your customers.

Focuses on customer behavior

A modular strategy can tell you what customers are doing - how they shop, their likes and dislikes, and buying trends.

Using this information, you can target your marketing activities, increase customer satisfaction, and boost sales.

What are the challenges in implementing composable commerce?

While composable commerce has many advantages, it has its drawbacks:

High maintenance cost

When you engage in composable architecture, you purchase all the components from different vendors. As a result, the price of maintaining and upgrading is higher than a single-vendor solution.

Complex integration

Integrating components from different vendors is a common problem of a modular approach. Because each part comes from a different vendor, they don’t naturally synchronize. You must spend time on engineering to ensure all the parts fit smoothly.

Risk of vendor lock-in

Although composable commerce avoids vendor lock-in, certain functions or services work well with a particular vendor. It limits flexibility, making vendor switching difficult.

Case studies of businesses using composable commerce

These case studies will help you understand how companies use composable commerce to reap business benefits:

Case study: How did Contentstack reduce development time by 50% for Pella?

When Pella, a leading window and door manufacturer, experienced difficulties with their monolithic CMS, they switched to Contentstack’s composable architecture.

By migrating to Contentstack, Pella reduced the time needed to build an entire website. They resized images via Contentstack's image API. Therefore, every image was published only once, making content management more manageable. Pella could launch sites or add new media functionality for customers 50% faster. With the help of Contentstack, they could publish content 230% faster.

After using Contentstack, Brad Postma, Senior IT Engineer at Pella, said: 

“We’re now building on this new solid, efficient foundation! The speed of Contentstack enabled Pella to get things done fast is what we needed. We are trying to deliver a breakthrough digital experience at Pella, and Contentstack is the foundation that allows us to do that.”

Read the complete case study.

Case study: How did Contentstack facilitate a smooth e-commerce experience for bol.com?

Before collaborating with Contentstack, bol.com was searching for a replacement for their outdated CMS that only served their website. With the growing popularity of the bol.com app, they needed a CMS that could handle content for both the website and the app. They required agility in content production and the ability to make changes easily.

Contentstack scored high in terms of developer satisfaction and documentation. The flexibility of Contentstack's composable platform enabled seamless content and commerce experiences. Contentstack made localization and multilingual content management easy. Additionally, organizing images and content was easy, reducing the time spent creating and updating campaign pages.

The implementation increased click-through rates from 3 to 40%, improved accessibility from 87 to 94%, and enhanced performance.

After implementing Contentstack, Lennart Billekens, IT Architect at bol.com, said:

“It’s been a year now, almost I think since we signed the contract. And it’s been an extensive process in selecting a new partner. And you know, you talk a lot and you try out a lot of things, but in the end, it’s still a question how the actual implementation goes. I think from that perspective, we are happy with how it’s going.”

Read the full case study.

FAQs

Is composable commerce suitable for an online store?

Composable commerce is suitable for any e-commerce business that values flexibility and adaptability.

How does a modular approach benefit an e-commerce business?

A modular approach lets you choose the best components for your needs, resulting in a more efficient and tailored e-commerce solution.

How can composable commerce improve customer service on my e-commerce website?

Composable commerce allows you to integrate advanced customer service features into your website, such as AI chatbots or personalized recommendations.

What is the role of API-first technologies in composable commerce?

API-first technologies allow different components of your e-commerce platform to communicate seamlessly, enabling a cohesive and integrated user experience.

How does a component-based solution design work in composable commerce?

In a component-based solution design, each part of your e-commerce platform is a standalone component that you can customize based on your business needs.

Learn more

Going composable has transformed the industry and allows businesses to be future-proof, customer-centric, and agile. A composable approach will strengthen your e-commerce platform and provide exceptional customer experiences. Request a demo to learn how Contentstack can help your organization elevate its e-commerce business model.