Written By: eyos Marketing | Last Updated: March 2023
Traditional commerce platforms used to be enough for businesses to sell products and deliver standardised customer experience.
These platforms had the essential features to customise your online store and were efficient for a long time. However, the world of online shopping has since changed, becoming more fast-paced as consumer expectations constantly evolve.
As a result, businesses must use e-commerce platforms that are fast, innovative, flexible, and scalable if they want to stand out. According to a report, organisations with a composable commerce approach will outpace the competition by 80% in feature implementation speed.
This article will explore the meaning of composable commerce architecture and its benefits. It also discusses how composable commerce affects customer experience and how it differs from headless commerce platforms.
What is Composable Commerce?
Composable commerce is used in e-commerce businesses to create innovative solutions by composing them into custom apps that meet unique needs.
Composable e-commerce uses modern technology like Microservices, API, Cloud, Headless (MACH), JavaScript, APIs, and Markup (JAMstack).
MACH and JAMstack help the composable commerce platform to adjust to market trends and dynamics. Gartner coined the term ‘composable commerce’ in a 2020 report on the modular digital commerce approach.
According to Gartner, commerce teams can use composable applications to create digital experiences as required, depending on the customer and touch point needs. Therefore, composable commerce can be broken down into four vital tenets. They include the following:
Modular
Individual components of the commerce platform can be interchanged and deployed unaided. This includes customer relationship management systems (CRM), shopping cart technology, etc. With the modular architecture, businesses will enjoy increased agile delivery, faster market time, and better experiences across all touch points.
Open
Composable commerce open ecosystem helps teams integrate applications seamlessly without creating vendor lock-in. As a result, businesses can assemble best-of-breed solutions using third-party apps, pre-composed solutions, and various accelerators to fulfil business needs.
Flexible
Teams can build a unique stack on composable commerce architecture. This makes creating experiences tailored to meet each customer’s needs possible.
Business Centric
By being business-centric, composable commerce platforms allow e-commerce teams to customise their systems, aiding the faster response to evolving business needs.
Also, every tool and capability needed by the development teams and business buyers are readily available, offering more control over innovations at a lower risk and cost.
Benefits of a Composable Commerce Platform
Composable commerce has several main benefits, including the following:
Personalised Customer Experiences
Customers today want to enjoy a seamless shopping journey, and personalisation is vital to make it happen.
With composable commerce, you can customise customer experience and cover specific needs using best-of-breed e-commerce components. This includes payment checkouts, CRM, inventory management, etc.
Increased Scalability
A composable commerce architecture improves flexibility and scalability in an e-commerce setup. The platform can break down your e-commerce store into small independent components.
You can modify, remove, or add functionality without affecting any part of the e-commerce platform.
Construct Custom Back-End Processes
Composable commerce has business logic, making decoupling and constructing back-end processes easy. The back end is 100% modular to combine different business capabilities. Also, it is scalable, replaceable, and pluggable, and you can keep improving it through agile developments.
Cost-Effective
Another benefit of a composable commerce platform is that it is cost-effective. You only have to pay for what you need, and you can select the features you like. This way, you don’t have to pay for an all-in-one platform that you’ll only utilise parts of.
Headless vs Composable Commerce
Headless and composable commerce are similar technology but with several differences. Headless commerce involves separating the front-end and back-end of an e-commerce platform. It allows businesses to create whatever they want on their e-commerce platform and improves customer experience.
Several e-commerce platforms like Shopify, Magneto, and Strapi use headless commerce architecture. Separating the front-end and back-end processes allows them to operate without relying on each other. Instead, you can use API calls to communicate and send instructions to the two parts.
On the other hand, composable commerce is a modular approach that allows businesses to have more control over customer experiences across different touch points. As a result, your in-house tech team can handle several aspects of the e-commerce services deployed behind the scene.
While the two offer similar benefits like speed, flexibility, and control, composable commerce has more advantages. It gives you more control over your tech stack, easily integrates third-party apps, and future-proofs your business.
How is Composable Commerce Influencing Customer Experiences?
Customer touch points have moved beyond ‘in-store and online’ to internet of things (IoT) devices, marketplaces, and social channels. Consumers now interact with brands using means that were unavailable when traditional commerce started.
As a result, brands must evolve to ensure a customer’s journey is seamless.
Composable commerce makes this possible by providing businesses with tools for creating customised solutions and connecting effectively with different vendors and technologies.
For example, you can create personalised and automated marketing campaigns with composable commerce architecture.
Get Advice from eyos retail
eyos retail delivers software designed to transform customer shopping experiences.
Retailers worldwide use eyos retail software to identify in-store customers through digital receipts, connecting 100% of in-store transactions to any platform in real-time.
If you’d like to find out more about how you can upgrade the experience your company offers, get in touch with the team to find out more.
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