In a digital world that moves at lightning speed, adaptable and agile e-commerce solutions are key. As the primary goal of any virtual storefront is to stand out from its fellow retailers. Where traditional e-commerce platforms were popular for their simplicity in managing the “all in one” system, now trends seem to slide as 95% of e-commerce platforms choose the modular “headless” or composable commerce solutions. The composable commerce platforms carry a microservices-based architecture that’s simply more flexible, scalable, and customizable.
Forecasts on the future shifts towards composable commerce
- Retailers believe that the next 5 years will experience a 96% domination of composable commerce.
- Over 72% of existing e-commerce platforms have opted for a composable commerce structure.
- 27% of the retailers are likely to consider composable commerce solutions, while 5% are planning to execute them within 2 years.
- Within 12-24 months, 71% of e-commerce retailers have positioned the composable commerce strategy as a high priority owing to its reliability.
- The unified traditional commerce approach has been narrowed down in favor by 30%.
What is composable commerce?
Over 79% of retailers prefer to invest in composable commerce solutions that are customizable to meet their specific digital e-commerce needs. Composable commerce has projected itself as an innovative build that combines different technologies and premier commerce solutions from multiple vendors to craft unique virtual storefront experiences.
How does composable commerce feature itself?
Composable commerce adaptability to configure any challenges into opportunity has garnered 98% satisfied retailers managing e-commerce storefronts. Let’s figure out what drives this micro-services architecture that breaks down complex commerce services into independent ones.
Packaged Business Capabilities (PBC)
The building blocks of composable commerce e-storefront is a software component that tailors assembling your applications to functionally meet your business capabilities.
Application Programming Interface (API) integration
The PBC components communicate and seamlessly integrate services through the API language. Leading to the development of commerce solutions that glue the composable commerce structure.
Commerce engine
Key e-commerce platform aspects such as pricing, order management, promotions, transactions, and checkouts are coordinated under this powerhouse engine.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Maintaining personalized customer experience to increase brand loyalty and sales while equally managing customer queries and data.
Content management systems (CMS)
Customizable storefront content is crucial for e-commerce retailers to stand apart from their competitors. Separating a content presentation layer from its back-end storage layer using the API language to deliver engaging content.
Analytical reporting
Optimizing your strategies through analytical decisions that share an insight into customer preferences, sales traffic, and operational efficiency.
Transactions and tax
A hassle-free payment processing and compliant tax calculations that ensure secure transactions are vital to building customer loyalty and trust in our e-commerce platform.
Search engine optimization
A personalized SEO experience is vouched for that enhances the customer storefront experience by recommending products based on their preferences or choices.
Order Management System
Real-time orders and inventories are processed to access a prompt sequence of events from the point of purchase to the order delivery.
Product Information Management (PIM)
Proficient product data access and consistent product information availability are vital for customers to make purchasing decisions.
Traditional versus composable commerce
| Particulars | Monolith commerce | Composable commerce |
| Architecture | Rigid architectural approach with a unified single system that treats integrating components tightly. | Modular architectural approach that samples various complex commerce components into small and independent services. |
| Flexibility | The front end and back end functions are constrained to changes beyond its conventional experience. | Allows decoupling commerce functions as micro-services, making it flexible to changes. |
| Scalability | Due to a unified all-in-one system, applications can’t be scaled independently but as part of a larger stack, which reduces optimum resource allocation. | Decoupling stacks component-wise has allowed effective and independent scaling. More efficient resource allocation without the need of adding additional infrastructure. |
| Agile marketing | Reduced agility due to the huge complexity, size, and scale of development of commerce components | With large development, varied specializations, and different feature support, agility is expandable. |
| Secure data privacy | Since security concerns are primarily managed by vendors, privacy is made less vulnerable and more controlled. | More secure measures and data protection rules should be implemented as more logins across the stack are available. |
Upsides of composable commerce
Flexible adaptability
The modular features of composable commerce swiftly channel it to the top priority of retailers. As 27% of them reported experiencing the freedom to adopt commerce solutions that fit their needs and changing business requirements. Seamlessly interchanging technological systems without breaking our tech stack.
Satisfied customers on the go
With 30% satisfied customer engagement, composable commerce has driven engaging customer interactions and loyalty across different touch points, increasing revenue.
Speed to market
Composable commerce successfully boasts an average of 28% increase in time to market updated platform features. In such a phase, retailers can swiftly respond to the changing market demands and customer needs.
Top-line components
As 22% of retailers prioritize delivering unique shopping experiences, the demand for the best commerce solution surges to the top. With this, 27% of retailers have expressed their freedom with best-of-breed solutions in selecting desired vendors and components instead of built-in vendor recommendations.
Business-friendly interfaces
Composable commerce designed with a business-friendly interface has successfully delivered differentiated digital experience reports to over 30% of retail executives. To adapt to the changing customer behavior, over 26% of composable commerce users have cited its flexibility with technological optimization and changes.
4x lower ownership costs
27% of retailers believe that the cost of ownership with composable commerce has reduced, attributing to its customized development and maintenance of e-commerce platforms.
Challenges to composable commerce setup
Multiple choice kills
The composable commerce structuring took more than 6 months for 69% of retailers, 12 months for 27% of them, while only 5% could complete its implementation within 3 months.
With a streak of services, products, and component options to seek from various vendors, retailers are finding composable commerce implementation time-consuming.
Vendor management
From 27% of retailers finding it hard to select vendors to 26% experiencing difficulty in enabling multiple vendors access with a team, retailers are struggling. A huge base of vendors is also coherent with a 25% supplier payment spike.
Appropriate skill set
Optimum management platform required people with the right technological skill-set. Which was pretty hard to find for over 34% of retailers. 27% of retailers have reported that their team didn’t match with the tech requirements to deal with a composable e-commerce platform.
Administration failures of tools
12% of retailers are failing to administer unity among commerce tools, while others are not able to experience the benefits that follow along with the use of features. For instance, 31% cited PIM tool failure, 29% showcased site performance downfall, 27% depicted degrading speed to market features, and others.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is composable commerce different from headless commerce?
Composable commerce uses headless technology to customize and provide more flexible e-commerce solutions. While headless commerce provides more flexibility for front-end integration rather than back-end.
What are the available composable commerce solutions?
Composable solutions for e-commerce include CRM, CMS, analytical reporting, swift transactions, and much more. Refer to the above article’s feature sections to address more on this topic.
What are composable platforms?
Composable commerce platforms are customizable solutions to meet retailers unique e-commerce needs. Refer to the above article for more information.
Conclusion
The future is heading bull-strong towards composable commerce. With 99% of retailers choosing to be familiar, businesses are now able to rapidly evolve and innovate solutions to meet growing customer preferences and market needs. The agility, flexibility, and customization attributes of the competitive commerce platform have widely contributed to this significant proportion of favoritism.
Also Read:
What is composable commerce, and why is it the future of e-commerce?
