- What is composable commerce?
- The importance of composable commerce
- Composable commerce architecture
- Modular architecture
- Business-centric solutions
- Open ecosystems
- Difference between PBCs and microservices
- MACH architecture
- Composable vs. traditional Commerce
- Composable vs. headless commerce
- Benefits of composable commerce
- Cost efficiency
- Flexibility and agility
- Improved employees experience
- Conclusion
The competition for online stores is enormous nowadays, so e-commerce businesses need to make their business unique and appealing to their customers. That’s why increasingly more online stores turn to the modern approach known as composable commerce. This approach to e-commerce has helped businesses build their brand and a loyal customer base.
We have prepared a guide on composable commerce to help you understand this e-commerce solution and how it’s built. Below, we will cover other commerce architectures, like traditional and headless, to help you upgrade your e-commerce business and build a better e-commerce experience for your customers.
What is composable commerce?
Composable commerce is an approach to e-commerce where online stores build their websites by composing different individual components into one whole. These components include modular and independent components, services, and other functionalities.
By selecting best-of-breed components, you can create an incredible e-commerce platform for your customers. There’s no need to start from scratch, but there’s also no need to rely on a single vendor to create a standard functionality for your e-commerce platform.
Instead, the composable approach takes different vendors that offer a functionality they excel in and combines it into a custom application built based on your specific preferences and needs.
Composable commerce separates the user interface from business logic, separating the front and back end, allowing you to create the best e-commerce platform. This software architecture uses API to communicate between different Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs) and microservices. This approach to e-commerce also allows you to replace particular parts without affecting the whole set.
The importance of composable commerce
With vast competition, online stores must tend to every customer’s needs to keep them. However, customer needs and behaviors vary significantly. Therefore, e-commerce businesses must understand there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution for online stores.
As a solution to this problem, composable commerce is perfect for customization as it allows online businesses to reach their customers, not wait for customers to come to them. For instance, only offering a single desktop version of your website isn’t enough. You must provide your customers with several sales channels to meet their needs.
Composable commerce is a service-oriented approach and focuses on providing the best customer experience. Thus, combining components like product catalogs, payment processing, shopping carts, promotions, orders, and much more. This technology presents the future of digital commerce, gaining you loyal lifetime customers.
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Composable commerce architecture
Composable commerce is an API-first modular approach for building e-commerce systems. Its structure is composed of smaller components and services that, when connected together, create a perfect digital commerce solution. Therefore, as opposed to a pre-composed solution, a modular best-of-breed solution will propel your online business to the next level.
Modular architecture
The modular architecture allows you to create and adjust the e-commerce experience quickly and easily. Modular technologies of composable commerce will enable you to divide the system into modules and services for specific functions. Modules can include payment gateways, checkouts, search filters, product information management, analytics, etc.
Different modules allow you to build the functions of your digital commerce platform from different components instead of using the monolithic solution. The modular development approach allows you to share your products and online business through various channels, providing customers with an incredible omnichannel experience.
The modular nature of the composable commerce approach allows the integration of various modules in the backend of your e-commerce platform to handle various functions and provide customers with a seamless and unique user experience.
Business-centric solutions
Another tenet of composable commerce architecture is business-centric solutions. Since composable commerce solutions are created to improve business teams and help them build their brand, it’s important to focus on business-centric solutions.
Therefore, customizing solutions and using best-of-breed technologies to serve your exact business requirements and business model is what makes composable commerce so efficient. Some business-centric solutions include partner ecosystems, analytics, digital asset management, etc.
Open ecosystems
By keeping your digital commerce ecosystem open, you can operate between your commerce components, PBCs, and microservices and integrate them seamlessly into commerce systems. This ability for interoperability is essential for composable e-commerce to make your website clean and smooth.
Besides the ability to operate between commerce components, an open ecosystem allows you to expand the framework the development team uses and add to the front-end and back-end capabilities. The collective innovative experience of the open composable ecosystem is what brings out the improved customer experience and new, improved functionalities in e-commerce.
Difference between PBCs and microservices
As mentioned, composable commerce composes and combines Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs) to create a custom application for the e-commerce platform. PBCs are capabilities or functionalities of your e-commerce application, such as promotions, shopping carts, business users, etc.
However, many people confuse PBCs with microservices. The confusion happens because PBCs and microservices are similar and connected in composable e-commerce. Therefore, let’s explain the two in simple terms.
Microservices are independently deployed third-party services that allow your system to have different functions and work properly. In other words, they’re small applications that work for specific business functionality and collaborate with other microservices to provide users with a seamless experience.
PBCs present accumulated sets of microservices, which means that PBCs can contain one or more microservices that function together to achieve their goals. For instance, your e-commerce platform has a cart and checkout PBC.
This PBC contains several microservices, including a cart, ordering, payment processing, etc. By composing your PBCs of various microservices, you can choose the best-of-breed services to improve the user experience.
MACH architecture
You must implement the MACH architecture to fully take advantage of and enjoy your composable commerce strategy. MACH architecture is what composable commerce is essentially all about.
It’s an abbreviation for Microservices, API-First, Cloud-native, and Headless technology. In a way, the MACH alliance is the foundation for the composable commerce development process.
As we said, MACH architecture comprises of:
- Microservices – microservices architecture allows the construction and management of PBCs. In other words, they’re essential for composable commerce as they allow you to customize your e-commerce system and compile services from different best-of-breed vendors.
- API-first – all the modules are connected through APIs, each responsible for different business functions. The API-first approach allows the system to communicate between different parts, which ties together your platform’s e-commerce services.
- Cloud-native – taking full advantage of the cloud allows for application scalability and flexibility. Moreover, it allows agile and dynamic application development, uses each section of your application on-demand, and avoids upgrades.
- Headless architecture – the headless nature allows continuous upgrades and improvement of the user interface. It separates the front end from the back end, allowing you to expand the application, connect it to various channels, and have numerous endpoints.
Composable vs. traditional Commerce
There’s a significant difference between composable and traditional commerce. Traditional commerce platforms came as an all-in-one package with tightly connected features and functionalities. That makes integrations and collaborations with different systems impossible.
Having a package of pre-composed solutions means you can’t choose the best solutions for your platform but work with what came together in the package. On the other hand, traditional e-commerce platforms are convenient as you have everything in one place and no need to spend time and money on different vendors.
Composable commerce allows for modular technology without restricting you to a single vendor. Its structure is divided into PBCs chosen from various providers and are the best of their kind. That allows you to create an incredible user experience and provide your customers with numerous seamlessly integrated functions and capabilities.
These features are usually third-party components and allow you to expand or adjust your systems without interfering with other parts of it. Composable commerce gives you control over the functionalities of your e-commerce platform and allows you to choose the best microservices for your system’s performance and usage.
Composable vs. headless commerce
People sometimes confuse composable with headless commerce solutions. The difference is rather obvious, even though the two terms are connected. Put simply – the headless approach is the first step towards composable commerce. Composable commerce is a much broader term that includes headless commerce.
Headless commerce decouples the front end from the back end and gives some control to the developers. This results in faster front-end experiences for users. In other words, headless commerce separates services from experiences, allowing brands to create a flexible front end and keep a complex commerce back end.
By decoupling the front end from the back end, different development teams can work independently and not compromise the other team. That’s where composable commerce steps in. It takes the headless solution’s flexibility and, with its API-first architecture, creates more complex e-commerce business solutions.
Since the composable commerce software communicates through commerce APIs, all the independent components come together to create a seamless customer experience. However, it also allows them to work independently, meaning any component can be replaced, and other components can be added without impacting the whole system.
Benefits of composable commerce
The benefits of composable commerce are manifold. Here are just a few of them to highlight the advantages of implementing composable commerce solutions.
Cost efficiency
Even though it may not seem that way, composable commerce can be very profitable. When getting a monolith solution, you get everything the package includes. However, with composable commerce, you get reduced operational costs by selecting only the features and services you need.
You can find competitive prices on the market for the services and features you need – not only do you get the features and PBCs you need, but you also get them at affordable prices if you explore the market.
Flexibility and agility
Today, e-commerce must be done through numerous channels like the web, mobile, social networks, etc. That means your e-commerce business needs a flexible and extendable commerce platform. Fortunately, the modular nature of composable e-commerce allows businesses to benefit from the omnichannel.
With the ability to integrate their own tech stack, brands can get the freedom to shape their front-end experience and how their business functions backend. Composable commerce also allows for the agility digital businesses need to provide their customers with innovative and unique experiences, as well as to stand out from the competition.
Improved employees experience
Building e-commerce platforms used to be a stressful job for development teams. However, with the composable commerce solution, they’re much more relaxed and stress-free. Since they no longer have to fret over what tremendous effects one simple change could have on the entire system, they can work in a much more relaxed environment.
In fact, system upgrades are made much easier with composable e-commerce, so development teams can focus their hard work on the actual upgrades and not on the possible problems that used to occur when changes are made or change-caused application crashes.
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Conclusion
Composable commerce presents the future of online stores and is a worthy replacement for the traditional, monolithic approach e-commerce used to rely on. With the ability to decouple the front end from the back end, brands can focus on the user experience and provide customers with incredible eCommerce features while keeping the work in the back end.
Composable e-commerce allows brands to choose the best-of-breed services and integrate them into their commerce platforms instead of relying on the all-in-one package of e-commerce features. Besides the convenience and improved customer experience, the benefits of composable e-commerce include cost efficiency, improved development teams’ experience, flexibility, and agility.
Alex is a wordsmith for Luigi's Box where he works as a product marketing specialist. He used to work as a graphic designer while getting his degree in Media Communication. His other interests include photography, reading, art, philosophy, and psychology. Besides being a part of the Luigi's Box team, he does video translations for the Art You Can Eat video portal about contemporary artists from Slovakia.
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