Key takeaways:
The case for flexibility: Outpacing monolithic platforms
No matter the industry, business leaders share a common goal: Increasing revenue while reducing costs. Traditional strategies — raising prices, trimming budgets — can only take you so far. To truly thrive, businesses must move faster, adapting to evolving customer expectations, emerging trends and unexpected challenges. In this landscape, agility and flexibility aren’t just nice-to-have traits; they are the foundation of sustainable growth.
But what does agility look like in practice? At its core is composable technology — a modular, adaptable approach that empowers businesses to:
Release products and features faster to meet changing customer expectations and boost revenue.
Deliver personalized experiences at scale.
Expand seamlessly across brands, regions and business models.
Reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).
In the past, adopting a monolithic platform (also known as an “all-in-one” platform) was a straightforward proposition: businesses accepted the platform as-is, with little room for customization. That model worked when commerce lived in a single channel. Today, consumers can shop via social media, mobile apps, or even in immersive experiences — trying on lipstick through AR, furnishing a room virtually, or experimenting with a VR avatar before making a purchase. In a world like this, a rigid, one-size-fits-all platform simply can’t keep up.
Composable commerce flips the script. Instead of constraints, it offers freedom: “Create any experience you want, whenever you want, without risk.” By replacing tightly coupled systems with flexible, modular technology, composable commerce turns your platform from a blocker into an enabler — and it’s especially poised to power the next wave of innovation, including emerging concepts like agentic commerce, where experiences become even more interactive and autonomous.
Next, let’s dive into four ways composable commerce outperforms traditional monolithic platforms — and why agility isn’t just an advantage, but a necessity.
#1 Monoliths are rigid. Composable is agile and flexible.
As the name suggests, monolithic platforms are built as a single atomic system whose components are deeply interconnected. That means changing anything requires changing/updating the monolithic application in its entirety. Unsurprisingly, this approach isn’t practical for companies that need to adapt to constantly changing customer expectations and market dynamics.
In contrast, a composable architecture with an open, decoupled design makes it much easier and faster to turn revenue-generating ideas into reality. Without the rigid parameters inherent in monolith platforms, launching custom promotions, adding new shipping options and updating product data or pricing can be accomplished quickly without interrupting other processes. This provides the flexibility to pivot on the fly, so you can respond quickly to new customer needs and capitalize on every opportunity with lightning speed.
Beyond speed and efficiency, this flexibility also lays the groundwork for emerging trends like agentic commerce. By enabling autonomous experiences — from personalized product recommendations to intelligent shopping assistants that act on behalf of customers — composable commerce allows businesses to experiment, iterate and deploy new experiences far faster than rigid monolithic platforms ever could. In other words, the same adaptability that accelerates day-to-day operations also makes it possible to embrace entirely new forms of commerce as they emerge.
“By adopting commercetools and other leading composable platforms and technologies, coupled with modern product development practices, Breville’s product teams are able to rapidly deliver new features and user experiences across both Breville and Beanz sites — with more brands to follow in the future. This helps us accelerate time to revenue and improve the customer experience, such as gift card support, coffee subscriptions, personalization and many more, all toward supporting the customer’s culinary journey with Breville globally.”
Pamela Liang, Group Product Manager, Breville
#2 Monoliths are restrictive. Composable gives you freedom.
With composable commerce, there are no limitations to building whatever you want. Not only can you choose from a wide range of existing best-in-class flexible components with plug-and-play capabilities, but your developers can also extend the capabilities of these components as well as build custom features to fit your exact needs. This gives complete control over every aspect of your commerce experience — checkout, payments, promotions, loyalty, etc. — and freedom to add, replace or even drop components at any time.
With the freedom to add new features, enable new functionalities and try new vendors without risk, you can deliver the omnichannel journeys and customized, hyper-personalized experiences that customers expect today while future-proofing your business for whatever comes tomorrow.
“We’re finally delivering the premium shopping experience our premium products deserve. In just six months we took control of our site operations, modernized our digital experience and improved its overall performance. Now, our customers can engage with us however they want and customize orders to their specifications — and it’s making a big impact on our bottom line.”
Megan Casey, D2C Marketing Manager, Christie Cookie Co.
#3 Monoliths stifle growth. Composable scales with your business.
Imagine the following: With cloud-native storage on your mobile device, you never worry about running out of space. You can access your photos from anywhere, on any device. The same goes with a cloud-native commerce system: No matter how many products you add to your site, how many different sites you have or how many people are browsing or purchasing at the same time, everything runs smoothly, with unlimited scalability, resilience and efficiency.
So, the days of trying to work around server restrictions and limitations, paying for more capacity before seasonal events like Black Friday or waiting for another data center to be built before expanding are over. With a composable solution, your capacity is continually monitored, and the system automatically adapts to changes, scaling up and down as needed.
In addition, you no longer have the burden of managing software updates; these happen automatically and frictionlessly — without costing you time, money or resources.
“We essentially have everything running in the cloud. Everything runs on AWS, everything scales uniformly and seamlessly because everything is serverless. And, I can’t state enough the importance of building enough in a way that allows you to scale in a cost-effective fashion.”
Suchema Oyetey, VP of Engineering, Moonpig
#4 Monoliths are closed systems. Composable is open.
Monolithic platforms lock businesses into proprietary technology, limiting flexibility and driving up costs. With rigid architectures that support only specific programming languages, companies must hire specialized developers and often rely on vendor support for updates — slowing innovation and operations.
Composable commerce eliminates these constraints. A tech-agnostic foundation allows businesses to code in any language, integrate best-in-class solutions and scale without restrictions. This not only accelerates innovation but also improves efficiency, reduces costs and expands access to top tech talent, ensuring technology serves business needs, not the other way around.
“With a monolithic platform, you’re dealing with all of the decisions of all of the engineers in that company — whatever patterns they've implemented in their code. You have to follow all of that. And what we found was to do a simple change, it was taking weeks and the business would go, “Well, why is it taking so long to fix this when we knew this three weeks ago?”
Matt Swan, Cloud Data Architect, ACE Southern (Henry Schein)
The key benefits of composable commerce
Composable commerce is so much more than a tech upgrade — it’s a business advantage. Here’s what it delivers:
Scale across brands, regions and business models with ease. Optimize the user journey with personalized promotions and quick channel launches to increase conversions and sales.
$10M incremental revenue from 100+ enhancements – L.L.Bean
48% increase in recurring buyers – Treedom
47% YOY increase in AOV – Christie Cookie Co.
25% increase in online revenue – ARK Bokhandel
500% increase in conversion rate – Flügger group A/S
Create personalized, seamless shopping across channels and devices. Fast-loading sites, frictionless checkouts and real-time updates keep customers engaged, boosting satisfaction and conversions.
71 NPS score – LabelVie Group
50% faster webshop speed – PLUS Supermarkets
20% reduction in customer service queries – Interflora Australia
Reduce licensing, maintenance and downtime costs. Automate operations, streamline integrations and free resources for higher-value work, lowering total cost of ownership.
75% decrease in operating costs – Salling Group
2,000 hours saved in order processing – Cargo Crew
20% reduction in hosting costs – FREITAG
50% reduction in infrastructure costs – Silvan
Retailers that move from legacy to composable commerce can add new channels, payment methods, markets, brands or business models faster — and stay ahead of trends like agentic commerce.
16 regional sites launched in 6 months – Breville
400% faster time-to-market – Express
40% faster time-to-market – Pet Valu
6 weeks to launch a unified commerce solution with real-time data – Jaycar
1st-mover adoption of agentic commerce – Frasers Group, Liverpool, JD Sports
By adopting composable commerce, businesses can launch faster, scale smarter cut costs, and deliver next-generation customer experiences without waiting for legacy systems to catch up.
Learn how composable commerce works in more detail by downloading our white paper Why composable commerce will change the way you run your business.
Manuela leads content strategy at commercetools. With over 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS, she writes about all things commerce by day and turns to fiction by night. She loves long walks, traveling, and, unsurprisingly, reading books.
