What you’ll learn:
Why a modern tech stack needs to be composable
For a long time, delivering online shopping experiences was the job of a single vendor providing all things commerce under one roof, from search and personalization to checkout and subscriptions. The problem with this approach is that all these functions are standardized and cannot be easily customized, resulting in identical customer experiences rather than unique, differentiated ones.
Furthermore, customer experiences aren’t set in stone; over time, they must be adapted and updated. With an inflexible all-in-one platform, making changes isn’t easy. If your business isn’t able to keep up with customer expectations, this invariably impacts your ability to innovate, differentiate and grow.
Composable commerce turns this model on its head. Now, it’s possible — and ideal — to create a tech stack with best-of-breed solutions that fit a company’s business requirements. That means your business can select and integrate expert components, such as search, product catalog and personalization, to craft powerful experiences. With composable’s flexibility, you can add, swap or even drop components according to your budget, compatibility, functionality, etc.
For companies that want to go agentic, composable commerce is a critical foundation. Agentic systems rely on autonomy, orchestration and real-time decision-making across specialized capabilities — something monolithic platforms struggle to support. Composable architectures make it easier to introduce intelligent agents that can act independently yet work together, drawing from best-in-class services for search, pricing, personalization, inventory and so on.
Because each capability is modular, businesses can evolve toward agentic workflows incrementally, experimenting, optimizing and scaling without overhauling the entire stack.
The result: You can provide cohesive customer experiences while becoming adaptable to new requirements, market shifts and customer needs.
The benefits leading brands and retailers reaped with composable commerce
L.L.Bean
The American outdoor apparel retailer L.L.Bean unified carts, orders and web hierarchy in one platform that enables frictionless omnichannel experiences. After launching over 100 enhancements, the company generated $10 million USD in incremental revenue.
The Vitamin Shoppe
The health and wellness retailer The Vitamin Shoppe delivers on high-ROI projects faster and employs advanced deployment strategies with a composable infrastructure. The platform’s performance has eliminated downtime, enabled faster deployment cycles, and accelerated shopping cart API responses 4X and data processing 10X.
Pet Circle
The Australian pet brand Pet Circle taps into an API-first platform for checkout, cart, orders, product catalog and customer details, freeing up internal engineering teams to build what sets the company apart. The retailer can now deliver richer online experiences — personalization, recurring orders and better product discovery — powered by an innovation engine that deploys in about three minutes.
The specifics of a composable commerce tech stack for B2C based on commercetools
A composable commerce tech stack based on commercetools will have three layers:
The presentation layer, also known as the frontend, is where your customers directly interact with your store. It includes all the elements the customer will see when they’re browsing or searching your site (or any other touchpoint) for something they want to buy. This can be powered by commercetools Frontend, third-party or in-house-built frontend products.
The application layer, also known as the backend, provides component-based applications to address eCommerce needs. commercetools B2C, B2B and B2X products address specific eCommerce requirements; those are extensible per customer needs. Additionally, custom-built or third-party applications can be used. Moreover, businesses can unify physical and digital commerce with commercetools InStore.
With the Solution Hub, Payment Hub and AI Hub, businesses can seamlessly plug and play best-of-breed solutions through a wide range of integration options — including support for AI agents in eCommerce, AI workflows and third-party analytics.
The role of integrations and connectors
With best-of-breed at the heart of a genuine composable commerce approach, commercetools provides a wide range of integrations, from standard partner-built integrations to pre-built secure connectors hosted by commercetools, ready to be leveraged for your business. These best-of-breed partners with seamless integration options with commercetools come in two flavors:In the following sections, you’ll learn more about the presentation and application layers based on the commercetools Platform.
The presentation layer (frontend)
The presentation layer is the eCommerce frontend, which refers to the visual and interactive components of a digital storefront (website, mobile app and social media) that customers directly interact with, including the copy and visuals, navigation menus, buttons and even pop-ups. All the UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) elements are laid out for the users to engage with. A well-designed and visually appealing frontend can help build brand trust and increase the likelihood of conversion and loyalty.
There are different tools primed to build, manage, optimize and A/B test frontends, so let’s delve deeper into that:
Build a (custom) frontend
Manage: CMS/DXP systems
Optimize: Personalization
Test: A/B testing
Due to the limited flexibility of legacy commerce platforms, many companies opt to build custom frontends using web frameworks, thereby creating unique and differentiated UI/UX experiences for their users. However, a new software category has emerged — Frontend-as-a-Service (FEaaS) — with the mission to streamline the lengthy and complex process of building a frontend solution from scratch. With such a service, you can leverage prepackaged software tools that make building unique frontend experiences easier and faster.
Recommended solutions
There are two main tools to consider to manage your frontend: A content management system (CMS) and/or a digital experience platform (DXP).
A CMS is a platform that helps teams create, manage and publish digital content — such as text, images and videos — through a user-friendly interface, without requiring advanced coding skills. It streamlines content workflows and simplifies maintaining an online presence. Headless CMS solutions are a modern alternative to traditional CMS platforms.
DXPs manage digital experiences across channels like websites, apps, portals, and social media. Powered by AI, they deliver personalized content at the individual level while ensuring consistent messaging and branding across touchpoints.
Recommended solutions
Optimize your frontend with personalization and recommendation engines.
Personalization engines utilize AI and machine learning to deliver one-to-one experiences by tailoring search results, recommendations, messaging and offers in real-time based on customer behavior and data.
Recommendation engines, by contrast, rely on predefined rules and product signals, such as views, sales or reviews, to surface relevant or popular items across category pages and key moments in the shopping journey.
Recommended solutions
Experimentation is a central part of any growth story! A/B testing plays a significant role in helping businesses become more disciplined and focused on how they experiment to learn what works and what doesn’t for your business growth.
Recommended solutions
The application layer (server-facing)
The application layer, or commerce backend, handles the server-side operations, business logic, and data management that power an online store. It manages discovery, checkout, payments, and systems of record, and in modern composable commerce, it’s decoupled from the frontend and communicates via APIs.
commercetools B2C Commerce offers modular components that let brands integrate only the tools they need, combining them with other providers or in-house systems as desired.
Let’s explore the key components of your commerce tech stack across the following categories:
Product Catalog: Manage complex product data through an AI-ready interface built for unified and agentic commerce, so your catalog appears wherever modern buying begins. Deliver consistent, localized experiences across all touchpoints with centralized global control.
Storefront Search: Make products instantly discoverable with an intelligent search that understands both human and AI inputs. Fine-tune relevance, filtering and facets to deliver faster, more accurate product discovery.
Pricing: Set prices with maximum flexibility to fit any business model. Support dynamic, tiered and volume pricing with full control over tax categories and sales configurations.
Promotions: Configure personalized offers, regional bundles, discounts and promotions from one interface, dynamically tailored by buyer, channel or context for both humans and intelligent agents.
Checkout: Manage checkout, payments and fulfillment in one platform with easy PSP integrations, recurring orders, inventory management and shopping lists for humans and agents.
Let’s explore the main highlights: Product Catalog, Promotions and Checkout.
With commercetools’ Product Catalog capabilities, you can:
Seamlessly access and manage all product information through a dynamic interface that handles even the most complex catalogs.
Enable custom views to organize product lists and details by segment, region or brand, while workflows facilitate the verification, editing, approval or rejection of pending product changes, streamlining catalog operations to just a few clicks.
Implement recurring revenue models using our native catalog capabilities, including subscription pricing, loyalty incentives and automated recurring orders.
Model your product structure in a flexible manner, serving as a blueprint for organizing, storing and managing product data within a centralized system.
Additional solutions
Our powerful promotions capabilities enable organizations to define and manage unique revenue-generating strategies across stores, products, channels, regions, countries and more. This flexibility enables the configuration and combination of any idea for a promotion based on product, customer or cart properties. In the agentic era, our promotions APIs allow agents to query available promotions, validate eligibility programmatically and apply complex offer combinations. Moreover, our customers’ loyalty programs must expose point balances, tier benefits and redemption options through structured interfaces.
Additional solutions
By building on a scalable, composable foundation, businesses can create checkout experiences that are intuitive, personalized and optimized end-to-end — without compromising brand consistency. This approach helps reduce friction, guide customers smoothly through the purchase journey and continuously improve performance.
At commercetools, there are multiple ways to power your checkout, depending on your goals and level of control:
Option 1: commercetools B2C Commerce
For teams that want maximum flexibility, our APIs let you design and build a fully custom checkout. You control every element — from cart and order management to shipping logic and tax calculations — so the experience works exactly the way your business requires.
Option 2: Payment Hub
For a faster time to market, Payment Hub offers a prebuilt checkout and payment solution. With simple configuration in the Merchant Center and minimal development effort, you can embed a production-ready checkout directly into your site. Built-in integrations with payment service providers remove complexity and significantly reduce ongoing maintenance.
Option 3: AI Hub
For brands preparing for agent-led commerce, AI Hub enables transactions within generative AI experiences such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. It connects your product data, follows the Agentic Commerce Protocol and allows intelligent agents to manage the entire purchasing flow — from discovery through payment — within conversational channels.
Additional solutions
3 ways to unlock the benefits of composable commerce faster
Accelerating time to value is critical for companies embracing composable commerce. There are three ways your business can achieve this goal:
1. Think incremental for your rollout: More organizations are adopting an incremental approach instead of risky “big bang” migration methods. With Agile methodologies, project complexity and scale are addressed by breaking down large tasks and projects into bite-sized, more manageable pieces. This also means creating MVPs (minimum viable products) to test the waters before proceeding with the rollout.
2. Utilize accelerators and implementation partners: You don’t have to go composable all by yourself. Tap into the expertise of accelerators and implementation partners to achieve a faster time-to-value.
3. Leverage pre-composed solutions: The fastest way to adopt composable is by using pre-composed solutions, such as commercetools Foundry for B2C Retail, which provide a pre-configured set of components, features, best practices and launchpads, making your composable implementation simpler and faster.
It’s clear that composable commerce is not just a trend but a strategic imperative for businesses seeking to thrive in an era of constant change. As Paul Hornby, Digital Customer Experience Director at The Very Group, said: “The best technology route to deliver business strategy for us was composable.”
Discover why decision-makers choosing a composable commerce stack are 7x more liukely to be “very satisfied” with our report The State of eCommerce: Retplatforming and Migration Trends for 2025.
FAQs
A modular eCommerce architecture that lets brands select, integrate and swap best-of-breed components for flexibility and growth.
Composable commerce enables faster innovation, personalized experiences, scalable operations and seamless omnichannel experiences, as well as faster implementations for agentic commerce.
Frontend (experience layer), backend (application layer) and ecosystem integrations (connectors, AI, and third-party tools).
By using incremental rollouts, pre-composed solutions like commercetools Foundry and implementation partners or accelerators.
The modular, API-first architecture of composable commerce allows intelligent agents to act autonomously across discovery, checkout and personalization workflows.
Mary Rebecca is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at commercetools, focused on B2C. With over a decade of experience across product and marketing teams, she excels at crafting GTM strategies and positioning products to drive growth and deliver value.
