Composable commerce for B2B 101, Part 2: How complex and costly is it really?

Does it seem to you that everyone is raving about composable commerce these days? We assure you, it’s for a good reason! After all, moving to composable has helped many B2B and B2C companies quickly adapt to ever-changing market conditions and customer expectations in the last few years. 

However, relevant questions remain: Is composable commerce too complex? Is composable only possible for elite digitally mature companies powered by an army of developers? Can B2B companies, traditionally less digitally mature than their B2C counterparts, go composable? Read on to learn the simple truths to these complex questions in part 2 of our “Composable commerce for B2B 101” series. 

Some executives and tech professionals in the B2B space have concerns about the perceived complexity and high cost of composable commerce. Much of this fear comes from four main misperceptions:

1. Perceived complexity and cost of best-of-breed solutions, leading to an unmanageable plethora of vendors, each with its own pricing, contracts and integration protocols. 

2. Potential issues surrounding systems compatibility and interoperability, which would directly impact costs and translate into time-intensive projects. 

3. Additional development resources, which would require extra recruitment and training costs. 

4. Replatforming complexity, as many organizations have been heavily burned in the past with daunting migration projects. 

These concerns are common blockers that hinder organizations from modernizing their commerce infrastructures, putting their financial performance and future success at risk. 

So, are these concerns valid? Keep reading the next sections for more details on why these fears are unfounded, and how your business can positively benefit by adopting a composable approach.  

Despite concerns about complexity and high costs, composable commerce actually simplifies and modernizes your tech stack while reducing costs over time. Here’s how:

Implementing best-of-breed solutions is plug-and-play

The idea of “best-of-breed” is to integrate a solution that fits your specific business requirements, instead of getting all the commerce features from one platform that might not always fulfill those unique needs. While getting everything in one place may sound more convenient, ask: Do these functionalities fulfill your business requirements? Are they priced according to your budget? Can you customize them to deliver what you expect them to? If the answer to these questions is No, No and, again, No, then buying an all-in-one solution doesn’t make sense. 

A best-of-breed approach might indeed require additional effort to find the right solutions. You must research vendors, find out what they offer and manage various relationships. But integrating these solutions is something you shouldn’t worry about; they’re plug-and-play and interoperable with any API-capable system. 

Composable commerce is a cloud-native SaaS, so you also benefit from lower maintenance costs and higher scalability. Cloud-native infrastructure is designed to be resilient, self-healing and fault-tolerant, so you can optimize performance for online applications. 

Developer resources

Companies don’t need an army of developers to implement a composable infrastructure. In fact, many B2B companies have done so with less than 10 developers. B2B players like Loomstate accomplished it with a team of five people in-house, without a system integrator, and managed a full deployment within two months. Many B2B manufacturers, such as ACE Southern and Normet, have also implemented composable commerce in less than six months. 

Several factors are at play to increase developer productivity with composability: 

• First, developers aren’t stuck doing maintenance work and bug fixing. 

• Second, they’re releasing new features, optimizing the system, experimenting and innovating faster. 

• Third, developers have the complete freedom to select, code, integrate, monitor and manage applications without requiring specific languages, certifications, frameworks or proprietary technology, aka the technology-agnostic approach. 

Companies can leverage their existing pool of talented developers to extend their tech stack, which reduces the complexity and cost of hiring and training.   

The last replatforming, ever

Many technology professionals fear that a migration project may take years and cost millions of dollars. This does hold true for the traditional replatforming process from a legacy platform to yet another legacy platform using the “big bang” approach. However, the picture is entirely different with a composable commerce platform, as B2B companies can move components incrementally using the strangler pattern. 

This paradigm shift from a large replatforming project to an incremental approach means businesses have more flexibility to create an MVP (minimum viable product) based on customer needs and experiment with different components, which drives better and faster results. Plus, you don’t have to put your faith in big-bang projects and cross your fingers that you've got everything (or anything) right for your customers. 

In addition, cautious B2B practitioners will avoid putting all of their eggs in one technology basket. They’ll find it easier to start small to prove the value of composable gradually within their organizations, using first successes to obtain buy-in for more ambitious replatforming projects as a second step. 

Last but not least, you can easily replace components within a composable architecture, but you don’t need to replace an entire platform. So, you don’t ever have to replatform again, which is a massive benefit!

While many digitally mature companies have composable architectures, it doesn’t mean that only elite companies like Amazon can implement composable commerce. You can turn this way of thinking on its head: Composable architecture can actually enable companies to achieve digital maturity faster than legacy commerce platforms.  

Let’s take the example of new-to-digital companies, which are still a reality in B2B. Usually, they lack eCommerce capabilities entirely or have a rudimentary eShop with a limited (or worse, outdated!) product selection. Also, digital tools, like pricing transparency and order status, are non-existent. Sales and customer engagement are on a person-to-person basis. Is it possible to pull off a composable architecture in such an analog scenario? 

Absolutely! Normet, a B2B provider for underground mining and tunneling projects, is a great example. The company has nurtured decades-long customer relationships, relying on phone calls and emails for order taking. Customers had no visibility on spare parts inventory, and Normet’s team was plagued with manual (and hence inefficient) ordering processes. 

Instead of buying a legacy platform to access all commerce features from one place, Normet tackled digitization with a composable approach. The company digitized its spare parts catalog of over 65,000 products as a starting point and automated the purchasing phase with best-of-breed solutions. The new digital team at Normet focused on its main customer pain points as part of its composable journey, aiming to incrementally improve and digitize the customer experience in the best way possible. Normet pulled it off in only four months. 

Many B2B firms have a similar journey to Normet: They need to build their digital commerce footprint from scratch and don’t have years to go through an extensive digital transformation process. Some might choose a legacy solution because it may sound more convenient, but they soon learn that the vanilla features of an all-in-one platform aren’t customizable, updating the platform is complicated, costly and time-consuming, and they become less adaptable. While plugging in a legacy commerce platform might provide a shortcut to digital maturity, many B2Bs realize that they're unable to evolve their digital maturity over time. 

Composable commerce tackles digital maturity from your main pain points and lets you evolve and adapt as time goes by. Imagine plugging in advanced search capabilities or AI into your commerce platform; in a legacy environment, connecting AI tools would take months of meticulous planning, translating into higher costs and a longer implementation time. In contrast, a composable approach enables you to seamlessly plug (or unplug) new features, experiment, see what works and what doesn’t, and adapt your strategy. 

In short, your business can become more digitally mature, adaptable and resilient with composable. According to the market analyst IDC, “By embracing API-first composable commerce, which offers modular architecture for rapid innovation, MMG [midmarket growth] B2B firms can swiftly adapt to market changes to optimize revenue generation and capitalize on emerging CX opportunities.” 

Composable commerce enables businesses to reduce risk by embracing change as a tool instead of a threat. Leading analyst Gartner® states that embracing composability is when “everything is designed to change, and change is considered often, to achieve large and small outcomes, eyeing both growth and resilience.” In short, composable commerce helps you reduce risk in six ways:

1. Modular and decoupled: When your commerce infrastructure breaks free from a tightly coupled approach, you worry less about single points of failure or full application failure with long resolution times. With a composable approach, your infrastructure is more distributed, making it easier to contain, fix and maintain a seamless customer experience in case of issues. 

For example, the industrial equipment supplier Zoro.com relies on an ERP system that holds all the account information, but that system goes down occasionally. At one point, the ERP suffered an outage which might have jeopardized the customer experience, but it didn’t. While the ERP was down, the commerce experience kept running smoothly: The problem was successfully contained through Zoro's modular and headless environment.

2. APIs and data modeling: With a super flexible infrastructure, you’re in charge of how your workflows and data behave — not your vendor. You can model data, as well as extend and customize APIs to respond how you want them to. For instance, Zoro.com uses Custom Objects, which allows companies to design anything they want with commercetools, allowing their Net-30 customers to look at their invoices and pay them without hassle. Even though this was not an out-of-the-box functionality of commercetools at the time, the Zoro team was able to create this feature because of the extensibility of the commercetools platform. 

3. Operational efficiency with automation: In B2B, it’s typical that many processes, including order processing, are done manually. With the inherently modular approach of composable commerce, it’s easy for B2B organizations to automate processes like quote generation, orders, inventory management and fulfillment, customer-specific pricing and promotions. This also enables your business to reduce manual administrative operations, such as order processing significantly, while also reducing the risk of human error during manual tasks. 

4. Streamlined integrations: A lean tech stack is crucial. Not only can you easily swap integrations in and out without issues, but you can also experiment more freely with a lower upfront investment. Best-of-breed reduces the risk of relying on a single vendor or solution provider for the entire system. If one vendor's performance or support falls short, businesses can easily replace that specific component while keeping the rest of the system intact. 

5. Faster iterations and testing: B2B businesses can incrementally change individual components, test them in isolation and gather feedback before deploying them in production. This iterative approach minimizes the risk of major failures or costly mistakes, as businesses can identify and rectify issues early in development.

6. Reduced implementation costs: By adopting a composable approach, B2B businesses can reduce the risk of large-scale, high-cost implementations. They can start with smaller, focused components and gradually expand their commerce capabilities based on business needs and budget availability. This phased implementation approach lowers the financial risk of upfront investments in complex and comprehensive systems.

Omnichannel is a crucial area for B2B firms to focus on, enabling buyers to find the products they need and engage with suppliers on their own terms. This may include a mix of the manufacturer’s own website, online distributors, various marketplaces and in-person sales. A composable architecture enables B2B companies to excel in omnichannel strategies by:

• Introducing new features and channels without constraints, as well as responding faster to customer expectations. For instance, many B2B organizations have built one-to-one relationships with their customers, which they can use as a foundation to create systems and touchpoints that address their customers’ needs.

• Fostering an internal culture that comprehends the symbiotic relationship between digital and non-digital channels in driving revenue growth, powered by modern data management that enables accurate product, pricing, inventory, shipping and customer data points across every touchpoint. 

• Enabling a 360-degree view of the customer, allowing salespeople to visualize the products their customers are ordering across various channels. 

B2B companies are reorganizing their vast information pools to upsell and cross-sell effectively with composable commerce, so they can break data silos and access the data when needed.

After migrating the data and the first applications to a composable architecture, businesses can start completing their best-of-breed ecosystem. In a composable environment, you’re not locked in with any particular vendor, so you have complete freedom to choose what services best match your needs. 

A vital step is to define and prioritize all custom extensions you need to build or buy to create a cohesive commerce infrastructure. This may include (but isn't limited to) an ERP system, order management, sales tax, payments, marketing automation, personalization, CMS and search.

If you’re using the strangler pattern, integrations and platform enhancements can be tackled one at a time. Integrations can remain within the legacy system until the business is ready to port a given third-party system (or connect a new provider) to the new platform; for example, this could be timed to the ending of a current contract or renewal deadline. 

By using a microservices-based and API-first approach, you can seamlessly integrate the components you need, whether they’re developed in-house, sourced from best-of-breed vendors, or a combination of both. This approach, known as build-and-buy, enables you to build what makes your business unique and buy the components that don’t make sense to build from scratch, like catalog or cart (and even extend and customize those “commodity” features with bespoke parameters).

Whenever you need to integrate third-party services, tap into the commercetools partner ecosystem for a plug-and-play integration. When it comes to the migration process, you can leverage system integrator partners for a faster and best practices-based implementation.  

When thinking about essential B2B features, the first thing to consider is that much of the core commerce functionality is similar to that used by B2C and D2C businesses, such as search, checkout, promotions and other common functionalities that you experience in everyday online shopping. The beauty of composable commerce is that those core commerce functions are easily customizable and extensible, so B2B players can leverage the same components, like product catalogs, checkout, etc., and make them their own. For example: 

• Create a cart and place an order on behalf of a business.

• Purchase order support.

• Define standalone pricing for company-specific catalogs.

• Cart freezes to retain pricing throughout complex approval scenarios.

• Specify multiple shipping methods and addresses on the line item and SKU level.

Despite the similarities, B2C and B2B share core differences that set the tone for each strategy — and this is where B2B-specific functionality plays a major role. For instance, B2B firms usually operate with a higher value and volume per order than B2C, prices are typically influenced by volumes ordered and pre-negotiated contracts, and the decision-making process is multi-layered, involving several people across the organization. 

The B2B buying journey is usually more complicated, too: According to Gartner, 77% of B2B buyers found their latest purchase complex. These factors call for B2B-driven features that simplify the buying journey, which composable commerce can seamlessly deliver: 

• Companies & company structure management: With Business Units, you can model your customer’s organizational structure and set the appropriate roles and permissions, so associates can place orders and quotes on behalf of their business units. 

• Business Unit-specific pricing, product catalogs and promotions: Optimize customer operations and simplify data modeling with unlimited flexibility by utilizing stores and channels to create company-specific catalogs, pricing and discounts. By linking stores to Business Units, you can define specific pricing and discounts through channels and specific catalogs through product selections. 

• Buyer Approval Flows: Help customers implement purchasing checks and balances to ensure authorized purchases based on specific criteria (i.e., order total, shipping costs). 

• Quote generation and renegotiation: Automate the quoting process to reduce manual labor and overhead costs. With the flexible and extensible Quotes API, businesses can model and reflect existing sales and quoting processes, including quote generation, negotiation and acceptance. 

Overall, these B2B-specific features, combined with core commerce components, enable you to simplify the buying process, reduce complexity, save time and profit from efficiency gains.