9 recommendations for your composable implementation with commercetools

Discover tried-and-tested best practices to streamline your commercetools Composable Commerce rollout. 

Implementing a composable architecture with commercetools can transform your eCommerce strategy, but success relies on a lot more than just technology. While composable tech is relatively intuitive and straightforward, navigating organizational change management, spearheading executive alignment and all the other “soft” elements of a digital transformation is where the real complexity really lies. 

For business and tech leaders considering a composable commerce approach, we collected tried-and-tested best practices, from creating POC (proof of concept) projects during the RFP process to leveraging the extensive professional support services of commercetools.

A well-defined request for proposal (RFP) process sets the stage for a successful composable implementation. However, companies evaluating a composable solution should go beyond the traditional RFP questionnaire; in fact, you should get hands-on with a POC during the consideration process. This will help you validate that the chosen eCommerce solution can deliver its promised business value and meet your internal criteria before committing to a full-scale rollout. Plus, this step helps mitigate risks and sets a solid foundation for long-term success.

The modular nature of composable commerce means you can create a pilot project that doesn’t affect your operations or existing infrastructure. 

Is your executive team on board with adopting composable commerce? Internal buy-in is one of the main elements that drive a successful eCommerce implementation. After all, only when executives pay attention does the project receive the necessary resources and budget. Beyond funding, executive leaders help communicate the project’s strategic importance across the organization.

Having a clear and unified internal vision is equally important. A shared understanding of where the business wants to go and how composable commerce fits into that future helps to focus decision-making and execution.

Sharing this vision across the organization, especially across technology teams, is one of the most overlooked yet powerful tools for ensuring project success. Having a documented architecture and guiding principles serves as a North Star that keeps teams aligned. 

In a nutshell, when everyone refers back to these documented principles, whether it's during a meeting or during critical decision-making moments, it reflects buy-in and organizational alignment. Such an approach is especially useful in large organizations where multiple teams or departments might have different priorities.

Whether you’re migrating from a legacy system or starting your eCommerce from scratch, the discovery process helps you lay the foundation for a successful implementation by thoroughly understanding your current systems, business needs and future goals. 

During the discovery phase, stakeholders across departments provide input on pain points, integration requirements and functionality gaps. This ensures that the migration addresses both technical and business challenges while aligning with your long-term vision. 

By identifying potential risks, necessary integrations and the optimal migration strategy (such as the strangler pattern or a “big bang” approach), the discovery process helps avoid costly missteps and ensures the new composable architecture meets the organization’s unique demands.

In a composable architecture, one of the biggest decisions you’ll face is determining what to build internally and what to buy. Such a decision reflects how your company pursues its competitive differentiation by building what it does best while buying the components from best-of-breed experts for solutions that meet the needs of the organization.  

Achieving this balance is critical because it allows you to focus your internal resources on areas that provide the most business value while outsourcing commoditized functions to third-party vendors. 

While composable commerce is THE cutting-edge technology developers and engineers love to work with, the real reason companies are embracing this approach is to achieve business goals. Mapping technology achievements to business objectives and metrics is critical because it ensures that technology investments are directly aligned with the strategy of the business. 

When technology initiatives are tied to measurable outcomes — such as revenue growth, improved customer experience or operational efficiency — it becomes easier to justify costs, secure executive buy-in and demonstrate ROI. This alignment also helps prioritize projects that drive the most value. Plus, it ensures that IT teams aren’t adopting new technologies for the sake of technology but for a meaningful impact on the company’s bottom line. 

Establishing true ownership will make a huge difference in a successful composable journey. This person doesn’t have to sit with the executive team, but they need to be empowered with ownership in order to drive delivery across the organization. 

Such ownership also means being the master of your own destiny: Even if your company decides to outsource coding to a system integrator, for example, keeping decision-making in-house and being deeply involved throughout the process is an inherent part of true ownership.

Not every company undergoing a composable implementation will engage a system integrator. However, those who need that extra help moving forward with a composable architecture need to choose carefully which partner to work with. Not only are certain SIs focused on specific industries or business models, e.g., B2B, but it’s also a question of cultural fit. As Kelly Goetsch, Chief Strategy Officer at commercetools mentioned in an episode of the CommerceTomorrow podcast, picking the right SI is like a marriage: Cultural alignment will foster a smoother collaboration, which is a foundation for a successful deployment. 

As mentioned earlier, while an SI can help guide you through the technical complexities of implementation, it’s important to keep decision-making within your organization.

According to Gartner, “Bimodal is the practice of managing two separate but coherent styles of work: one focused on predictability; the other on exploration. Mode 1 is optimized for areas that are more predictable and well-understood. It focuses on exploiting what is known while renovating the legacy environment into a state that is fit for a digital world. Mode 2 is exploratory, experimenting to solve new problems and optimized for areas of uncertainty.”

Composable commerce enables companies to adopt a bimodal approach by allowing them to innovate rapidly with new, flexible technologies while maintaining the stability of their core business systems. This approach allows companies to balance risk, evolve faster and continuously improve while keeping essential operations stable and reliable.

We offer a range of professional services that can help you navigate the complexities of implementation and migration. 

Every commercetools customer, regardless of business size, is assigned a dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) to support them throughout their composable commerce journey. Together with Customer Solution Engineers (CSEs), you receive expert guidance, particularly during the implementation phase, ensuring architectural best practices and insights into all things composable. 

But that’s not all: commercetools regularly hosts customer meetups, which are networking events where customers can connect with industry peers to exchange experiences and insights. Additionally, customer advisory boards and product roadmap briefings provide opportunities to engage more closely with commercetools. Our newly launched commercetools Community also allows customers to collaborate and share their experiences, helping them maximize the potential of their composable commerce journey.

A composable implementation with commercetools is a journey where your company gets unparalleled expertise and support. Plus, we help you streamline your rollout not only with best-of-breed eCommerce solutions that drive real business value but also through our expertise in all things composable.   

Ready to start your composable journey? Get our report, The State of eCommerce: Retplatforming and Migration Trends for 2024, and discover the benefits of migrating to composable commerce with commercetools.