The possibility of fully customizing features for your customer experiences is the reason why you built a commerce platform in-house. But scaling capacity, increased costs and slow updates mean your developers are just maintaining the system instead of innovating at speed. So, is a homegrown commerce platform really the solution to meet unique business requirements, like you first thought?
"In the rapidly evolving tech landscape, the promise of control reigns supreme. And it’s why founders, CEOs, and technical decision-makers are increasingly drawn to the idea of building in-house platforms,” stated Asanka Abeysinghe, CTO at WSO2, in a recent article published on Tech Crunch. While the allure of in-house platforms is understandable — customization, security, adaptability and more — that DIY dream can quickly turn into a “quagmire of escalating costs, dwindling focus, and stifling complexity.” In other words, “What you gain in customization, you often lose in agility."
Loss of agility = Missed opportunities
That’s not to say that developing software in-house doesn’t have advantages. In theory, companies that have taken the homegrown path enjoy greater control over their tech stack as well as the freedom to create hyper-customized solutions that meet unique business needs. However, attaining maximum control and customization often demands significant investment in terms of cost and effort, with uncertain outcomes in the long run. Businesses that have built in-house platforms from scratch report a slew of issues, including:
Loss of agility: Homegrown platforms usually become a rigid architecture that demands more focus on maintenance rather than the timely release of new functionalities to address emerging customer demands. Controlling and managing every aspect of a tech stack becomes a resource-intensive endeavor to keep pace with an ever-changing marketplace, as developers have limited bandwidth to focus on innovation.
High continuity risks: The long-term viability of a homegrown platform is highly dependent on the individuals who developed the code and built the solution. When the engineers and developers who spearheaded the project depart the company, keeping up with the intricacies of the platform becomes increasingly challenging and time-consuming. That situation often results in the implementation of quick fixes and workarounds, which may offer short-term solutions but may lead to complications down the road.
Lack of scalability: Homegrown platforms resemble on-premise IT infrastructures, where businesses handle scalability in-house. This approach usually leads to downtime and sluggish performance, limiting a company’s ability to expand its customer base.
Complex integration and inflexibility: Homegrown solutions may face difficulties when integrating with other systems, often resulting in data inconsistencies. In addition, DIY (do-it-yourself) solutions are usually monolith-like solutions in which all functionalities are tightly coupled, missing out on the flexibility needed for customizations.
Growing costs: Contrary to what many think, homegrown systems aren’t an economical choice. When factoring in costs of hiring and retaining developers, customizations and integrations, hosting, ongoing maintenance, tech debt management, etc., DIY solutions end up being more expensive in the long run and lack a clear return on investment (ROI).
What’s more, homegrown solutions usually divert attention and resources away from creating functionalities and applications that meet customer expectations and deliver business value.
While the idea of building a platform from the ground up may seem enticing, the reality is far more challenging and costly than many technology leaders anticipate, usually failing to meet business goals as time goes by.
Moving away from home(grown): The build-and-buy approach
“I would think two or three times before I took the decision to build everything from scratch,” advised Kyle Barz, Director of Global Retail and D2C Technology at Mars, Inc., the mastermind group behind the iconic M&M’S candy. “I wouldn't recommend building a commerce engine or content management system on your own, unless you're truly bringing a lot of differentiating factors to that solution. Then you also have to think about the roadmap and managing the technical debt for each of those services. I don't think you'll be able to really compete with some of the bigger capabilities that are out there externally.”
This statement encapsulates the reasons why building homegrown platforms isn’t a smart investment in the long term, particularly considering the availability of commercially viable alternatives that enable a “build-and-buy” strategy. This modern approach to creating a customized technology stack strikes the ideal balance between entirely building your platform or buying an all-in-one commerce platform. In short, a build-and-buy approach empowers you to decide what you buy (outsource more “standard” functionalities to best-of-breed vendors) and what you build (so you only spend resources on what matters and differentiates your business).
This approach requires a flexible, agile and scalable solution that allows you to mix and match the best-fit components according to your needs. In a commerce landscape, this is exactly what a composable approach helps businesses accomplish.
In short, composable commerce is a design approach that breaks down a commerce platform into components (often referred to as PBCs, packaged business capabilities or building blocks), such as search, cart or checkout. All these components can be customized, extended and combined in various ways to create custom solutions to power all sorts of experiences across any channel.
To compose a unique commerce tech stack, it’s possible to combine components from best-of-breed vendors like commercetools with features developed in-house. Such flexible infrastructure helps your business achieve the ideal balance of customization and agility, as you can expand, contract or swap any of these components entirely for other solutions without affecting other parts of your platform or being locked in with a particular vendor.
Don’t be home alone: Businesses that moved from homegrown to composable
For the majority of companies that spent time and money on a commerce platform built in-house, transitioning to a composable approach proved to be the optimal solution. This shift allowed them to align with unique business objectives while enhancing agility and flexibility, enabling quicker responses to market changes.
Nuts.com, a leading online purveyor of nuts, dried fruits and chocolates in North America, built a homegrown PHP site from scratch in 2000. Initially, the webshop worked well but, as the years went by, it became a liability for the company’s growth plans. The DIY platform was inflexible and accumulated tons of technical debt over time, hindering the company from providing outstanding customer experiences.
Nuts.com decided to migrate to a composable architecture, so they could maintain a high degree of control and integrate in-house built applications while taking advantage of best-of-breed services for less differentiated parts of the customer experience.
We felt like the composable, MACH®, headless model gave us the right amount of flexibility while still giving us a stable core of things that need to work — like cart and checkout. They’re not really rocket science, they’re plug-and-play.
CTO, NUTS.COM
The leading flower delivery network Interflora UK invested early in eCommerce with an in-house built platform. Over time, the company’s homegrown infrastructure became rigid and expensive, with the company maintaining a costly year-round high-availability hosting service to accommodate just three seasonal spikes: Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas. Furthermore, the company struggled with a rigid platform that hindered mobile responsiveness and SEO performance.
As Interflora UK’s mission became progressively hard to deliver with the old architecture, it was time to reset its eCommerce infrastructure to keep delivering on the company’s promise… And wow our customers once again.
IT DIRECTOR, INTERFLORA UK
By modernizing its tech stack with a composable approach, Interflora UK improved its website performance and mobile-first customer experience while reducing its annual hosting costs by 20%. Plus, the company had to grapple with sluggish performance, achieving zero downtime across three webshops.
The French prêt-à-porter fashion brand Promod also chose the made-to-measure approach of composable commerce. The company relied on an internal solution that not only became outdated over the years but hindered showcasing the brand’s uniqueness across channels. The composable approach delivered the build-and-buy edge Promod was looking for: Now, the fashion retailer can easily combine commercially available software with in-house developments.
With its modular structure, commercetools fits very well into our best-of-breed strategy. In fact, we were not looking for a monolith, but for a solution that would allow us to integrate existing modules developed in-house.
CIO, PROMOD
And finally, the power tools manufacturer Festool chose a composable approach to create a D2C (direct-to-consumer) store. Combined with the manufacturer’s DIY ethos, digitizing commerce to meet the company’s goals needed the adoption of a composable infrastructure from the outset.
With a composable architecture, we were able to build a robust system that allows Festool to bring its strategy to life, from D2C sales to omnichannel commerce and international expansion. Achieving such ambitious goals while accelerating time-to-value in only five months was made possible by the flexibility of our composable stack powered by commercetools. Not only can we easily integrate best-of-breed technologies but we can also plug our DIY applications that differentiate Festool from competitors, creating a custom tech stack that fully meets our business and customer needs.
HEAD OF E-COMMERCE, FESTOOL
From homegrown to home run: A flexible approach with composability
Building and relying solely on in-house platforms may be a tantalizing promise that often falls short when confronted with reality. After all, companies need more than the ability to hyper-customize experiences: They also need to foster agility, focus on true differentiation points and accelerate innovation, all the while boosting internal productivity and reducing costs.
To accomplish these goals, businesses need a flexible solution to make the most of their expertise and differentiation factors without being bogged down with developing commoditized features. A composable approach helps companies strike the balance between what to build and what to buy, ultimately reaping the benefits of both in-house applications and best-of-breed solutions at the same time.
Ready to reclaim innovation and flexibility? Discover how to move to commercetools Composable Commerce with our quickstart guide.
Manuela Marques Tchoe is a Content Writer at commercetools. She was a Content and Product Marketing Director at conversational commerce provider tyntec. She has written content in partnership with Facebook, Rakuten Viber and other social media platforms.