Everything you need to know about composable commerce.
In a world of constant change, businesses need agility and flexibility more than ever. Discover why composable commerce is the answer to staying agile, so you can craft the experiences your customers are looking for — today and tomorrow.
The result: Maximum flexibility, agility and freedom to design experiences for your customers.
Migrating to a new cloud infrastructure for composable commerce has had a significant impact on the performance and scalability of our online store and, ultimately, our business success. The freedom to innovate is one of the key benefits we've experienced. With a composable commerce infrastructure, we can experiment with new technologies and features without being limited by the constraints of a monolithic platform.
CO-FOUNDER AND OPERATIONS DIRECTOR, CARGO CREW
What makes a composable commerce platform truly composable?
A composable solution is more than the sum of flexible components. For a commerce system to be truly composable, it must combine three core traits: Cloud-native, component-based and tech-agnostic.
Together, they deliver the magic of infinite scale, unlimited flexibility and reduced costs for enterprise businesses to innovate, become adaptable and grow.
The trio that makes a genuine composable system.
Your business on cloud nine
Leverage the power of cloud-native SaaS to unlock infinite scale and improve performance. Respond to new influxes in real-time and monetize on Black Friday-like moments.
Best-of-breed = Best-for-you
Plug (or unplug) and play flexible components at any time and achieve unlimited flexibility and agility. Innovate faster and adapt customer experiences on the fly with the ability to add, swap or drop components.
Freedom of engineering
With a tech-agnostic approach, you can move away from the constraints of proprietary technology. Developers can design solutions aligned with business needs, delivering fast and cost-efficient rollouts.
What’s the difference between composable and headless commerce?
Headless is an eCommerce approach that decouples the frontend from the backend commerce functionality. This way, it’s possible to update/edit the frontend without interfering with the backend, and vice versa. Headless was the first step in breaking down legacy monolithic platforms.
Composability takes the idea of headless further: Essentially, composable breaks down the commerce infrastructure into individual components. That said, every composable infrastructure is headless, but not every headless infrastructure is composable. Get all the details.
Why is everyone talking about composable commerce?
Traditional eCommerce solutions, also known as legacy or monolithic platforms, are indivisible blocks of standardized software that are hard to customize and slow to update. Every time you change or update something, the entire system must be retested and redeployed, which may cause issues or even a complete system crash.
This inherent lack of flexibility and agility doesn’t compute at today’s accelerated pace; consequently, companies struggle to innovate and even hire and retain talent (unsurprisingly, top engineers aren’t eager to work with old technologies). Plus, the cost of running monolithic infrastructures has become prohibitive due to additional fees for upgrades, integrations, etc.
Composable commerce is gaining traction because it’s the answer for businesses to manage constant change in their customer experiences without spending a fortune. Companies can shift from a monolithic approach to maximum flexibility in their technology stacks, so they’re adaptable to whatever the future brings. Through composable technology, businesses can enable unified commerce to provide a holistic view of all commerce operations in one place.
To be or not to be: Composable washing
Many enterprise eCommerce platforms claim to be composable, but are they really? If the vendor is cloud-hosted, lacks API coverage or doesn’t give freedom to use any development language and cloud provider, their technology is not composable and lacks the benefits of a composable environment.
What are the benefits of composable commerce?
Composable commerce offers enterprises the flexibility to tailor their commerce platforms by integrating best-of-breed technologies. This approach enables companies to build highly customized, scalable and agile systems that can quickly adapt to changing market demands, enhance customer experiences, streamline operations and more. Here’s how:
- Unlimited flexibility and agility: Change a component, not the platform. When something doesn’t work, you can easily replace it or drop it. By leveraging modular and interchangeable components, composable commerce makes the architecture easier to manage and maintain.
- Seamless integration: The adoption of new cutting-edge solutions, such as search and AI tools, becomes faster and more efficient without incurring additional integration costs.
- Real-time updates and maintenance: True composable systems are versionless and continuously updated and maintained in real-time, eliminating technical debt and rendering version upgrades obsolete.
- Enterprise-grade performance and scalability: With a cloud-native SaaS solution, businesses no longer need to manage their own servers or handle capacity increases. Auto-scaling enables you to respond to new influxes of traffic and customers in real-time, so your business is ready to monetize in Black Friday-like moments.
- Increased developer productivity: Working with modern tech means developers become more productive, enabling the company to innovate at a faster pace.
- An ecosystem of composable commerce vendors: Vendors like commercetools offer extensive partner networks and accelerators that simplify implementation timelines and enable businesses to leverage best practices.
- Lower TCO: A true composable system optimizes your commerce investment and reduces costs over time.
- Infinite growth possibilities: You can easily run multiple brands, expand to new markets, introduce new channels and even try out business models.
We articulated a burning ambition: How do we create a flexible platform that delights our customers and that allows us to choose the best of everything that we need rather than settling for the median anywhere? And when we looked at that in a tech-agnostic lens, the best technology route to deliver that business strategy for us was composable.
Digital Customer Experience Director, The Very Group
How does composable commerce improve the customer experience?
Omnichannel experiences. Artificial intelligence and personalization. Seamless checkout. Composable commerce is the engine that enables brands to translate these expectations into exciting customer experiences by plugging in the best-of-breed eCommerce components that suit each of these demands.
The leading automaker BMW Group can auto-scale online capacity during traffic peaks across multiple touchpoints, such as Connected Drive, boosting omnichannel sales like never before.
READ STORY
Ulta Beauty, an American retailer, empowers shoppers to blend physical and digital with an app that becomes the shopping companion within the store.
READ STORY
The media conglomerate NBCUniversal leverages composability to run its own marketplace for consumers to shop while watching their favorite NBCUniversal movies and shows.
READ STORY
Is commercetools truly composable?
commercetools is the most versatile eCommerce platform for enterprises, widely recognized by market analysts such as Gartner and IDC. By embodying the key core traits of composable commerce — flexible components, cloud-native SaaS and a tech-agnostic approach — commercetools is the right choice for brands looking to harness the full potential of composable technology.
With over 500 commerce APIs and success stories across B2B, B2C and D2C companies, commercetools also boasts a best-in-class ecosystem of 175+ partners across EMEA, the US and APAC, offering unparalleled support and innovation opportunities for every commerce possibility.
The legacy tech wasn’t right to achieve our goals, so we switched to composable commerce. With the flexibility of composable, we have the foundation to tap into our customer needs, no matter if they’re omnichannel, AI or anything else that may pop up in the future.
Head of eCommerce Development, SPORT 24
How to start your composable commerce journey?
Embracing composable commerce doesn’t require a complete overhaul all at once. Brands can start by addressing their main pain points or missed opportunities, such as enhancing an unstable checkout flow during high-traffic periods. Such incremental changes enable companies to tackle issues one at a time and realize business value faster.
commercetools empowers companies to overcome the key challenges of migrating to composable commerce with this phased approach — also known as the strangler pattern. This monolith-to-composable migration method enables brands to break their platform into small pieces as microservices and slowly replace those with single components incrementally. Over time, the monolith will start to “suffocate” and eventually disappear.
Moreover, commercetools provides you with all the best practices you need to successfully migrate to composable commerce in only seven steps.
How to accelerate your composable commerce implementation?
Implementing composable commerce doesn’t have to be a complex endeavor. On the contrary, turbocharging composable implementations have never been easier and faster. With the rise of pre-composed solutions, such as commercetools Foundry for B2C Retail and B2B Manufacturing, your business has all the components to kickstart your commerce project — without risk and at speed.
Plus, leverage additional options to expedite your implementation even further with commercetools, such as Premium Support and Expert Services.
commercetools Foundry for B2C Retail
Packed with a robust set of commercetools products and resources, this pre-composed solution offers a quick path to creating exceptional shopping experiences.
Explore Foundry for B2C
commercetools Foundry for B2B Manufacturing
Make your digital commerce easier than ever. Deliver exceptional purchasing experiences with the only pre-composed solution for B2B manufacturers and reduce implementation time by 30%.
Explore Foundry for B2B