Composable commerce. Flex for what’s next.

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.

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.

At first glance, composable commerce and unified commerce may seem at odds, but they are actually complementary. Composable commerce provides a flexible architecture that lets companies plug in, customize, and integrate best-of-breed solutions. Unlike rigid monolithic platforms, it allows features to be adapted and modules swapped without disrupting the system. By leveraging pre-built components from commercetools or other providers — or integrating your own — businesses can create seamless, unified shopping experiences.

In short, composable is the architecture, and unified commerce is the outcome. This approach gives retailers the freedom to innovate while delivering the cohesive, high-quality experiences customers expect.

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

commercetools is a leading composable commerce platform, 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.