Stay Ahead of the Curve: How Composable Commerce is Shaping the Future of E-Commerce

Article

4 min read

Words by Wonderful Digital

The world of e-commerce is always evolving and one of the most significant movements is the one towards composable commerce and the benefits it brings to e-teams, businesses and the user experience.

Over the past few years composable commerce has made an enormous impact on the e-commerce space. Providing a more flexible and robust software architecture for e-commerce sites, businesses are switching over from traditional site builds in droves.

Traditional websites rely on one almighty system that governs the look, feel and response of the website. Based on a single-source platform, these sites take an ‘all eggs in one basket’ approach that can limit adaptability and responsiveness of a site.

Often referred to as monolithic systems, this traditional approach can be rigid and limiting – putting a cap on scalability and adaptability. They are back-end heavy and hold you hostage to the one software provider.

Enter composable commerce – an ecosystem that takes a bigger picture approach to building and managing websites by pulling in multiple modular technologies that work together to form a ‘stack’ of tech. Think of it as a big ‘tech sandwich’ where the meat between the front end and back end slices comprises APIs and the pooling together of various building blocks of technology to create a highly customised end result.

By separating the front end from the back end, composable commerce allows e-commerce teams to leverages modern technologies and approaches like MACH (Microservices, API, Cloud, Headless) and JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs and Markup) and essentially cherry pick the most effective technologies in order to create a premium site and enhanced UX.

This results in less work for backend developers and more flexibility and empowerment for front end developers and marketers thanks to a more powerful workflow powered by stack tech.

While composable commerce allows you to specifically curate an ecosystem via stackable technologies the advantages extend beyond customisation alone. Here are just a few top-of-mind pluses.

Best-in-Breed Solutions

Composable tech allows developers and businesses to choose the most effective tools and components to suit their unique needs. These solutions can be tailored and sourced from various vendors, offering greater negotiation power and potential savings.

Flexible and Scalable

Making changes and updates to a site are streamlined and requires no site downtime.

This flexibility allows sites to remain adaptable to the users needs and wants.

More Bang for your Buck.

Rather than paying for a solution that may end up being underutilised, businesses now get better mileage for their spend with a system that is curated for their unique needs.

Cloud Native Structure

A cloud native structure enables access to Saas advantages, offering better option control rather than relying on Manual It operations needed by all-in-one operations.

Open Access to data

Traditional sites don’t always play nice with other systems when it comes to accessing data.

Composable ecosystems use open standards that enable targeted and unrestricted data access when you need it most.

Goodbye to Vendor Lock-in.

Monolithic systems can keep you on a tight leash firmly held by the software provider. In essence you are locked into these systems as per contract. Composable enables you to opt in and out of the API components as needed.

The days of online purchases being made from a desktop computer are long gone. Today we shop from our laptops, tablets and (more increasingly) our phones and we often do it on the run.

In order to meet customers' lifestyles, purchasing habits and increasing desire for a speedy and streamlined shopping experience a site needs to perform flawlessly on multiple devices and platforms.

The flexibility, customisation and API-pooling power that composable commerce ecosystems offer meet those demands in ways that monolithic systems simply cannot.