What Is Composable Commerce?

Composable commerce is an innovative approach to building eCommerce platforms. Instead of relying on a one-size-fits-all solution, businesses can select and integrate various technologies to create a tailored solution that aligns precisely with their needs.

Nearly half (46%) of IT teams have implemented composable commerce — and 43% plan to. Why is this development approach gaining so much traction, and what, exactly, are the benefits? Here’s everything you need to know about how it works, why it’s so popular, and whether composable commerce is a good fit for your business.

What you’ll learn:

• What is composable commerce?
• Composable commerce vs. traditional commerce: What’s the difference?
• Why do businesses choose composable commerce?
• How it works — and why dev teams like it
• What’s the difference between composable commerce and headless commerce?
• What are the benefits of composable commerce?
• Is composable right for your business? How to tell
• How to choose the right composable commerce platform
• Composable commerce glossary: Terms you should know

Composable commerce is a way to build unique digital storefront experiences across various channels and touchpoints. With composable, you can combine different technologies that align best with your specific business needs and goals. In other words, it’s modular: Brands can cherry-pick their technology of choice to create a memorable online experience for customers.

This is an alternative to traditional, monolithic commerce in which one software suite offers most commerce-related functions under a single structure. While a full-stack, all-in-one application might sound like a simple way to deliver digital commerce, it can’t always satisfy business needs for scalability, customisation, and flexibility.

Composable commerce is also different from API-first headless architecture, where development teams must stitch everything together themselves. Many organisations struggle with the deployment and maintenance of API-first implementations. Composable commerce provides a modular set of software and tools.

Composable and traditional commerce differ significantly in building and managing e-commerce platforms. Composable commerce focuses on modularity, enabling businesses to construct their e-commerce infrastructure by assembling specialised components or microservices. These components, such as shopping carts, payment gateways, and content management systems, offer flexibility and adaptability, allowing businesses to scale and customise their operations more efficiently.

In contrast, traditional commerce relies on monolithic platforms where all functionalities are tightly integrated into a single system. While traditional platforms may provide comprehensive features, they often lack the flexibility and agility of composable solutions.

Composable commerce platforms excel in scalability and agility, enabling businesses to add or remove components quickly in response to changing market conditions or customer demands. This scalability makes them ideal for companies with evolving needs or those operating in fast-paced industries. Conversely, traditional commerce platforms may struggle to scale effectively, hindering responsiveness and agility.

Additionally, composable commerce fosters innovation and customisation by allowing businesses to mix and match components or develop solutions. This flexibility empowers enterprises to create unique, tailored customer experiences and experiment with new technologies or business models. In contrast, traditional platforms may offer limited customisation options, limiting innovation and differentiation.

Furthermore, composable commerce prioritises integration and interoperability, making connecting with third-party services, APIs, and existing systems easier. This seamless integration enables businesses to leverage best-of-breed solutions and achieve a unified view of their operations. Conversely, traditional commerce platforms may have constraints when it comes to integration, potentially leading to silos of data and processes. Overall, composable commerce offers greater modularity, scalability, customisation, and integration capabilities than traditional commerce, making it a compelling choice for businesses seeking flexible, innovative e-commerce solutions.

As an analogy, you can think of building an ecommerce site like building a custom home. When you first start the process, one of the options is to use an out-of-the-box home design from a developer. These COTS solutions will certainly make things simpler and faster, but they will result in a one-size-fits-all solution that likely won’t be tailored to your specific needs.

Alternatively, you could build a completely custom dream home — room by room. Starting from scratch may be more complex, but it guarantees a design that suits your distinct needs and achieves your goals. For example, if you love to cook, you can build a state-of-the-art kitchen with a giant island. If you have kids and work from home, you can add a separate office and playroom.

This is the same with composable commerce. It enables organisations to build and integrate digital commerce one capability at a time, creating a completely customised experience that satisfies specific business needs.

As software technologies have advanced, it’s rare to find a full-stack, all-in-one SaaS application (built in-house or licenced by a vendor) that fully satisfies a business's distinct long-term requirements. Adopting a composable commerce approach ensures today’s solution can stay in step with tomorrow’s demands.

These are the features that make composable an ideal approach for many businesses:

1. Designed to be modular

Each component is a self-contained system that can be deployed independently.

2. Based on open standards

You might customise a dishwasher with a cabinet door panel in your kitchen. For commerce, open standards, integration patterns, and extensibility models also encourage customisation. But in this case, it’s the customisation of third-party and proprietary API services. These services can be designed by technology vendors, the business themselves, or their solution and integration partners.

3. Flexible

Modern, flexible technologies and approaches are leveraged for agility. For composable commerce, these include microservices, APIs, cloud, headless, and Jamstack (JavaScript, APIs, and markup language) architectures. Composable commerce and dream homes both include all the necessary capabilities for teams (or you, personally) to have full control to "compose" independent services into an end-to-end solution that addresses complex and dynamic requirements, enables iteration, and lowers the cost and risk of innovation.

If you want to understand how composable commerce works, you need to understand a few key concepts.

With traditional, monolithic architecture, development teams need to redeploy the wider platform to make changes, improvements, or add functionality. That requires abundant time and resources. Even worse? This could cause downtime and potential disruptions for users.

With composable commerce, you get the flexibility to mix and match capabilities to achieve your specific business goals. For example, if your goal is to sell on new channels to open more revenue streams, you can add live video shopping to your APIs. If you aim to improve product search to increase your average order value (AOV) you can introduce an AI-powered search solution. Composable commerce makes it easier, faster, and more cost-effective to implement these new experiences.

Simply put, headless commerce is the first step toward composable commerce. Organisations adopting a headless approach may be on their way to becoming a composable enterprise. Headless commerce is when a platform’s front and back end operate independently via APIs, and changes on one end do not affect the other. Composable commerce emphasises modularity a step further and decouples services that solve business problems, like search, payments, or personalisation.

Every component is pluggable, scalable, replaceable, and can be continuously improved. Combining these packaged business capabilities (PBCs) — whether purchased or developed in-house — allows for maximum organisational agility. The creation, curation, and dynamic assembly and reassembly of these PBCs is not a “new architecture.” Instead, it is an ongoing evolution of architectural practices.

Both approaches connect best-in-class technologies to allow more flexibility to meet organisational needs. Both result from organisations' need to adapt and respond quickly to the accelerating pace of business change.

Nearly half (46% of IT teams) have implemented composable architecture. And for a good reason: Composable commerce helps businesses move fast and adapt to customer demands, market changes, ecommerce trends, and new technology. Here’s how:

More flexibility: With modular applications, only the required services’ APIs and logic are involved, rather than the entire platform. Not only can independent components of a composable platform be swapped in and out as needed, but they can also be selectively applied to new experiences you build or be consumed in multiple experiences.

This flexibility—and the freedom to innovate—allows you to stay ahead of consumer expectations and outmaneuver the competition.

Unlimited customisation: Since composable commerce is modular, you can deliver highly differentiated and personalised commerce experiences on any touchpoint. Considering that 65% of customers expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences, this aspect of composable commerce is crucial. It opens up an ecosystem where your business can connect with partners, vendors, and other solutions so you can easily build and adjust your offerings on the fly.

Increased efficiency: Composable commerce includes the ability to increase operational efficiencies for faster development cycles and less interdependence across teams. Businesses can maintain complete design and process freedom and scale systems independently while responding to changes. Ultimately, composable commerce unifies business priorities and initiatives.

Better performance: With composable commerce, you can fine-tune the user experience, seamlessly blending functionality from your back-end systems to optimise for both performance and mobile commerce. This is crucial when you consider that more than 70% of shoppers use their mobile devices to find and browse products and make purchases.

Site performance and speed are critical. In fact, the highest ecommerce conversion rates occur on pages with load times between 1–2 seconds. With each additional second of load time, website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42%.

Replatforming to composable requires careful consideration. To discover if composable commerce is a good fit for your business, ask these questions:

- Is your business part of a rapidly changing and competitive market that requires person-centric innovative experiences that can be deployed quickly?

- Does your business run on a complex set of applications that takes months to change?

- Does your growing business have an ecosystem of open source and simple integrations that you may want to change somewhere down the road?

If you answered yes to any of these, it’s time to consider composable commerce. Not sure where to start? First, it’s important to understand how you'll run your DevOps team. Is it with a top-tier internal IT team working closely with a systems integration partner? Or will you use technology like Salesforce's Composable Storefront to manage this aspect?

You’ll also need to determine costs. The argument against change is that often it can be expensive and time-consuming. Fortunately, you don’t need to take an all-or-nothing approach with composable. You can start with an incremental approach to avoid the hefty, all-at-once cost of replacing a legacy architecture with composable capabilities. Identify the immediate business goals that will make the biggest impact in your organisation and start there.

If, for example, your goal is to improve your customer’s experience and boost engagement, start by rolling out an API-driven progressive web app on your top-of-funnel web pages (homepage to cart). You can tackle the checkout once those efforts have been successfully rolled out.

Above all else, it’s important to choose the right composable platform for your business.

Just like choosing a builder or floor plan for your home, when it’s time to choose a composable commerce platform, there are multiple factors to consider. Here’s a checklist that will guide you through key considerations.

• Flexibility of SaaS solution: A flexible framework empowers your team to design one-of-a-kind experiences and seamlessly integrate third-party functionality without the constraints of cookie-cutter ecommerce templates. It’s also important to know which architecture types your vendors can support (for example: all-in-one, composable, custom, or hybrid).
• Partner ecosystem: You’ll want to look for a platform that has an ecosystem of partners to easily integrate and build with, as well as one that provides tools for both developers and business users. Lastly, you should consider your organisation’s digital awareness. Select a technology vendor that matches the technical capabilities of your team, system integrators, or the agency you hire.
• Accelerators and Integration: Can you rely on the platform’s prebuilt components and integrations? This can help significantly reduce custom code, build costs, and overall total cost of ownership.
• Web Hosting: Knowing whether hosting is included in a composable commerce offering is important. Remember that hosting fees can vary dramatically depending on traffic and the features of your website, so it may be difficult to know what kind of budget you will need to allot. That said, choosing a partner that can host your site can significantly reduce costs.
• Technical Support: Does the composable vendor only support their APIs or will they support your whole architecture? It’s crucial to define a process around ongoing support and management upfront. This will give you clarity about what your internal team is responsible for and what falls under the purview of your composable partner.
• Uptime and scalability: Site Speed and availability are critical when it comes to ecommerce, especially during high traffic moments like holidays and sales. Just a few moments of website downtime during peak traffic can take a big chunk out of your yearly revenue. Make sure your platform partner has proven scalability and uptime.

Composable commerce presents a modular approach to e-commerce, empowering development teams to select and integrate diverse commerce technologies to craft a tailored experience that aligns with their unique requirements. Particularly beneficial for businesses facing challenges in swiftly launching new experiences to market or encountering barriers to innovation due to limitations in their existing architecture, composable commerce offers a promising solution.

When considering the adoption of composable commerce, it's crucial to evaluate various factors such as hosting options, support capabilities, flexibility of the solution, and the strength of its partner ecosystem. These considerations are vital for ensuring the sustained success and adaptability of the chosen composable commerce framework over the long term. By prioritising these elements, businesses can navigate the transition to composable commerce more effectively and capitalise on its potential to drive innovation, agility, and customer-centricity in their e-commerce operations.