Composable commerce offers an alternative to all-in-one, legacy platforms for eCommerce companies. This modular approach makes it possible for businesses to improve uptime, streamline processes, and reduce friction across the customer journey. While the flexibility of composable commerce allows organizations to pick and choose the combination of components that best align with strategic goals, three characteristics set composable solutions apart from their all-in-one counterparts: They’re cloud-native, component-based, and tech-agnostic.
Before diving into the details, it’s worth taking a look at the basics of composable commerce. Put simply, a composable approach enables businesses to select, replace or even drop independent and interchangeable components, such as product catalogs, search, and checkout, at any time. Businesses benefit from unlimited flexibility, scalability, and agility to build and run outstanding customer experiences.
Truly composable systems share three common characteristics.
Cloud-native solutions are built to run in the cloud. This sets them apart from cloud-hosted solutions, which often take the form of legacy solutions that have been migrated to the cloud. Composable commerce relies on cloud-native services to so companies can autoscale online capacity during traffic peaks leveraging cloud- computing provider of their choice, such as AWS, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure.
In contrast to cloud services is an on-premise solution, whereby companies manage their own data center with a finite amount of storage space and an upper-performance limit. With a cloud-native solution, businesses no longer have to manage and scale servers internally, and can rely on autoscaling capabilities available in the cloud.
Composable solutions are built using independent and interchangeable components that can be added, replaced or removed at any time. This makes it possible for companies to build e-commerce systems that are adaptable and can meet current and future needs.
In a traditional e-commerce solution, this isn’t possible since all functions and features are interdependent. If one process fails, it can have far-reaching impacts on other operations and may lead to unexpected downtime. Addressing issues may require a full system update or direct support from solution providers.
Using a component-based approach, meanwhile, companies can add, replace, or remove services as needed. This is because e-commerce capabilities are connected using application programming interfaces (APIs). These interfaces are lightweight pieces of code that facilitate communication and make it possible to connect software tools from multiple providers.
Finally, true composable platforms are tech-agnostic. This means that companies can use any programming language or cloud service rather than being locked into a walled garden technology.
The tech-agnostic nature of this approach also allows companies to build exactly the tech stack they want following business requirements. Instead of being bound to proprietary software upgrades and changes like other platforms. Technology professionals can code in the programming languages of their choice. Thus, don’t need extra certifications to operate a composable system, positively impacting developer productivity
Composable commerce solutions are cloud-native, component-based, and tech-agnostic. Thereby, allowing e-commerce companies to achieve infinite scale, add or remove components as needed, and unlock the freedom of engineering. This allows businesses to create technology solutions that meet business requirements. The result? A technology stack that meets business needs and, most importantly, customer expectations and demands now and in the future.
