In an era where digital transformation is more than just a buzzword, businesses are constantly on the lookout for agile and adaptable solutions to stay ahead. Enter composable commerce: a revolutionary approach that's changing the game for e-commerce businesses by offering unprecedented flexibility and customisation.
What is Composable Commerce?
Imagine building a house. Would you prefer a one-size-fits-all model or the ability to pick and choose the features that best suit your lifestyle? If you lean towards the latter, you're already grasping the essence of composable commerce. This approach to e-commerce is like constructing your dream home, brick by brick, with each component meticulously chosen to meet your specific needs.
Composable commerce is a modular, building-block approach to digital commerce. It extends the modularity principles in which business users can construct commerce experiences using low-code tools. Composable commerce makes it easier for B2B and B2C businesses to use building blocks based on their own unique needs, making personalisation and great CX a reality within large enterprises.
Composable Commerce Example: SAP Commerce Cloud
Why Composable Commerce?
Organisations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace their competitors by 80% in terms of speedy implementation of new features, according to Gartner*.
Composable commerce offers the promise of greater flexibility and freedom to choose best-of-breed solutions. Similar to LEGO bricks, the final creation can be custom-built. This gives an organisation full control of each function and tailor it to exact business needs:
- Customisation at Its Core: Tailor every aspect of your e-commerce experience to align with your brand identity, customer needs, and business objectives.
- Future-Proof Your Business: With the ability to easily integrate new technologies and trends, your e-commerce platform remains at the cutting edge, today and tomorrow.
- Faster deployment: An advantage of composable commerce is that a brand can deploy changes faster; it doesn’t need to update the entire commerce application; the specific microservice can be updated instead of all components.
- Enhanced User Experiences: Craft seamless and personalised customer journeys by leveraging the best tools for each touchpoint, from discovery to post-purchase support.
- Operational Efficiency: Streamline operations by choosing solutions that best fit your internal workflows and processes, reducing bottlenecks and improving productivity.
Composable vs. Traditional E-Commerce Platforms
The traditional e-commerce platform is akin to a pre-built house; it's functional and gets the job done but might include features you don't need while lacking some you do. These platforms often come as monolithic systems, where every component is tightly integrated, making customisation and scalability challenging. On the flip side, composable commerce is like building a custom home. Every element, from the foundation to the fixtures, is chosen to meet your specific desires and needs, offering a level of personalisation and flexibility that traditional platforms can't match.
Composable vs. Headless Commerce
Composable commerce and headless commerce represent distinct yet complementary approaches in the digital commerce realm. Headless commerce focuses on decoupling the front-end presentation layer from the back-end, enabling rapid innovation and flexibility in customer experience across various platforms. Composable commerce, however, adopts a broader, modular strategy, allowing businesses to tailor every aspect of their e-commerce operations by integrating best-of-breed solutions across all functions, from product management to customer engagement. While headless commerce enhances front-end agility, composable commerce offers an extensive framework for end-to-end customisation and scalability, making them synergistic choices depending on a company's specific needs for innovation, flexibility, and comprehensive control over their e-commerce ecosystem.
Are there any downsides of Composable Commerce?
The benefits of fully 100% composable commerce platform are certainly appealing. However, this level of customisation comes with notable challenges. To effectively implement and manage a fully composable commerce system, organisations must possess a high degree of digital maturity and have access to skilled IT resources capable of navigating the complexities involved.
Key challenges of adopting a fully composable commerce approach include:
- Digital Maturity: It's not well-suited for organisations that are still evolving in their digital transformation journey.
- Skilled Resources: The necessity for experienced and often costly developers, as composable systems lack a standard "instruction manual."
- Modern Tech Architecture: A requirement for a contemporary technology framework, as composable commerce may not integrate smoothly with outdated systems.
- Overcustomization: The risk of overengineering solutions, driven by the capability to build custom user interfaces and other components, even when not strictly necessary.
- Vendor Management: The need to manage relationships with multiple vendors and maintain the essential integration points between different systems, which can be as challenging as dealing with vendor lock-in.
How to tackle the challenges of Composable Commerce?
Transitioning to a Composable Commerce architecture is a strategic move that necessitates deliberate planning and execution. It's about making a smart long-term digital strategy choice, considering your existing tech infrastructure and its potential impact on your operations and customer interactions. Partnering with Langia IT Solutions can significantly mitigate the challenges associated with implementing a fully composable commerce platform and pave the way for a successful and seamless transition.
- Bridging Digital Maturity Gaps: Langia can provide the strategic guidance and support necessary for digitally evolving organisations to navigate the complexities of composable commerce. By offering tailored advice and best practices, Langia helps businesses accelerate their digital transformation journey, ensuring they are well-equipped to handle the demands of a composable architecture.
- Access to Skilled Resources: Langia's team of experienced IT professionals and developers becomes an extension of your business, filling the gap for the specialised skills required to design, implement, and manage a composable commerce platform. This alleviates the need for businesses to source and retain expensive in-house talent, significantly reducing resource-related challenges.
- Modernising Tech Infrastructure: With its profound understanding of the latest technological advancements and trends, Langia can assist businesses in updating or optimising their technology architecture to ensure compatibility with composable commerce systems. This includes advising on the integration of modern tools and platforms that enhance the scalability and efficiency of the e-commerce ecosystem.
- Preventing Overcustomization: Langia IT Solutions helps businesses strike the perfect balance between customisation and practicality, ensuring that the development efforts are focused on delivering value and enhancing customer experiences rather than unnecessary over-engineering. Langia's expertise helps in identifying the key areas that truly benefit from customisation, avoiding the temptation to build superfluous features.
- Simplifying Vendor Management: By acting as the central point of coordination for various technology vendors and solutions, Langia IT Solutions simplifies the management of multiple partnerships. This not only reduces the operational burden on businesses but also ensures that the 'connective tissue' between different components of the composable commerce platform is well-maintained and effectively managed.
Wrapping It Up: Is Composable Commerce Right for You?
Embarking on the composable commerce journey offers a world of possibilities, allowing you to craft an e-commerce experience that truly reflects your brand and meets your customers' ever-evolving needs. While it may require a bit more upfront planning and investment, the long-term benefits of flexibility, scalability, and customisation make it a compelling choice for businesses looking to thrive in the digital age.
As we wrap up this exploration of composable commerce, it's clear that this approach isn't just a fleeting trend; it's the future of e-commerce. By adopting a composable mindset, businesses can not only meet today's challenges but also adapt to tomorrow's opportunities, ensuring they remain competitive and relevant in an ever-changing market.
So, whether you're just starting out or looking to revamp your existing e-commerce strategy, consider how composable commerce could be the key to unlocking your business's full potential. After all, in the dynamic world of e-commerce, flexibility isn't just an advantage—it's essential. Contact us today to get started.
Appendix: SAP Commerce with Composable Storefront
SAP Commerce Composable storefront (formerly known as Spartacus) is a lean, Angular-based JavaScript storefront for SAP Commerce Cloud. Composable storefront talks to SAP Commerce Cloud exclusively through the Commerce REST API.
Advantages of the Composable Storefront
- Extensible: Composable storefront is designed to be upgradable while maintaining full extendability. You'll be able to adopt new versions of composable storefronts by updating the composable storefront libraries that we regularly enhance.
- Progressive: Composable storefront is on a journey to be fully compliant with the Progressive Web Application (PWA) checklist. Support for all major features of a PWA-enabled storefront will be added, to offer the best possible customer experience regardless of device or location.
- Open Source: Composable storefront is open source. It will be continually developed by the SAP Commerce Cloud team.
Features of the Composable Storefront
Composable storefront provides core storefront features such as:
- home page
- search
- categories
- product details
- cart page
- adding to cart
- checkout
- order history
FAQ:
What is Composable Commerce?
Composable commerce is a modular approach to e-commerce, allowing businesses to customise their platforms using best-of-breed solutions. It offers flexibility, faster deployment, and enhanced user experiences by enabling companies to choose and integrate the specific components they need.
Why should I consider Composable Commerce for my business?
Composable commerce provides unparalleled flexibility and customisation, allowing businesses to tailor their e-commerce experience to their specific needs. It supports rapid deployment of new features, improves customer experiences, and ensures operational efficiency by integrating best-fit solutions for each business function.
How does Composable Commerce differ from traditional e-commerce platforms?
Traditional e-commerce platforms are often monolithic and less flexible, while composable commerce allows for custom-built solutions by integrating modular components, offering greater personalisation and scalability.
What is the difference between SAP Commerce Spartacus storefront and Composable storefront?
Spartacus is the open-source project name, and composable storefront is the official storefront release from SAP. Their codebases are currently the same. Composable storefront can be referred to as Spartacus and vice versa.
Are there any downsides to Composable Commerce?
While composable commerce offers many benefits, it also comes with challenges such as the need for digital maturity, skilled resources, modern tech infrastructure, and the potential risk of overcustomisation. Managing multiple vendors and integration points can also be complex.
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*Gartner Report: https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3986490
