What is composable commerce?

Businesses focused on speed, innovation, flexibility, and scalability are increasingly turning to modern headless, microservices-based technology to power their e-commerce customer experiences. These technology platforms have a composable architecture, so that business leaders can build custom software for their best-of-breed solutions.

What is composable commerce? 

Today, businesses are looking to build custom commerce applications by embracing a modular approach to software architecture. Composable commerce is a development approach of selecting best-of-breed digital commerce software components from third-party providers, and combining or ‘composing’ them into a custom application tailored to specific business needs. 

A composable commerce approach utilizes various vendors who offer robust, comprehensive functionality for the one thing they do, rather than relying on one vendor to provide the entire product as a standard, one-size-fits-all offering.

What are the components in composable commerce?

A composable commerce platform is made up of an ecosystem of select third-party components, called PBCs, or packaged business capabilities. PBCs provide commerce functionality such as the checkout process, order management, or promotions.

In addition, the third-party components are themselves made up of components, called microservices:

 

What is composable commerce architecture?

The architecture underpinning composable commerce is known as MACH architecture (Microservices, API-First, Cloud-Native, and Headless):

By moving towards MACH architecture for your tech stack, you’re enabling yourself to take advantage of a composable approach to e-commerce, so you can select and deploy best-of-breed, modular applications. You can easily add, replace or remove various capabilities as your needs grow and change. As our friends at Amplience say, “it’s how a technology stack should be.”

What are the benefits of composable commerce?

Composable commerce solutions make sense because no single vendor offers the best functionality needed for your uniquely complex business and the ever-evolving needs and demands of your customer base. Rather than tightly containing features and services in an all-in-one bundle, composable commerce gives you control over the functionality and performance of your application.

Composable commerce is:

• Modular: Each PBC can be deployed independently, both eliminating risks associated with tight coupling of services and offering flexibility to swap modules out over time. 
• Open: Built on open standards, integration patterns and extensibility models, composable commerce encourages easy integrations and customization.
• Flexible: Composable commerce delivers the flexibility and adaptability needed to extend to new customer types, channels, and markets.
• Business-focused: All necessary tools and capabilities for both business buyers and development teams are available, offering full control over the iteration and innovation process to lower risk, increase cost effectiveness, and build digital experiences that meet customer expectations.

The flexibility of composable commerce allows businesses to use and develop only the features and functionality necessary to run their business, streamlining applications to make them leaner, faster, and more flexible. To deliver an experience that’s far superior, with a greatly reduced time-to-market, this development approach lets you seamlessly combine different best-of-breed components, from a content management system to payment processing. 

With market changes coming fast, and the need for impressive user experience more important and necessary than ever, composable commerce gives businesses greater control over how their e-commerce solution is delivered. The decoupled approach makes it easy to optimize e-commerce experiences across channels, improving the omnichannel customer journey in real time while setting yourself up for success with a future-proof application.

What should you look for in developing your composable enterprise?

Like with any technology strategy, there are a few things to consider when developing a composable commerce strategy:

• MACH architecture - The cornerstone of any digital strategy should be the type of technology that provides the flexibility, scalability, and adaptability needed for future-proof success. With its modern decoupled architecture native to the cloud, MACH architecture is necessary for building a true composable commerce strategy. 
• Fully documented APIs and rapid development tools - Because composable commerce is about selecting best-of-breed vendors to create a custom technology stack, it’s necessary to have fully documented APIs. Pairing best-in-class documentation with robust rapid development tools will make development efforts easier and less time-consuming.
• Support - Extensive and fast support, such as through Slack communities or other open forums, make cross-functional development and cross-vendor collaboration of applications easier.

Sitecore’s headless, API-first e-commerce platform Sitecore® OrderCloud® supports composable commerce strategies. With a robust developer portal including comprehensive API documentation, cloud-native architecture, and an extensive B2B2X e-commerce data model, Sitecore OrderCloud® is an e-commerce platform built to scale with you through your continuously evolving digital transformation.