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Jan 19, 2021 | 13 minute read
written by Elastic Path
I work regularly with global brands on Composable Commerce solutions, which means I’m frequently asked to explain what composable solutions are and why we at Myplanet are so committed to them. Composable architecture offers a number of advantages for businesses in nearly every industry and vertical, but they offer distinct advantages for commerce in particular. Check out our Composable Commerce Hub to see our Integrations and Accelerators!
I describe Composable Commerce as being like LegoTM bricks for ecommerce. With Lego, there are individual pieces of different sizes, shapes, and colors. Each one can be connected to another, and another, and another, allowing you to build nearly anything you want. Composable Commerce architectures work the same way, except instead of plastic bricks you’re working with different digital features or functions.
A company that supports a Composable Commerce approach like Elastic Path, for example, empowers brands with business-centric tooling and adaptability, modular MACH-based architecture, and an open ecosystem so you can flex and adapt the structure to suit your needs. If we go back to the Lego example, it’s a little like getting a Star Wars set. Each piece of the set serves one purpose that builds to a larger whole, but you can also put them together however you want. For example, the same pieces that build the Star Wars set could be used to build a Titanic set, or a mansion, or a pirate ship, or anything else you could dream up. With Composable Commerce, as with Lego, the options are practically unlimited.
This is the biggest and most important question, in my opinion. There are lots of workable options in the world, so why is this one such an important one to consider? I see three primary reasons for why Composable Commerce is going to be the biggest differentiator for retailers in the future:
The goal of Composable Commerce is to give you customizability and flexibility in creating your digital experience, so it could work for nearly anything you can dream of. But here’s where I’ve seen it applied the most:
Once you’ve determined Composable Commerce is the right solution for you, the next step is getting started. For most businesses, I recommend starting with the least critical piece of your most critical feature. Here are some examples:
In each case, think about how your brand plans to excel in the market. By choosing a low-risk part of a high-impact area of your business to get started, your up-front investment will set you up for success later while giving you the opportunity to explore the benefits of Composable Commerce and begin optimizing its use with the increased control it offers.
Composable Commerce is, in my mind, far and away the best solution for retailers looking to make a smart, CX-oriented, future-ready investment, but the short answer is still no, there is no single solution that makes sense for every business out there. It’s a bit more nuanced than that. To help determine if Composable Commerce is right for you, these are the four key qualifiers I focus on when assessing fit for a client:
Big, all-in-one platforms do have one major convenience over composable: you only have to deal with one dashboard and one vendor. However, that convenience comes at a cost and in my opinion, composable still comes out ahead. Any solution will have its challenges, but Composable Commerce is a challenge to be managed, not avoided.
Think in terms of the business user experience— things like how each department or functional role needs to interact with technology. A monolith may appear to offer convenience for your technical team, but it’s likely setting up roadblocks and headaches that you won’t realize until you try to make a quick change to keep up with customer needs, add or remove a channel, or outpace competitors by spinning up new experience. One vendor isn’t easier if your departments can’t work with it easily.
The key to success in a multi-vendor composable scenario is working with an eCommerce agency who understands what you need. Partnering with the right agency means you’ll get someone who can build the exact solution you need, who can customize dashboards in a way that works for your business, and who can set you up for success from the start based on how your business users will actually use the platform.
You can start at any scale, and for many of my clients, I recommend starting small as you build up your capabilities in supporting a composable framework. In any composable build, there are three ways to scope a project:
Tech-by-tech: In this approach, you replace individual pieces (like a CMS or a search and discovery experience, or even a section of the commerce system) one at a time. This can be a great way to solve for high-trouble areas and reduce overall risk in your implementation.
Regional or vertical-specific: This approach is great for testing new features in smaller or test markets before launching across your whole organization. Because of Composable Commerce’s flexibility, we see people using a mix of new and old technologies with this approach.
Rip-and-replace: This is a classic overhaul, where an old monolithic platform is entirely replaced by composable elements. While doable, this is not usually a recommended path unless you truly need it. These kinds of projects are large, require bigger resource investments, and do take a bit longer to see the results, so they should be entered into with those constraints in mind.
Composable Commerce works whether it’s just one piece of the puzzle or the whole business ecosystem. While each composable element can make a difference to the efficiency of the entire system, you can start anywhere and have an immediate impact on just one part of it.
Some vendors have created a unique Packaged Business Capability (PBC) in the market by blending multiple functionalities together to form another core pillar of a Composable Commerce architecture. Elastic Path, in particular, is a great example of a solution with numerous core commerce capabilities working together (as seen in the earlier diagram).
Alongside our Composable accelerator, Myplanet has built out capabilities to take advantage of the opportunities PBCs present. For example, Myplanet has created connectors for two of the leading CMS providers — Amplience and Contentful — to help brands with a seamless and integrated Composable Commerce experience. This creates a better time to value for your migrations and delivers a better day to day experience for your operations teams.
The best solution for this challenge is a Customer Data Platform (CDP). When you build a composable system, each element is capable of communicating with one another via an API. A CDP lets you bring all that data together into a central source of truth that your teams can easily access to get the information and data insights they need for their work.
A CDP links all the data together from every platform you use — composable or not — and connects the dots to give you a customer-centric view of the business. Myplanet’s Composable accelerator comes CDP-ready to make sure your data is optimized and you have a full view of your customer from start to finish.
To calculate ROI for a composable architecture, I recommend drawing from a few different areas: costs of ownership, revenue, and maintenance needs.
Total cost of ownership
Monolithic solutions charge for the full package—even if you don’t use every feature—often resulting in wasted spend. With composable systems, you only pay for the products that you use (both individual platforms and pay-per-use pricing). With this structure, you have a leaner commerce experience and you can substantially reduce your annual costs.
Increased revenue
Having an improved time to market through faster integrations and full flexibility on the experience layer, the business can take advantage of changing customer demands based on events, trends or new business models. This can lead to:
Reduced maintenance costs
Running on a Composable Commerce architecture results in a more tightly integrated system, which allows you to spend less time maintaining break fixes in deployments while increasing development efficiency. The integration approach to composable also allows you to find the root cause of problems more quickly and test in isolation— for example, testing why your search personalization is not working optimally. Instead of testing the entire end-to-end solution, you can test the search feature in isolation and follow the trail more clearly (of course there is still a need for good documentation here).
Your ROI metrics will always need to be contextualized for your business. However, each starts with ensuring the system is capable of doing what you need it to— only then can you start to track the dollars and cents.
At the end of the day, Composable Commerce is about choice and flexibility. There are a lot of reasons why brands might want this flexibility — from building ultra-custom experiences to simply keeping up with changing consumer demands — but it is an investment. If you’re not sure about whether you need a full composable build, speak to a trusted expert that works in this area all the time. A software studio-like Myplanet can help you understand how to approach the transition and what the best strategy for your business is.
Want to learn more about Composable Commerce and Myplanet? Check out how we integrate with Elastic Path.