What is a Pre-Composed Solution™ & How Does it Accelerate Time to Market?

Author's Note: This is an update to a post originally published in November 2020 and has been edited for relevancy

I sound like a broken record when I say, yet again, that more and more brands are doubling down on their digital commerce strategy. Why?

We all know that the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed more consumers than ever before online.In fact, the US Census Bureau reported that “In the U.S., the increase in online retail sales penetration in one quarter between 1Q20 and 2Q20 equals what was achieved in the past five years.” But, Covid-19 is just the accelerant.

Brands have had digital commerce projects on their roadmaps for years and, for years, they have been delayed, or, slowly completed.

Why do digital commerce projects take so long to complete?   

Simply put, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Building, deploying, and optimizing differentiated digital commerce is no simple task. When a business decides they want to elevate their digital commerce strategy, one of the first steps is to explore commerce platforms.

Often brands start with the vendors that they have heard of-Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, Magento, etc.

With their strong reputations in market and comprehensive out-of-the-box functionality, these providers feel like a safe choice. But, once brands start to think about their innovation roadmap, the rigid nature of these solutions becomes a problem.

When a change needs to be made in an attempt to adjust to customer needs, quickly move against competitive pressure, or adapt to market environments (curbside pickup in Covid-19 times), these “safe” platforms becomes a nightmare.

At this point, companies often pivot to explore a different type of commerce platform, one that empowers their teams to innovate at the speed their business and customers' demand.  After some research, brands discover MACH-based technologies (microservices, APIs, cloud, and headless), which appear to offer the flexibility and control to build for their exact needs.  

But innovation dreams are quickly crushed as the risk associated with stitching together many moving pieces (core commerce functionality, partner technologies, extensions, etc.) become a reality.  

While MACH-based solutions promise differentiated experiences, the perceived time, resources, and technology investment work required go live are extremely daunting.  Brands feel the pressure to get digital commerce “right” and they can’t deal with any potential risk.

At the end of the day, brands are left with two choices for commerce platforms:

1. Safe but, cookie cutter
2. Innovative but, complex and risky

Neither of which will empower them to outpace competitors, keep up with customer needs, and hit ambitious growth targets. How can brands overcome the commerce compromise?

Fortunately, at Elastic Path, we are dedicated to providing brands with a third option. Our offering, harnesses a Composable Commerce approach to de-risk the technical complexity associated with other MACH-based technologies by providing the full solution required to rapidly unlock revenue growth.

Our offering is made up of three main parts:

• Elastic Path Commerce Cloud: A SaaS microservices-based headless commerce platform for brands
• Composable Commerce XA™: Premier support for multi-vendor solutions
• Composable Commerce Hub: An open exchange of business solutions made up of accelerators and Pre-Composed Solutions™

Today, we’re going to dive into Pre-Composed Solutions™ and explain how they accelerate time to market for brands.
 

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What is a Pre-Composed Solution™?

Pre-Composed Solutions™ make it easy for brands to launch a complete, commerce solution so that they can start driving revenue in weeks, not months.  

These are business-ready solutions that are built on top of Elastic Path Commerce cloud and pre-integrate core commerce capabilities, 3rd party olutions, and any customizations so that brands can use to quickly deploy experiences; with greater flexibility and less risk.

Whereas with typical MACH-based solutions users must stitch together numerous moving pieces, Pre-Composed Solutions™ eliminate this time consuming, expensive, and daunting task.  

Instead, the pieces are pre-stitched and ready to go.  The beauty of Pre-Composed Solutions™ is that the solutions are still built with the same flexible architecture of MACH so that optimizations and updates are easy to complete on-demand.  

What can you do with a Pre-Composed Solution™?   

In the Composable Commerce Hub you can explore a variety of Pre-Composed Solutions™ that were built by Elastic Path partners to support everything from specific experiences to ready–to-launch websites for different business models.  Two examples include:

Pre-Composed Solutions™ for D2C Commerce: This set of solutions were built by Elastic Path partner, Myplanet, to de-risk innovative commerce for D2C brands. They include solutions to help brand rapidly launch experiences across web, mobile, conversational commerce, marketplace, and retail.

Pre-Composed Solution™ for B2B Commerce: This Pre-Composed Solution™ for B2B Commerce, built in partnership with Elastic Path Partner, DigiCommerce, is a business-ready solution providing a quick start to rapidly launch complex B2B experiences with advanced quoting, account management, subscriptions, complex catalog support, role-based access and more.

Both solutions, empower brands to embrace headless commerce without the risk of delays and budget overages, so that they can start generating digital revenue sooner. You can explore our rapidly growing library of Pre-Composed Solution™ here.  

And, if you want to join the Composable Commerce Movement by submitting a Pre-Composed Solution™ to the Composable Commerce Hub we would love to work with you.  Join us here!