According to Statista, the eCommerce market is expected to reach $6.35 trillion by 2027, growing at a rate of 11.51%. This has made competition extremely intense, with almost every company selling products and services online today.
How do you customize features to suit the needs of a specific audience? How do you solve complex issues while delivering significant gains in efficiency and accuracy? How do you quickly adapt to new customer demands?
That’s where Composable Commerce comes in. It allows businesses to choose best-in-class technologies across various platforms to build their own unique eCommerce offering. For instance, instead of opting for a standard out-of-the-box CMS, businesses can combine the content management capabilities of SAP, Oracle, Magnet, and more to craft a solution that perfectly fits their needs.
Read on as we take you on a tour of what Composable Commerce is, why companies worldwide are getting excited about the concept, and how it is helping them make the most of a modular, best-of-breed approach.
What Is Composable Commerce?
Businesses that are looking to drive innovation with speed and flexibility are increasingly turning to modern headless, microservices-based technology to power their eCommerce experiences. Composable Commerce offers them the ability to take a modular approach to build a state-of-the-art eCommerce experience.
By choosing the best commerce components and combining or composing them into a custom application, businesses can more efficiently cater to unique customer needs.
Comprising Packaged Business Capabilities or PCBs, Composable Commerce enables enterprises to mix and match different features or components offered by different providers and merge them to build an experience that is unique, customized, and modern.
Instead of relying on the capabilities of one vendor to craft standard functionality or a one-size-fits-all offering, Composable Commerce allows companies to cherry-pick the best shopping carts, payment gateways, and search results and offer the best functionalities from the best vendors.
How Did Composable Commerce Come into Being?
Organizations have long been offering a host of products and services to customers online. But as customer demands and expectations grew, it became increasingly difficult to drive conversions with a standard eCommerce experience. Composable Commerce thus emerged, allowing businesses to choose the best functionalities offered by different third-party vendors and craft a tailored, highly personalized eCommerce experience.
Composable Commerce allows businesses to develop features and functionality necessary to run their business. Being leaner, faster, and more flexible, it helps them combine different components and deliver an experience that’s far superior to traditional approaches. The decoupled approach makes it easy to build and manage experiences across channels while making it easy for brands to set themselves up for success with a future-proof application.
Let’s take the example of SAP Spartacus. What began as a free, open-source JavaScript web application soon transformed into one of the most innovative Composable Commerce platforms in the market today. Today, this headless and API-driven platform allows companies to quickly create their own branded JavaScript-based storefront for SAP Commerce Cloud. Designed to be highly upgradeable and extendable, it caters to a wide range of branding and functionality requirements and enables companies to maintain a highly customizable storefront.
How Is Composable Commerce Related to MACH?
As customers become more and more digitally advanced, old technologies and approaches are no longer viable. To keep up with customer expectations, it is important to be able to customize, extend, and scale the end-user experience. Composable Commerce is largely based on the concept of MACH:
- It exploits the capabilities of microservices architecture to enable high levels of composability and customization.
- It is API-driven and allows for two or more applications or services to be quickly and easily linked or extended.
- It leverages cloud-native capabilities, allowing for high levels of scalability and flexibility across different platforms.
- It offers a headless architecture that allows for continuous improvement of the user interface as well as seamless extension across multiple devices and endpoints.
Why Is Composable Commerce Touted to Be the Future of Commerce?
As brands face the pressure to balance innovation and agility, Composable Commerce helps in creating compelling buying experiences while rationalizing technology costs and increasing tech stack agility. Composable Commerce is the strategic way forward for building and maintaining a customizable storefront. And there are many reasons for this:
- It’s quick: Composable Commerce allows enterprises to choose from an array of eCommerce components and quickly spin up modern storefronts. Since libraries, APIs, and templates are constantly updated, brands can quickly develop omnichannel experiences by customizing and styling loosely coupled components as required.
- It’s modular: The underlying architecture of Composable Commerce platforms is decoupled, offering a modular, scalable, and highly flexible infrastructure that can be leveraged to release features more frequently. Using Composable Commerce, brands can build highly intuitive and engaging storefronts, offer delightful experiences, and drive conversions and revenue.
- It’s customizable: Composable Commerce offers a bunch of constantly updated, upgraded, and published libraries. Companies are in total control of whether to embrace these updates: they are free to extend these libraries or combine them with their own customizations. They can pick components as needed to build unique and branded storefronts and integrate custom features and styling to transform the customer experience.
SAP’s composable storefront is a lean, Angular-based JavaScript storefront for SAP Commerce Cloud. Designed to be upgradable, it allows businesses to adopt new versions and update libraries. Being progressive, it offers support for all major features of a Progressive Web App-enabled storefront and delivers a bunch of features across home page, search, categories, product details, checkout, order history, and more. Today, the storefront offers several new and improved capabilities, including:
- The ability to assist customers and enhance customer satisfaction using the Customer Service feature.
- A reorder button that allows customers to put all of the items from a previous order into the cart.
- Options to view prices in drop-down list boxes with the new configurable products integration.
Summing Up
If you want to cater to the evolving needs of your customers, you need to find new and better ways of driving agility and innovation. Composable Commerce offers just the capabilities today’s enterprises need to be nimble, customer-centric, and future-proof. By choosing the best functionality offered by different vendors, Composable Commerce allows businesses to build highly customizable storefronts and meet the ever-evolving needs and demands of their customer base.
Leveraging loosely coupled features and services instead of an all-in-one bundle, Composable Commerce fuels far better integrations with existing systems and other best-of-breed microservices. Move to Composable Commerce today to overcome the limitations of basic out-of-the-box capabilities and gain more control over the functionality and performance of your eCommerce application. Contact us to learn more.