Staying Ahead of the Curve With Composable Commerce

Are you looking for a way to reinvent the traditional vendor marketplace? Consider adding composable commerce to your toolbox. This marketing approach enables businesses to offer their brands a distinct method of continuously optimizing their customers’ experiences.

Composable commerce leverages multiple best-of-breed vendors combined into a complete, business-ready solution. This development strategy combines selected commerce components into a custom application built for specific business needs using Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs).

According to Gartner research, companies with a composable tech solution will implement new features 80 percent faster than their competitors by 2023. This marketing strategy is like a symphony.

Retail’s Newest Tool

Consider that symphonic structure divides the musical score into parts or movements. Each one takes the listener on a journey. In the same way, the composable commerce strategy is a modern-day commerce solution built around the customer journey. It requires a host of parts or building blocks — such as CMS, ERP, search, relevance, live video shopping, and checkout.

Businesses must select and orchestrate these components to deliver the right functionality to support ongoing needs. This is where composable commerce comes into play. It enables organizations to construct an e-commerce solution with separate interchangeable building blocks to adapt to evolving customer needs.

Increasingly, commerce organizations are leveraging this approach to improve agility and flexibility. Composable commerce is one of the retail industry’s newest tools to help companies meet the sharp increase in digital commerce traffic during the Covid-19 pandemic.

“In a nutshell, composable commerce is the ability to implement your digital commerce solution in a best-of-breed manner. The other side of the spectrum is monolith solutions, which include everything,” Johan Liljeros, general manager North America and senior commerce advisor for digital commerce firm Avensia, told the E-Commerce Times.

Choosing Composable Platform Components

Think of the composable commerce system as a new type of marketing platform. You adapt its functionality to fit your business needs rather than adjusting your business flow to match what the monolith system offers.

For instance, you pick your CMS, the payments processing solution, and the kind of search engine. You select the type of personalization, the hosting provider, and your commerce orchestration for checkout, digital asset management, and so forth.

Liljeros noted that all those selected components will integrate like a modular jigsaw puzzle into whatever distribution resource planning (DRP) or CRM platform you use.

The initial cost to set up a composable platform is usually slightly higher, but according to Liljeros, the long-term gains are much higher as well.

“You might have to invest a little bit more initially to integrate all these components, but you also get a much longer life expectancy from the platform, which you can adapt much easier,” he added.

That continuing adaptability can pay off in cases where a company’s business model or customer experience changes. As expectations change, you can modify a composable platform much faster, saving time, money, and losses to competition.

“When it comes to competition, that would be the other business value in this, not only investment but the competition. I would say you will drastically increase your chances of outperforming the competition by implementing new solutions,” Liljeros said.

Customer Requirement Planning

Liljeros cautioned that potential adopters must view composable commerce platforms as a broad-based tool rather than a solution for certain industries. It is not about being a tool for a business-to-business or a business-to-consumer company. Rather, he said, it is more about how much flexibility you will need in the future and how quickly you want to adapt to industry changes.

Instead, business leaders must look at parameters like a company’s customer-facing requirements. How will customer requirements and expectations change over time? Will business leaders implement new business models, or will their industry require more flexibility in the business models moving forward?

Also, consider how a company’s value proposition will change over the next five years. What is the digital strategy, and what will the IT landscape force require?

Thus, Liljeros agreed that the industry’s business targets will determine the range of modules its leaders select to plug into the commerce platform.

He noted that composable commerce platforms are currently in an adaption curve. Their growth curve as a business tool has been around for the last few years.

Still Unfamiliar Territory

As with all new technology, it can take time for companies and governments to understand its value. Meanwhile, the founders of this technology continue to develop different platforms for their solutions.

“The concept of best of breed is not new. But it is now in a totally different way that the technology is so much further ahead to help it be more profitable and beneficial,” Liljeros said.

Like numerous other digital development firms, Avensia is on the ground floor of this new technology. The company delivers e-commerce solutions to retailers and business companies worldwide.

Ground floor involvement, yes, but not a new business start-up. Avensia has been involved in commerce platforms for 14 years, working with bringing platforms that put all these components together and adapt them for clients’ needs.

Avensia works with do-it-yourself companies, retailers, and manufacturers to help them select different platform components and glue together integrations between e-commerce orchestration platforms, explained Liljeros.

Physical Stores Included

Part of this growing trend of plug-in or composable business modules for commerce platforms is a morphing of terminology. For instance, Liljeros rarely uses the term “e-commerce” because doing so reinforces a divide between brick-and-mortar retail stores and traditional e-commerce businesses.

Instead, he uses a more inclusive term, “digital commerce.” He says so-called e-commerce is becoming an integral part of in-store commerce.

In a broader sense, composable commerce solutions are technologies now found in physical stores. These could be the digital displays used for self-checkout, the POS system, and so forth, which reuse the same technology.

“We use different components in the stores as well,” he said. “Product information displays or personalization effects in the physical store can be exactly the same information you use with online system services.”

He added that the good thing about this is that when you look at the results from a customer perspective, different channels no longer exist. For customers, it becomes more of a coherent experience.

“If you are met by the same wording, the same pricing, the same campaigns, and the same offerings in every channel, you get a channel-agnostic experience that all retailers look forward to. This way of building a commerce system makes it easier to connect new channels to the system. That makes sense,” observed Liljeros.