It would be naive to refer to Composable Commerce as "plug-and-play". We prefer the term efficient.

Through careful selection of multiple best-fit platforms and technology partners, a composable approach to ecommerce development can result in a vastly reduced time to market, whilst providing for a smoothly integrated experience from the frontend through to operations.

Through our experience in the composable commerce development, we're able to present and recommend best-in-class technology that is suited to your specific business needs.

Composable commerce can be thought of as a modular approach to building modern ecommerce storefronts and digital shopping experiences.

Multiple components are able to work together to build a highly-efficient ecommerce experience from both a presentation (frontend) and backend perspective. A best-in-class payment gateway can be coupled with the most appropriate order management backend, and a best-fit inventory solution can be linked to the ideal warehouse and fulfillment management platform. There is no vendor "lock-in", which is typically associated with traditional ecommerce builds, allowing businesses and developers to hand-pick the most suited tools for the specific goals of the project.

This "building-blocks" approach results in a completely custom roster of technology and infrastructure partners that are best able to suit a business's specific ecommerce needs.

In other words, the technology stack powering two Composable Commerce stores is not likely to be the same.

Reducing Platform Reliance

A composable approach to ecommerce aims to achieve interoperability with multiple best-fit technologies. This contrasts heavily with a more traditional all-in-one solution to ecommerce, through the delegation of key processes and functionalities to the most aptly-suited technology. Headless architecture and APIs are key to an effective composable commerce build, enabling each element of the build to interact with the other. This methodology reduces your business's reliance on any one particular platform, in favor of a feature-set which is distributed across various platforms and providers where they constitute a best-fit.

As a result, we can avoid the concerns typically associated with "vendor lock-in", and if one integration or microservice experiences downtime, this can be mitigated so that other areas of the ecommerce build are only minimally impacted.

Reducing Developer Dependence

The modular architecture employed in composable commerce builds reduces reliance on a single development team.

As the tech stack is comprised of multiple components, many of which will usually be maintained by an external vendor, the overall reliance on an internal development team is reduced fairly significantly. This isn't to say that composable e-commerce stores can operate without frequent developer input, but it does mean that the weight is distributed more evenly between internal development and external vendor applications.

With composable architectures, an internal development team (or composable commerce development agency) will focus development resources on the overall integration of the tech stack, ensuring smooth interoperability of each component of the stack.

Best-in-class

A composable approach to e-commerce development involves the marrying of multiple best-of-breed technologies in order to create a purpose-built tech stack. This means that each individual business requirement or functional need is satisfied by a specific component (ie a microservice, third party technology integration, etc).

Each component in question is selected by the development team in combination with project stakeholders on the basis of its ability to perform and satisfy its intended use case. This enables the selection of multiple best-fit technologies, each servicing a different area of the application and performing a narrow set of highly specialised functions.

As a result, composable commerce builds are more specialised, fit for purpose, and feature-rich. As business needs change over time, individual components of the stack can be swapped out for more suited alternatives, allowing the system to continually perform at the level required, and adapt as times change.

Conversely, traditional e-commerce platforms aim to satisfy a plethora of business requirements within a single system. While this may sound attractively convenient, it means that the application has to juggle various types of highly specialised tasks, not all of which may be one of its key strengths.

Traditional e-commerce platforms are tasked with both backend and operational functionality and product management, in addition to frontend rendering, presentation, and experience delivery. Beside these, the system may be involved in delivering numerous other functionalities such as search, inventory management, personalisation, and the creation and maintaining of custom landing pages and supplementary website content.

It’s a tall order to expect a single software to be a master at all of these functional needs. Oftentimes, limitations of the core e-commerce system itself are alleviated with the use of third party plugins or apps, which although providing short term satisfaction of business requirements, frequently contribute to application bloat and subsequent performance issues. In comparison, composable commerce approaches a tech stack differently; leveraging an integrated series of best-in-class components to architect a modular stack that achieves each individual business requirement with the best possible outcome.