Is Composable Commerce the right choice for your brand?
E-Commerce is growing at a fast pace, expanding and changing, transforming digital interaction between people and brands. In fact, by 2025, online sales are expected to reach $7.4 trillion, a 50% growth over 2021.
Considering how much the digital environment has changed since 2020 to date, it's clear that brands need to be prepared to meet high expectations. Thus, Composable Commerce emerges as the answer.
From monolith to decoupling, changing the paradigm
A few years ago, brands started to identify the symptoms and limitations of monoliths, resulting in the decoupling proposal of the platform, known today as headless.
This marked a change in how digital architecture was developed. Decoupling the monolith allowed the frontend and backend to have their own rules, and also gave freedom to customize knowing that modifying one doesn’t necessarily impact the other.
Another factor behind this approach was the expansion of microservices from 2016 onwards. Brands relied on more and better integrations to meet their platform requirements, in commercial and digital experiences. They focused on the usual channels and on simplifying the new interaction points’ integration such as smart devices, smartwatches, IoT, etc.
Nowadays, there are several strategies; for example, omnichannel has driven brands to have multiple channels unified by a single system, providing personalized and homologous experiences between channels, even the ongoing journey inside the store. This has blurred the once obvious line between an online and physical purchase. And just like omnichannel, multiple trends are linked to these platforms, showing their role in a fast-changing market.
It’s noteworthy that headless is driven by strategy, not a specific technology, which is quite different from the monoliths’ idea of an exclusive supplier.
Composable Commerce: an evolving strategy
We realize that each brand is an adventure on its own and that there’s no such thing as two identical cases. Each one has its challenges and its teams with different skills to solve them, so, at Reign, the approach gives brands the capabilities they need, not a set of specific technologies that only limit them in the long run.
When talking about capabilities we specifically refer to each component's flexibility and elasticity, thus translating into the entire platform. Achieving this requires, besides willingness, enhancing the headless strategy. In other words, to go beyond the system decoupling and its interfaces, which requires a native modular strategy.
It implies visualizing each aspect of your platform, commercial, operational, experiential, and so on, as a component in itself, as an autonomous unit running specific functions to fulfill the company's objectives. Composable Commerce is just that; it’s the tangible way to bring modular thinking to our platform, allowing us to solve major operational difficulties, like selling products in several countries with different currencies.
To do so, it employs software pieces called Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs); integrations that have all the required functions and, through APIs, can communicate with the different systems, i.e., they are highly compatible. In addition, there is an expanding ecosystem of companies supplying these software pieces, offering a wider range of solutions, leaving each brand free to choose the one that best suits its requirements.
Your situation will point out the best alternative
We want to add what we consider essential: Composable Commerce is designed to provide sophisticated solutions for the diverse challenges that large brands have faced in their quest to consolidate digitally. That is why it’s not a strategy seeking to bury the monolith or to proclaim itself above the others.
It’s very likely that most local e-Commerce, both small and emerging, are still not facing the challenges that Composable Commerce seeks to tackle.
A Composable Commerce is the alternative for brands looking to consolidate their digital visibility or go global. There is where its greatest benefits are noticed, for example, having the peace of mind that high traffic will not disrupt your platform’s services or that the different tax policies will be correctly applied to each purchase.
E-Commerce is without a doubt a cornerstone, and it can take many forms as your brand grows and matures its ways of operating. Thus, recognizing your conditions and challenges is the best guide for choosing what to implement in your platform.
However, it’s important to explain that it’s not necessary to go straight from a monolith, to headless, and then to a Composable Commerce. There are also other paths, such as Pre-Composed technology but we leave that for another story.
Whatever path you choose, the right advice will help you find the best alternative for your brand. In this regard, at Reign, we work in partnership with the best, such as Contentful, Commerce Layer, and Reblaze. We are experts at developing the best modular platforms.