B2B Trends. Composable Commerce.
You may be reading this because you’ve encountered new industry terms like Composable Commerce, MACH, and Packaged Business Capabilities (PBC) and want to understand their potential impact on your business. These topics are currently generating significant interest.
What is Composable Commerce?
Composable Commerce, a term first used by Gartner, is like building your own custom e-commerce system. Instead of using a single, pre-built platform, you pick and choose the best “pieces” – components, apps, or services – to create a solution that perfectly matches what your business needs.
This approach lets you work with different companies that specialize in specific areas, rather than being stuck with one company’s standard, “one-size-fits-all” package.
Think of your e-commerce platform as being built with LEGO bricks. You use different independent services to build your ideal online store. If some of those blocks don’t quite fit or meet your needs, you can easily swap them out for others without causing major disruptions. This gives you the flexibility to adapt and improve your store over time.
The Story
Traditional e-commerce solutions aimed to handle all business needs within a single, all-encompassing platform. This meant combining a wide range of complex features, solutions, and integrations.
However, the e-commerce landscape is rapidly evolving, driven by new technologies. Vendors are now offering specialized tools and services to boost customer satisfaction, increase sales, automate operations, enhance marketing and SEO, provide business insights, and enable personalization with AI.
As businesses adapt to the latest trends, merchants need affordable ways to leverage these cutting-edge technologies to empower their marketing, operations, and sales teams.
Traditional e-commerce platforms struggle to offer all these services without costly customizations and integrations. This is where Composable Commerce comes in – representing the next evolution in the e-commerce world.
Technology
The cornerstone architectural components for Composable Commerce are MACH and Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs).
MACH
MACH architecture (Microservices, API-First, Cloud-Native, and Headless)
Key elements of Composable Commerce consist of:
- Microservices – Individual small pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed, and managed. Microservices enable the composability of Packaged Business Capabilities (PBC).
- API-First – All functionality should be exposed through an API to help implement flexible integration capabilities.
- Cloud-Native – Software-as-a-Service that leverages the full capabilities of the cloud. Hosting and multitenant application approaches.
- Headless – The front-end user experience is completely decoupled from the back-end logic. Allowing complete freedom in developing interfaces or connecting any number of endpoints and interfaces.
PBC
Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs) are like building blocks – self-contained services or software components that provide specific business functions. They fully address business needs and can be used independently or as part of a larger system.
A Composable Commerce architecture is essentially a collection of these PBCs, connected and working together through a unified API. The beauty of this approach is that these PBCs can come from various vendors, utilize different technologies, and seamlessly integrate with other components using APIs.
For instance, a PBC could be a catalog, search function, content management system (CMS), promotions engine, recommendation engine, or even a tool designed for business users.”
Composable Commerce VS Headless, where is the difference?
Ecommerce solutions need to be headless first to be suggested as Composable Commerce.
Headless is an approach of architecture that separates the frontend presentation layer from the backend processing layer.
Composable Commerce is a further evolution of the headless architecture, as it allows a business to break its commerce platform down into individual services and compose it independently on the front end.
Going Headless is a step forward to Composable Commerce and decoupling the front end is a great starting point.
Packaged Business Capabilities (PBC) VS Microservices
When somebody explains the basics of Composable Commerce architecture, it might sound like they are describing microservices, but there is a difference.
Microservices are a way in which an application is broken down into small functions or features that perform a single business requirement. The key word here is small.
Meanwhile, Packaged Business Capabilities are an aggregated set of Microservices, that can perform business stories and final business requirements.
Moving to Composable Commerce
Moving to Composable Commerce, merchants should consider the key benefits and challenges. It is not only the topic of choosing technology or services, but also about choosing the strategy for the company’s growth.
Benefits
Flexibility and agility
Composable Commerce offers the flexibility and adaptability required to reach new customer segments, channels, and markets effectively.
It empowers businesses to add, remove, or replace any commerce component whenever needed, without causing disruption. Composable Commerce allows business owners to select the specific elements that perfectly align with their unique needs and requirements.
The transition to Composable Commerce can be a gradual process, implemented one functionality at a time. This enables merchants to prioritize the migration of critical features first, while systematically breaking down monolithic systems at their own pace.
Efficiency and profitability
A modular approach lets merchants choose components that align with eCommerce business needs, and reduce redundant elements. This can save time and money in the long run by allowing merchants to focus on serving their customers and driving revenue.
Improved user experience
With Composable Commerce, merchants can choose the best-in-class components, such as content management systems and marketing automation software, that better enable targeted and personalized touchpoints, including customized product recommendations and personalized content.
Modular
With a modular software component approach, merchants can select, prioritize, and configure the components that best align with strategies and objectives. Each component can be deployed independently, eliminating risks associated with tight coupling of services and offering flexibility to swap modules out over time.
Open
Composable Commerce is built on open standards, integration patterns, and extensibility models. It encourages easy integration and customization.
Business-focused
Using Composable Commerce enables businesses to always adapt for the future. All necessary tools and capabilities for business and development teams are available, offering total control over the iteration and innovation process at a lower cost and risk.
Challenges
Complexity
Each component (PBC) can have its own unique APIs, dependencies, data structures, and underlying technologies. This complexity can pose a significant challenge, even for seasoned engineering teams. It can also lead to delays in launching solutions and necessitate additional investment in team training and education.
Maintenance and cost
The client will have to pay for each component or service license.
As well as, the technical team should support multiple technology stacks and solutions, which might require resources with higher skill sets.
Depending on the amount of PBCs from varying vendors, it can quickly affect maintenance costs and total costs of ownership.
Slower speed-to-market
Different APIs, dependencies, complex data structures, or technologies stacks, might also negatively affect delivery time. The technical team will require more time for investigation, education, and implementation.
Summary
Today’s traditional commerce approaches cannot offer the agility and flexibility that are required to support fast-moving and fast-growing digital businesses. It might work well for companies, who have just started their eCommerce journey and usually want an all-in-one solution.
Fast-growing, forward-thinking businesses are adopting Composable Commerce to seize new opportunities, capitalize on the latest eCommerce trends, and exceed customer expectations.
Composable Commerce empowers businesses by:
- Selecting best-in-class solutions: Choose the optimal tools to enhance business operations, marketing, and sales.
- Increasing flexibility and agility: Adapt the technology stack, streamline operations, and ensure consistent business growth.
- Optimizing feature development: Utilize and develop only the essential features and functionalities, balancing implementation cost, complexity, and speed to market.
- Boosting competitiveness: Accelerate the implementation of new features and modifications to existing ones.
- Gaining greater control: Take command of eCommerce application delivery.
- Streamlining multi-channel management: Easily manage eCommerce experiences across diverse sales channels and markets with a decoupled approach.
Everything sounds very complex, but the new commerce future is already here. According to Gartner, Adobe is well-positioned as a media and digital marketing solutions leader. It has a proven record in driving digital transformation trends, developing solutions and products that match customer needs moving toward Composable Commerce with Adobe Experience Platforms:
- Adobe Experience Cloud
- AEM, Headless content management system
- Adobe Commerce, enterprise B2B and B2C ecommerce platform.
- Adobe Analytic, introducing business intelligence.
- Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service
- Adobe Marketing Cloud
- Marketo, automation marketing.
- CDP, Customer
- Marketing Automation
- Personalization
- Campaigns
- Adobe Document Cloud
- Adobe sign, Adobe Acrobat
- Adobe App Builder.
Let us drive our eCommerce future together!
