Composable commerce

Making multiple essential components and tools available allows ecommerce developers to pick and customize their commerce flow effectively based on business requirements. Developers can compose their development stack by selecting best-of-breed tools. Either from Jamstack tools, API-first solutions, microservices, headless solutions, and more.

With Composable Commerce, developers can combine different tools (either internally built or a third-party service) to deliver a unified customer experience, enhance customer satisfaction, increase conversion, increase engagement, increase retention, implement business requirements, and grow revenue.

What is composable commerce?

Composable commerce allows developers to select and utilize various available commerce solutions as required to satisfy specific business needs. Some of these solutions include CMS (content management system), OMS (order management system), CRM (customer relationship management), ERPs (enterprise resource planning), a/b testing, hosting, payments integration, inventory management, PIM (product information management), recommendation engine, tax management, search, etc.

Instead of creating solutions from scratch, developers can look for independent parts that already exist and are trusted, each solving a specific business need. These existing parts are combined to deliver a robust customer experience. According to Gartner's Composable Commerce Must Be Adopted for the Future of Applications. By 2023, 50% of new commerce capabilities will be incorporated as API-centric SaaS services. Organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace the competition by 80% in new feature implementation speed.

The composable approach using packaged business capabilities (components representing a well-defined business solution) is the future of digital commerce experiences. These solutions include individual components targeted towards specific business requirements. They are autonomously developed, deployed, and managed. APIs connect each of these individual components, SAAS leverages cloud computing, and the front-end presentation layer is decoupled from the backend logic. All these combined will produce the perfect commerce solution.

Benefits of composable commerce

With composable commerce, developers can use only the features and functionalities they need without building everything from scratch. This promotes flexibility, agile, and lightweight architecture. Businesses can now adapt to the new market opportunities, anticipate the future (future-proofing), develop methods of minimizing the effects of shocks and stresses of any future occurrence, and continuously scale their ecommerce business.

The composable commerce approach also reduces complexity and rigidity as opposed to the monolith or traditional architectures. Third-party services assure businesses of a secured and well-managed service, so they do not have to worry so much. Business leaders and developers can now work in harmony, which will result in more innovation, creativity, and increased revenue.

The concept of composable commerce is designed to focus on solving specific business problems and customer needs. It affects the business, technical, and growth aspects of ecommerce. Business needs targeting growth, and customer needs will be defined. Developers can easily find, pick, consume, integrate, and use available components to solve those needs. The functionalities of components in use can also be extended with other components to result in the perfect solution.

Benefits of composable commerce on headless

Modern commerce has changed, more technologies are arising, and customers make purchases on more devices. Businesses need to keep up with emerging technologies, competitions, and increasing customer demands. This has resulted in more architectures built upon the headless approach.

Headless commerce is great! Mixing composable commerce on headless is even greater. While headless commerce fixes traditional commerce issues, the composable approach can build on the headless approach. It allows for a more tailored technology stack, specific to business requirements and customer needs.

The combination of composable commerce on headless brings all the amazing benefits of headless tailored specifically for required business and customer needs. This will lead to even more development flexibility, customer satisfaction, and business growth.

Applications and webhooks

Developers can consume APIs and build integrations or applications. They can also use applications built by third-party services (like Commerce Layer's order management system). Real-time information can also be shared between applications via a webhook (also called a web callback or HTTP push API).

With the composable commerce approach, developers can create multiple sales channels, build integrations, integrate third-party services, exchange information between applications, and much more. Each functionality of the application will solve a particular business need.

Getting started with composable commerce

If you are already implementing Jamstack, microservices, API-first, serverless, and headless technologies, you are on the path to composable commerce. If you are not, you need to understand your business needs and utilize available packaged business capabilities (PBCs) to solve those needs. You can also build your own components that solve those business needs and rent to other businesses.

With composable commerce, businesses will select from a pool of available best-of-breed applications. They can add, replace, or remove certain capabilities based on any business requirement. This will result in the effective provision of personalized and satisfactory experiences for customers and, in turn, revenue growth.

How Commerce Layer supports composable commerce

One way of achieving a true omnichannel experience is by using API technologies. Commerce Layer allows users to develop with our commerce APIs, integrate with any third-party service or application as required, and combine applications to provide customers with a robust experience.

Components are built on open standards and can be scaled independently with ease without disrupting other components in use. This will also reduce costs accrued from maintaining services and components.

Commerce Layer implements the OAuth 2.0 protocol to manage the client's authorization. This allows users to share real-time information, build integrations with different authentication flows and permissions based on the use case. Our commerce APIs allow developers to solve several ecommerce businesses' needs easily.