The term “composable” in software refers to an architecture composed of modular building blocks that can be combined to create customized solutions. A composable commerce approach enables businesses to choose best-in-breed vendors who offer robust functionality for the one thing they do, rather than relying on a one-size-fits-all offering.
According to Gartner, a leading research and advisory company, composable commerce will emerge as an increasingly important approach in the enterprise software space, with ecommerce at the forefront.
Read on to learn what composable commerce is, how it differs from other ecommerce architectures, and its benefits and limitations.
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Composable commerce is a modular, flexible, and configurable approach to building and managing digital commerce solutions. Composable commerce is able to deploy this by using packaged business capabilities (PBCs).
PBCs are the building blocks of the larger solution, all of which are connected via application programming interfaces (APIs). The core capabilities of an ecommerce platform may still be used, but will act more like a “peer” among other solutions than a “core” around which other solutions fit.
Headless commerce was the foundational technology that introduced the separation of front-end presentation layer and back-end functionality. Composable commerce is a further evolution of this technology, as it allows a business to break its commerce platform down into individual services.
In a headless system, the front-end system or components typically rely on a single back end. In a composable system, each business capability is independent. For most enterprises going down the path of composable solutions, a decoupled front end is a great starting point for their journey.
Packaged business capabilities (PBCs) are software components that represent a particular business function. In other words, a PBC serves a specific business capability and is meant to be functionally complete to ensure autonomy. A composable commerce solution is a collection of these PBCs, stitched together using a unifying API. They may be from the same or different vendors.
PBCs are created to align to a business outcome. Examples of PBCs include:
These should be available in a catalog of capabilities both first and third party, for deployment as part of a solution. The benefit of a composable commerce’s plug-and-play architecture is you pick the PBCs that best meet your unique needs and configure them to work together as you see fit.
It’s important to note that PBCs aren’t necessarily microservices. Microservices are the small units of individual programs, whereas PBCs are a compilation of those individual units, working together to serve a specific business purpose for the organization. Packaged business capabilities can themselves be composed of a group of related microservices for a more unified, organized, and maintainable commerce architecture.
Commerce suites were once the pinnacle of ecommerce technology. Dubbed monolithic commerce suites, they offer a ton of commerce-related functions in one single software system. Popular vendors include Oracle, IBM, and SAP.
These suites are often huge and integrate deeply with other elements of digital commerce, such as:
Their goal was to deliver everything in one single suite. This resulted in monolithic structures that depended deeply on each other and were not modular.
Over the past few years, legacy suites have been challenged by present and future commerce. Monolithic suites are complex and require so much maintenance that it’s hard to scale, resulting in high operational costs and low flexibility.
Composable commerce offers a range of benefits to businesses looking to enhance their ecommerce systems. Here are a few ways it can yield greater flexibility, increased profits, and a better user experience:
Composable commerce is more complex than a traditional all-in-one platform. By weighing the following factors, you can decide whether a composable commerce approach aligns with your needs and objectives:
Composable commerce, a term coined by Gartner, refers to an innovative approach to building and deploying ecommerce solutions in which each component of the operating system is independent but integrated. This lets businesses create tailored and personalized ecommerce experiences that can adapt and grow to meet the changing needs of customers and the market.
Composable commerce takes the flexibility and modularity of headless commerce to the next level by offering independence for every component of the commerce operating system. Whereas headless commerce involves decoupling the front and back ends, composable commerce goes even further by enabling businesses to break down each specific business need to an individual software component.
Composable architecture can be considered the software equivalent of building with Lego bricks, where pieces can be combined, swapped out, and recombined to create custom solutions. The composable approach is designed with an API-first strategy, making it easier to integrate with existing systems and processes. This is just the start, and ideally, in the future, composing will be a business user task, not a developer task.
