Putting composable commerce into practice? With this approach you quickly create business value.

A lot is happening in the world at the moment, which makes doing business uncertain, both offline and online. This results in the short term receiving more focus from companies small and large, while digital transformation requires a long-term vision. Without a clear business case, investments in e-commerce and innovation are put on hold, while you can make a difference with innovation right now. In this article you can read how to take the right steps with composable commerce and quickly create business value.

E-commerce growth has declined and physical store visits are increasing again, according to Thuiswinkel.org. Not only big Tech companies such as Facebook and Amazon are cutting staff, but also bol.com and Messagebird. 2023 is uncertain for companies due to war, crisis and looming recession on the European continent. On the other hand, the digitisation trend continues and companies cannot fully apply the handbrake on innovation and development. Even with a promising approach such as composable commerce, the question we’re often asked is: nice, but what does it actually yield? When can I expect results?

Short-term composable commerce

The beauty of composable commerce is that it allows you to solve short-term challenges without losing sight of the big picture. With composable you break functionalities that were once stacked in a monolith into practical, separate components. You determine the area where and the speed at which you do this. So you don’t have to replace everything at once. You assess where the pains and opportunities lie in your current setup — even if this is an all-in-one monolith — and address them in a composable way.

Is the conversion from search very low, for example? Then implement a mature search engine, measure the added value and evaluate whether you want to continue with this or not. Don’t have any product recommendations yet? Implement a dedicated product recommendation engine for suggestions during the customer journey (on site, email marketing, etc.) as a Proof of Concept and measure the added value.

Especially when revenue growth stagnates and costs increase, the practical approach of composable is pleasant. However, the big challenge is to efficiently put composable commerce into practice in the long term so that the benefits can be optimally exploited.

Start structured with composable in four steps

Before you start making changes to your IT infrastructure, you first need to know where you are now and what the dot is on the horizon. That is where a commerce Assessment & Recommendations process helps. This process enables you to provide insight into and subsequently realise your future e-commerce architecture, organisation and processes in a structured manner.

Why are you doing this?
Start with the most important questions: why exactly are you doing this? What do you want to achieve? Have a digital strategy with clear objectives and goals that also take into account customer needs and the competitive landscape. Then identify the metrics you will use to measure success and progress.

Where are you now?
The next step is to understand where you are now. Look at the organisation, the processes and the current technology stack. Before embarking on a composable roadmap, be honest with yourself about your organisation’s digital maturity. Are you, as an organisation, sufficiently capable of effectively managing existing applications functionally and technically? How about new ones? Do you have the right people and skills on board, and is there sufficient cooperation and coordination between business and application owners? Can you respond quickly enough to changes?

To focus on revenue growth and efficiency, it is advisable to take an outside in approach through the customer journey. First gain insight into all the different touchpoints — both online and offline. Then link these to the underlying processes and technology stack. What does it yield and what does it cost? Are there similarities or do you deviate from your segment in the market? Is that a USP or a historic choice and what does it mean? This allows you to identify the pain points in the current processes and architecture. Often these can be divided into two different dimensions:

1. Improving the customer experience that can increase sales. What can you do to create more orders and/or fuller baskets? Where is the best opportunity to look at current customer behaviour and market characteristics? What happens in the analytics funnel, where is the unnecessary drop off? Do you have qualitative insights that help you further? Is it easier to attract new customers, have existing customers buy more often, more or different products, etc.
2. More efficient processes within the operation that can save costs, such as: fulfillment, customer service, content management, merchandising, online marketing, application management and development.

Where are you going?
With this baseline you can go to the third step. You determine the ideal long-term organisation, supporting processes and composable technology landscape. Then you identify the gaps with the current situation. Where are the greatest opportunities? What are the quick fixes, workarounds and desired end state and what does this mean? For example, does content management in your commerce platform still have a future? What can you reuse from your current monolithic platform? Investigate whether the additional solutions you are looking for exist in the market, gain insight into the possibilities and costs to test your plans against reality. Make the business case for the separate parts. An important condition to keep you sharp: can the specialists with the right experience and programming knowledge that you would need actually be found?

How will you get there?
As a final step, you create a roadmap based on the business cases. The roadmap should prioritise the functionalities that have the most business value and create impact on customer value. The metrics previously mentioned to measure progress and success can be further refined and detailed to be part of quarterly goals and evaluations. The composable scenario differs per organisation, but a number of routes are regularly used in practice.

The three most common scenarios for composable commerce

• From monolith to headless, for example because the monolith has substandard performance or offers too few options for a distinctive customer experience. You can introduce a new front-end that connects to the existing commerce engine. In addition, adding a headless CMS increases the possibilities to efficiently manage and expand the customer experience. Consider, for example, adding a blog or richer product pages with additional content, better speed and SEO, but also to enable your internal team to work more efficiently. The first business case for composable then is to replace the front-end of the monolith.
• Introduce composable in phases. Completely replatforming from a monolithic solution to composable is often a large project with a long lead time and associated costs and risks. That is why organisations are increasingly opting for a step-by-step approach that achieves results quickly. Frequently recurring topics are the customer experience (search & merchandising, promotions, content management, subscriptions & localisation) and operational efficiency (product information management (PIM), order management (OMS), digital asset management (DAM), marketplaces and the ecommerce engine). A often seen first goal is to replace the standard search engine with a search & merchandising solution that provides benefits quickly.
• Go composable from the get-go. The final scenario is to dive into composable from scratch. Replatform your monolith with the best components for front-end, commerce and content management, quickly followed by search and merchandising. This requires a substantial investment in advance, but that is ultimately cheaper than gradually replacing the infrastructure. This scenario is interesting, for example, for a webshop that is experiencing rapid international growth. The longer you wait to move to a flexible infrastructure that allows you to scale, the more difficult it will become. By launching in a small market first or phasing the go-live, you reduce the risk of this approach.

Composable commerce for the short and long term

it is possible to start with composable regardless of the situation your organisation finds itself in. It’s not bad at all to make it small and just start somewhere. The lessons you learn as a company will help you with the next steps. And if you need to go faster: make sure you don’t skip any steps and that careful analysis and interim coordination and adjustment takes place.