If Composable Commerce is the Future, Where is it?

In June 2020, Gartner released the report: Composable Commerce Must Be Adopted for the Future of Applications. Gartner made bold claims about the adoption of this new technique and how companies that ignore composability will be unable to compete.

A year ago, Gartner was predicting that composability would be one of the biggest tech trends in 2022. They defined composability as creating an organization made from interchangeable building blocks. The modular setup enables a business to rearrange and reorient as needed depending on external (or internal) factors like a shift in customer values or a sudden change in the supply chain or materials.

The overall idea is extremely attractive. The concept was that organizations can architect their commerce solutions in the same way you build a house with Lego. Pieces would be interchangeable allowing the final build to adapt to changing requirements and business needs. Does your Lego creation need a pop of color, swap out some white bricks for vibrant blues or reds. Has product discovery become a huge focus, swap out your existing search for an AI-driven solution with personalization built-in.

When buying all-in-one solutions, compromises were always required. Do you choose the all-in-one with a great checkout, the one offering a better PIM, or focus on the overall cost? With composable commerce organizations, you could have it all, selecting the best possible building blocks to meet their specific needs. This flexibility caused a significant buzz within the market.

Marketing Buzz

From a marketing perspective, composable was the biggest trend of 2022. It quickly became a leading hashtag across social media with every commerce vendor trying to capitalize on the term. Headless vendors started rebranding as composable, some going so far as to rename their product to “Composable Commerce”. Platforms brought in a single search alternative and proudly published press releases about their adoption of composable. Companies made large press releases with terms like composable stack or commerce components.

Whether discussing headless, MACH, or even legacy plugins, vendors attempted to redefine Composable Commerce to better match their products.

This land grab on our collective attention created confusion, with an uptick of content around “What is composable commerce?” each with a slightly different take. While Gartner had clearly defined and outlined the term, this onslaught of free content being pushed and shared across the internet was enough to muddy the market, create uncertainty, and for some, mistrust of all things composable.

Early Adopters

Organizations that cut through the noise and successfully adopted a composable commerce approach were rewarded with increased sales. There are many success stories discussing better website performance and how a bespoke experience was created through best-of-breed APIs.

What is not discussed is the massive 8 to 12-month development project required to build this final solution.

While composable commerce is defined as interchangeable building blocks, just like Lego, the reality was very different. The magic of Lego is the connections, the ability for any person to quickly snap and unsnap pieces is what makes building fun and accessible. Composable commerce can feel more akin to traditional woodworking where you need advanced joinery techniques, a high amount of skill, and a decent budget as pieces cannot be reused once joined. Cloud and Solution Architects are needed to design and help build the many integrations.

When choosing aCMS, Search, or other components, there are many great options available, but they are not interchangeable. Vendors selling components want to highlight their unique features, so each API and integration is different. Making the search or CMS options fully interchangeable would require an API standard, but this would limit products to a base set of commoditized functionalities. This makes them interchangeable but removes the benefit of best-of-breed.

Current State

So, we have marketing teams blurring the concept, most vendors that are only willing to participate in their single piece of the solution, and development firms that are happy to collect payment for massive 12–18-month projects. At the same time, we have early adopters happy with the results and clearly benefiting from the investment.

The problem is that early adopters fall into two categories:

1. Enterprise Companies – where even a small lift in conversion rate can quickly recoup the investment.

   
   

2. Tech-savvy Companies – where the expertise to build the solution is in-house, lowering the project costs.

For Composable Commerce to expand to where the entire industry benefits from this movement, it needs to be accessible to all companies. This means lowering the cost of entry and project timelines to a fraction of where they are today.

Integrations are Key

Much of Lego’s success can be attributed to the connectors between bricks, the injection molded pegs, and the holes that give Lego its satisfying snap. For Composable Commerce, integrations will be the key factor in moving from a niche approach to the default way we build solutions.

Most vendors sell the components meant to be included in the final design. The legacy players are happy to go headless, exclaiming they can be composable if you put in the work. This is not surprising as SaaS vendors are typically paid during the implementation and can benefit from these long project timelines, especially when people settle for built-in functionality while waiting for best-of-breed to be integrated. In addition, analysts, RFPs, and online comparisons have not been adopted to a composable approach, they all still reflect a monolith mindset. They focus on features and functionality instead of placing focus on integrations.

Integrations are clearly key to success but they need to be built from scratch or they get forced into the front end. The only company heavily investing in integrations is Elastic Path.

Impact

This dynamic makes it imperative that technical teams guide any software decisions. As architects and developers, we need to see past the marketing and ensure that the best possible software is selected or risk failed implementation projects and huge technical debt.

We need to see past the excitement of headless and understand that the core requirement of any composable commerce solution is integrations. If 2023 is going to be the year where composability is not just talked about, but easily implemented, we can’t accept vendors who shout technical buzzwords and made-up acronyms. Instead, we need to dig deep into the offering, how the pieces will fit together, and what the implementation time will be.

For companies that lack an internal development team, the best advice is to choose a vendor that fully embraces composable commerce.

This can be difficult to identify, but a few key items to look for include:

• Offering integrations to CMS, Search, etc.
• Does not try to cover all functionality. For example, there is no need to offer a product search if integrations to best-of-breed options are prebuilt.
• The functionality they do offer should stand on its own.
• Can support the entire solution.
• Has comprehensive documentation and training portal.

The last piece of advice is to work with companies that can handle the implementation themselves. Even if you work with another development team, they will have the resources on staff to assist when necessary, and the experience to understand what is needed and how long it should take.

So… where is composable commerce?

Composable Commerce was a major trend of 2022 and will continue into 2023, but should accelerate in adoption. Most conversations will continue to be from vendors offering a single piece of the final solution, but hopefully, as people become informed the misinformation from legacy and headless e-commerce platforms will die back.

There is only one true composable commerce solution currently available on the market, Elastic Path Commerce Cloud, so apart from their clients, companies adopting composable will be tasked with building out the final design.