What is Composable Commerce?

Many of today's forward thinking businesses are looking at composable commerce to allow them to innovate at speed. Composable commerce allows you to build agile, flexible and scalable platforms required to support fast moving digital businesses and develop truly customer centric commerce experiences. 

So, what is composable commerce? And how could it help your business?

What is composable commerce?

Composable commerce is the approach of selecting best-of-need components and combining or ‘composing’ them into an application built for the needs of your business. 

Composable commerce achieves this through composing Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs). PBCs are software components that represent a well-defined business capability, functionality that is recognisable by a business user. For example, a PBC could be search, content (CMS), payment, or cart functionality.

PBCs are often provided by 3rd party vendors, who provide best-of-breed or best-of-need (i.e. they fit the specific needs of the business) products. Each vendor specialises in providing a specific service and doing it well. This is different from the traditional monolithic commerce platform that often provides standard one size fits all functionality.  

Various omnichannel experiences or frontends can then consume the combined functionality of this composed commerce platform. Allowing truly customer-centric applications, providing a common shopper experience in-store and online.

What are the benefits of composable commerce?

The agility and flexibility needed to support fast moving digital businesses. You have the ability to find the vendor that provides the best functionality for your uniquely complex business. This new functionality can then be incorporated into your composable platform. 

No single vendor lock in. The ability to choose the best vendors to work with, then change or bring in new vendors as your business evolves over time. Moving to composable commerce eliminates your risk of buying basic out-of-the-box capabilities and gaining more control over the functionality and performance of your application.

Modular approach. Each PCB can have a different development and release cycle, independent of others, eliminating risk. It allows each business unit to be in control of their changes and new features allowing them to innovate independently.

Open standards. Built on open standards, integration patterns and extensibility models, composable commerce encourages easy integrations and customisation.

Customer centric commerce experiences. The ability to build multiple headless customer experiences utilising the services of the composable platform. Cabiri has helped customers develop websites, native apps, in-store apps and POS experiences all using the same commerce services. Each one of these can use different technologies and provide different experiences, but they all use the same commerce services.

Important Definitions:

Headless: Headless commerce is the practice of separating the frontend part of your commerce solution (the customers experience) and the backend services (checkout, catalog, payment). A confusing term as there is always a head or multiple heads. This is an important element of a composable solution as it is the heads that consume the services of your composable platform.

MACH architecture: (Microservices, API-First, Cloud-Native, and Headless) MACH is a marketing term that brings all of these flexible technologies together and is a key component of a composable solution.

• Microservices - Individual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed, and managed.

• API-first - When all functionality is exposed via API.

• Cloud-native - SaaS that leverages the cloud, beyond storage and hosting, including elastic scaling and automatically updating.

• Headless - Front-end presentation is decoupled from back-end logic. The programming language and framework are agnostic.

Migrating to a composable solution?

Depending where you are on your digital journey will define the starting point of the migration to a composable solution. If starting on a tightly coupled monolithic platform then the first step would be to develop a headless solution. The monolith can then be broken down into modules with clear APIs. Over time and dependent on business drivers and requirements these modules can be replaced by third party PCBs and the beginnings of a composable solution. This migration is often called the “strangulation” approach, where you chip away at the monolith.

Business drivers for the migration could be a better search experience, a loyalty scheme or improved recommendations. All of these can be incorporated into the migration to composable.

The alternative migration approach is to take a brand or region and relaunch it with a fully composable solution. This allows the new technologies and business practices to be bedded in within the organisation before key brands or regions are migrated. These are not just technology changes, but often business processes will have to adapt and incorporate new functionality.

How can Cabiri help with your composable project?

Cabiri have successfully delivered composable projects for a number of years now, even before the term was first used by Gartner in 2020. We have strangled multiple monoliths in a variety of ways and we have also built new completely composable commerce experiences for our customers. Wherever you are on your digital journey we have probably been there and can advise on solutions and the roadmap to your composable solution.

Cabiri are experts in bringing the PCBs together to build a coherent commerce solution. We have years of experience doing this and can assist you in the best ways of composing these elements and building engaging commerce experiences.

Our composable solutions are always part of a modern CI/CD workflow with monitoring, alerting and analytics. These all have to be in place to allow software changes to be deployed with speed and confidence and for the platform to be flexible and agile.   

Cabiri have developed their own composable accelerator, Ashiba. This contains all the building blocks for a modern composable solution. A headless frontend, connectors to many PCBs, cloud agnostic, with business logic extension points and CI/CD workflows, monitoring, alerting and analytics. Please get in touch for more info.