There is little doubt that we are entering a new era of digital experiences and that the commerce systems and solutions required to support them must also evolve to keep up.
This year has been a breakthrough year for online retail. In the previous 18 months, we’ve seen tremendous growth, driven by a radical shift in how companies and their customers connect, a combination of online and offline, and a huge need to innovate and be agile. “The new normal” no longer suffices, and we’re entering a new era of digital experiences, which necessitates a shift in the commerce platforms and solutions that support them.
It took just seven minutes for Volkswagen to sell out their entire stock of limited edition cars in Brazil when they unveiled a new series. Marketing, commerce, IT, and sales departments face a new set of issues due to the rapid evolution of digital commerce.
How can the platforms cope with the Cambrian explosion of digital touchpoints and purchasing journeys that we’re seeing now? Openness to change and to provide new building blocks are the first steps in fostering innovation and interoperability in the first place.
What is Composable Commerce?
Composable Commerce is simply developing the entire business piece-by-piece, encompassing numerous separate services and tools that are integrated to deliver the complete marketing, sales, and service lifecycle, whilst maintaining the customer experience and business needs at the forefront.
Composable commerce is an example of this concept pertaining to eCommerce infrastructure, according to Gartner’s definition of “Composable Enterprise.” Creating a company that can be broken down into smaller, more manageable pieces is referred to as the composable business model by Gartner. There are four central tenets that underpin the composable business model:
- Through discovery, more time is saved.
- Modularity provides greater adaptability.
- Enhanced leadership via orchestration
- Autonomy fosters resilience.
Composable business, according to Gartner, has three building blocks:
Consistent, methodical thinking prevents the dwindling of one’s originality. Anything may be broken down into its parts. What to compose and when to compose should be guided by the ideas of modularity, autonomy, orchestration, and discovery when combined with composable thinking.
The foundation of your organization’s adaptability and resilience is provided by a flexible business architecture. In the end, it’s all about the framework and the goal in mind. Using these capabilities, you can build the structure of your firm.
It’s time to embrace a new generation of technologies that can be easily combined. It’s necessary to check the Composable Commerce trends 2021 like MACH principles – microservices, cloud-native and headless and update the software development kits (SDKs). In the near future, AI will be fully integrated into commerce. In fact, Amazon’s Anticipatory shipping is sending products without even ordering just by analyzing shopping patterns.
A Progressive Web App, store-specific clienteling capabilities, or an omnichannel inventory capability for “purchase online, pick up in-store” might all be part of a brand’s composable strategy to speed up their site and make it more responsive on mobile devices. I can’t wait to see what the future holds!
Developers, as with many new developments in technology, are the first to make use of APIs and advance the concept of headless commerce. They create with it. Salesforce Commerce Cloud handled one billion API requests from 54 countries in the holiday season of 2021, indicating the breadth of innovation taking place. Low- and no-code technologies will eventually put the trend toward modularity in enterprise solutions in the hands of business users.
As well as offering building blocks, though, composability has a lot more to offer. Composability is all about the connective tissue and end-to-end platform basis, without which maintaining a complex architecture through time is like supporting an unstable Jenga tower.
Integrated consumer information systems that can connect even the most complicated purchasing journeys, API-based methods to application and data integration, and a vibrant alliance environment to facilitate co-creation are all needed to scale across complex businesses. As a foundation for future growth and development, it is critical to invest in these competencies now.
Understandably, creating a world-class digital commerce experience can be daunting. For many firms, getting the proper level of granularity in their digital infrastructures is a challenge, according to Gartner. The management costs of a “distributed monolith” style (a separate microservice for every tiny feature) are high, yet a loosely connected architecture is essential for agility and adaptability. The Holy Grail for many companies engaging in digital commerce today is defining and attaining this “techquilibrium” of “only enough tech to get the job done.” Furthermore, no two customers will have the same experience.
A full platform solution that is both adaptable and designed for interoperability, as well as the services and assistance to truly make it yours, is what Cooperative Computing is all about. Our clients were able to quadruple their innovation speed while lowering the total cost of ownership.
It’s impossible to foresee what new digital touchpoints or retail models will emerge in the years to come. A single fact remains: the digital commerce infrastructure of tomorrow will be constructed in a fashion that is modular and interconnected. Brands, developers, and customers can all look forward to an exciting future with this vast technology.
