How to Build Flexible Composable Commerce Systems That Scale with Your Business

Current enterprises need flexible commerce solutions — solutions that can adapt, evolve, and transform in response to rapidly evolving business demands.

However, achieving this kind of agility can be challenging for many ecommerce businesses with their current tech stack. Historically, many retailers have built their online stores using traditional monolithic ecommerce platforms, which not only hinder their ability to deliver cutting-edge shopping experiences but also limit what teams can accomplish.

The solution? Composable commerce.

As of March 2023, 72% of US retailers had already implemented composable solutions, and an additional 21% planned to adopt them over the following year. This dramatic shift toward composable solutions reflects a fundamental change in how businesses approach their technology infrastructure. Undoubtedly, the ecommerce landscape is shifting away from legacy technologies and toward a more flexible, modular technology strategy.

In this article, we'll explore why adopting a composable commerce approach can empower online retailers (as well as its potential challenges) and how BigCommerce can help you build a future-proof commerce solution.

What is composable commerce?

Composable commerce represents a paradigm shift in how businesses build and manage their digital commerce experiences. At its heart, it's about flexibility, choice, and adaptability. This approach, formalized by Gartner, represents a strategic departure from traditional all-in-one platforms, enabling businesses to tailor their technology stacks by selecting and integrating best-of-breed solutions from various vendors to meet their unique business requirements.

The four key tenets of composable commerce.

1. Modular: Each component of the system, representing a specific business capability (like search, cart or payments), can be independently selected, deployed, updated, and interchanged.

2. Open: Applications and services are designed for seamless integration with other applications through open standards, APIs, and event-driven architectures, preventing vendor lock-in.

3. Flexible: Businesses can create unique, highly tailored commerce experiences by choosing and combining best-of-breed solutions that precisely match their specific operational and customer-facing needs.

4. Business-Centric: The modular architecture empowers businesses to quickly and cost-effectively respond to evolving market demands, customer expectations, and new business opportunities, placing strategy before technology constraints.

What is the value of packaged business capabilities (PBCs)?

At the core of composable ecommerce are Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs) — pre-configured, API-first software components or modules that deliver specific business functions. Think of these as specialized building blocks that businesses can select and combine to create their ideal commerce platform.

Common PBCs businesses might select and combine in a composable commerce platform include:

Product information management (PIM)

• Function: Centralizes and manages all product data (descriptions, specifications, images, videos, translations, etc.), ensuring consistency across all channels.

• Example: A retailer uses a dedicated PIM to manage detailed product attributes for thousands of SKUs, then pushes this data to their website, mobile app, and marketplaces.

Shopping cart and checkout

• Function: Manages the items a customer intends to buy, calculates totals, and facilitates the process of finalizing the purchase. These PBCs can be highly customizable for a better user experience.

• Example: A brand chooses a checkout PBC known for its high conversion rates and customizable one-page checkout flow.

Promotions and discounts engine

• Function: Manages complex rules for applying discounts, coupons, bundle offers and loyalty rewards.

• Example: A retailer implements a sophisticated promotions PBC to run targeted "buy one, get one free" offers or tiered discounts based on customer segments.

Search and discovery

• Function: Provides intelligent, fast, and relevant product search capabilities, often including features like faceted search, auto-complete, and typo tolerance.

• Example: An ecommerce site integrates a specialized AI-powered search PBC to offer personalized search results and recommendations based on user behavior.

This flexibility means you can choose your preferred technologies for each specific business need and then assemble them into a custom, agile, and scalable tech stack. If one component becomes outdated or a better option becomes available, you can replace it without needing to dismantle the entire structure.

Simplifies complex systems.

Especially if you're a larger enterprise retailer, chances are you're dealing with some complex systems in your tech stack. Luckily, PBCs help streamline the management of intricate systems by breaking them down into modular, self-contained components. This approach simplifies integration and scalability, enabling you to manage complex ecommerce environments with ease and efficiency.

Beyond simplification, this modular approach also enhances visibility across operations.

Reporting and dashboard-friendly.

Since PBCs integrate seamlessly across your tech stack, you can consolidate reporting and dashboard capabilities across your entire system into a single unified view. This provides you with actionable insights and comprehensive data points, enabling better decision-making across your entire ecommerce ecosystem.

Instead of siloed data, a marketing manager evaluating a promotion can use PBCs to view a single dashboard that displays email click-through rates, redemption rates, average order value (AOV), customer lifetime value (LTV), and inventory impact. This holistic view reveals true profitability and channel effectiveness, enabling informed decisions to optimize marketing spend and ROI.

This unified visibility naturally fosters better collaboration across teams.

Inspires collaboration between teams.

With PBCs, you can drive impactful business benefits through company-wide innovation. Greater levels of agility enable teams to pivot swiftly — when new ideas emerge, they can be quickly implemented without the potential for widespread disruption. Because each modular PBC can be developed, tested and deployed independently by specialized teams, cross-team dependencies are significantly reduced, dramatically speeding up deployment cycles for new features or updates.

Composable commerce vs. traditional commerce

To fully appreciate the advantages of composable commerce, it's essential to understand how it differs from the traditional approaches most businesses currently use. Traditional monolithic commerce platforms are all-in-one solutions where all functionalities (e.g., frontend storefront, product catalog, order management, payments, marketing tools) are tightly coupled and delivered by a single vendor within a single codebase.

Think of a pre-built, all-inclusive playset. You get everything in one box, designed to work together. However, if you don't like one part of the playset or want to add something new that isn't compatible, you're often stuck or face significant modification challenges.

How adopting composable commerce can improve your online store

Given these architectural differences, let's examine how composable commerce translates into practical improvements for your online store. As technology evolves and retail finds new ways to innovate, businesses must be poised to react quickly to (and even anticipate) changing customer expectations.

Composable commerce's modular approach provides businesses with the agility needed to deliver best-in-class experiences at speed and scale — and differentiate themselves from an increasingly growing number of competitors.

Flexibility and agility.

Composable commerce empowers businesses to select best-in-breed vendors and customize their technology stack to precisely meet unique requirements, avoiding the limitations of single-platform solutions. This flexibility enables rapid adaptation to market changes and customer demands.

Build personalized end-to-end customer experiences.

Customer journey touchpoints have expanded from "in-store" and "online" to social channels, marketplaces, IoT devices, and more. Shoppers interact with brands in new contexts and media. Building a user experience with these factors in mind requires a level of flexibility that is not possible or feasible through a monolithic system.

For instance, imagine a customer browsing specific hiking boots on a brand's website (interacting with the PIM and Search PBCs), then later using the brand's mobile app to check store inventory for those boots (Inventory PBC). Through modular integrations, this cross-channel history allows a Personalization Engine PBC to trigger a targeted email (via an Email Marketing PBC) a day later. This won’t just remind them about the boots, but will also suggest complementary items like waterproof socks or a local hiking trail guide pulled from a CMS PBC, creating a highly relevant and cohesive journey that encourages conversion.

Respond rapidly to changing business needs.

Under a monolithic system, any change to functionality can be a complex process. On the other hand, composable commerce enables you to address only the functionality you need to grow, without the risk of impacting other business capabilities within your ecosystem. This agility enables businesses to remain competitive and responsive to changing market conditions.

Reduce customer acquisition costs.

Due to increasingly saturated advertising channels and shifting consumer perceptions of advertising, customer acquisition costs are on the rise. A modular approach, however, enables agile integration with the technologies necessary to build lasting customer relationships and engagement.

For example, businesses can seamlessly integrate a best-of-breed loyalty program (PBC) to reward repeat purchases and cultivate advocacy or connect sophisticated marketing automation tools that leverage real-time commerce data (such as cart abandonment or purchase history) to deliver highly personalized communication campaigns.

Furthermore, deep integration with a central CRM PBC ensures a unified view of every customer interaction, empowering teams to nurture relationships more effectively and increase lifetime value, thereby mitigating the impact of high acquisition costs.

Scalability and innovation.

Composable commerce ensures that a business's technology stack can expand in tandem with its growth and adapt to future needs without being locked into a restrictive system. This scalability supports both current operations and future expansion plans.

Avoid vendor lock-in.

Monolithic software vendors often limit their clients' flexibility. Discover a better product from a different company? You'll have to wait until your contract expires — or buckle up for a potentially expensive re-platforming process.

However, because composable commerce leverages open standards and well-defined APIs, individual components can communicate and integrate regardless of their provider, significantly reducing dependency on any single vendor. With its modular design, you can easily swap these components in and out as needed to suit your specific business requirements.

MACH architecture: The foundation of composable commerce

The technical foundation that enables composable commerce adheres to established industry standards, known as the MACH architecture. In 2020, a community of developers formed the MACH Alliance to help enterprises navigate the current technology landscape, advocating for open technology ecosystems.

MACH represents four key principles that define truly composable solutions:

• Microservices-based: The building blocks of your tech stack, which offer a decentralized, decoupled, approach to meeting individual business requirements.

• API-first: All commerce functionality is connected and accessible via APIs, providing seamless integration and communication between systems.

• Cloud-native:  Fully leverages the cloud for speed, performance, and security, delivering fast and reliable experiences to your customers.

• Headless: Decouple the frontend presentation layer from the backend commerce engine.

Is composable commerce right for your business?

Understanding these advantages helps frame the next critical question: How do you determine if composable commerce aligns with your business needs? Composable commerce offers significant advantages, but it's not a universal solution. Deciding whether to adopt this approach requires a careful evaluation of your business's specific needs, goals, capabilities and overall digital maturity.

How to evaluate if composable commerce is a fit.

Businesses should ask themselves several critical questions:

1. Are current platform limitations hindering growth or innovation? If your existing monolithic platform makes it slow, costly or impossible to implement new features, personalize experiences or enter new markets, composable offers a path forward.

2. Do you need to create highly differentiated customer experiences? If "out-of-the-box" isn't enough and you aim to build unique user journeys or integrate cutting-edge technologies (like advanced AI personalization or AR try-ons), composable provides the necessary flexibility.

3. Are agility and speed-to-market critical competitive factors? If you need to respond to market changes rapidly, launch new products or channels quickly, or A/B test new functionalities without disrupting the entire system, composability is key.

4. Do you have specific, critical business capabilities that require best-in-class solutions? For instance, if complex product configurations, sophisticated global tax calculations, or highly specialized search are vital, a composable approach allows you to pick top-tier PBCs for those functions.

5. Are you looking to avoid vendor lock-in and future-proof your tech stack? If you want the freedom to swap out components as better solutions emerge or as your business needs evolve, composable is designed for this.

Considerations for digital maturity, resources, and existing tech stack.

1. Digital maturity: A composable approach often requires a shift in mindset towards API-first development, agile practices, and managing a multi-vendor ecosystem. Teams need to be prepared for some disruption.

Equally important is having adequate resources to support this architectural shift.

1. Resources: While you might save on unused monolithic features, implementing and managing a composable stack requires skilled developers (either in-house or agency partners) who are proficient in integrations and modern commerce architectures. There's an "orchestration" overhead to consider.

Finally, your current technology landscape will influence the implementation strategy.

1. Existing tech stack: Evaluate if a complete "rip and replace" is necessary or if a phased approach is more feasible. Composable can allow you to update incrementally.

While careful evaluation of digital maturity, resources and the existing tech stack is vital, powerful business drivers, such as the need to rapidly meet evolving customer expectations, overcome innovation barriers imposed by legacy systems, and accelerate speed to market, are increasingly compelling organizations to adopt composable commerce.

Composable commerce challenges to consider

While composable commerce offers significant advantages, successful implementation requires navigating several key challenges. Let's explore the primary considerations that businesses should anticipate.

Managing multiple vendors.

There's one advantage to a monolithic platform: you only have to deal with one vendor. Negotiating terms of enterprise subscriptions, reviewing terms and conditions, and integrating with the software — it takes significantly longer to do this when you're considering multiple vendors versus just a few. But with a flexible composable ecosystem, you can streamline your vendor management.

Requires complex digital maturity levels.

Composable commerce is a complex business model that requires a digitally mature organization and deep, cross-functional collaboration among sophisticated developers. However, organizations shouldn't be discouraged by these complex requirements. For teams starting with lower digital maturity, practical readiness steps can include:

1. Starting with a pilot project: Identify one significant pain point (e.g., an underperforming search function or inflexible promotions engine) and replace just that component with a best-of-breed PBC. This first step allows the team to learn and build confidence with a manageable scope.

2. Partnering with experienced agencies or consultants: Leverage external expertise to guide the initial strategy, vendor selection, and integration processes.

3. Investing in training and upskilling: Provide resources for internal teams to learn about API-first architectures, microservices concepts, and the specific technologies being considered.

4. Focusing on PBCs with strong vendor support and clear documentation: Choose initial solutions from vendors who offer excellent onboarding and readily available help to ease the learning curve.

5. Adopting a phased approach to modernization: Gradually introduce composable elements rather than attempting a complete, immediate overhaul of the existing tech stack.

By taking these steps, organizations can incrementally build their capabilities and understanding, making the transition to a more composable future a manageable evolution rather than an overwhelming revolution.

Investing in infrastructure and monitoring tools.

Switching to a composable architecture may require changes to the infrastructure and tools you need to monitor your various microservices. Be aware of these changes and factor them into the total cost of ownership; develop relationships with partners who can support your growing needs.

Implementing DIY control panels.

A pure microservices or completely headless experience requires merchants to build a cohesive user interface on top of other components. Fortunately, a growing ecosystem of third-party solutions, such as Frontend-as-a-Service (FaaS) platforms or composable storefront builders, offers pre-built UI components, templates, and development frameworks specifically designed to connect to various backend services, which can significantly reduce the amount of custom interface development required.

Build a future-proof, composable solution with BigCommerce

For businesses ready to embrace composable commerce, selecting the right platform partner becomes crucial. BigCommerce positions itself as an enterprise-focused platform designed for future readiness. As an active member of the MACH Alliance, BigCommerce fundamentally subscribes to a best-of-breed architectural approach, ensuring businesses have the flexibility and extensibility to assemble a commerce system tailored to their specific operational and customer experience needs.

A significant technical differentiator for BigCommerce is its extensive API coverage, with over 90% of its platform functionality exposed via APIs. This comprehensive API-first design is crucial for enabling seamless integration with various PBCs and building custom frontends, a foundational requirement for any robust composable strategy.

To accelerate development and lower the barrier to entry for composable builds, BigCommerce recently introduced Catalyst. This flexible starter kit is designed to combine the customization potential of headless architectures with the reliability, security, and scalability benefits of a SaaS platform. Catalyst offers a fully integrated storefront reference implementation built on popular technologies, including Next.js and React, providing developers with a pre-wired, end-to-end guest shopper experience connected to the BigCommerce backend.

Composable commerce success stories

The theoretical benefits of composable commerce become tangible when examining real-world implementations. These case studies illustrate how diverse businesses have leveraged BigCommerce to drive digital transformation, boost performance, and enhance the customer experience.

MKM Building Supplies.

Case Study: MKM

MKM Building Supplies, the UK's largest independent brand for builder supplies, embarked on a significant digital transformation project that showcased the blueprint for establishing a robust B2B ecommerce presence. To meet the needs of a younger, mobile-first audience, MKM adopted a MACH-based, headless architecture, enabling the business to build a tailor-made tech stack.

"Using headless technology meant we could make rapid improvements and change directions quickly, adding new features or categories without being limited by the technology," said Andy Pickup, Digital Director at MKM Building Supplies.

TradeTools.

Case Study: TradeTools

TradeTools, Australia's trusted name in industrial tools for trades professionals and DIY enthusiasts, faced escalating costs and complexity on their previous ecommerce platform, Magento. To reduce expenses and enhance performance, TradeTools adopted BigCommerce's headless commerce architecture. This allowed the company to transition smoothly to a more cost-effective, scalable solution without disrupting their customer experience, resulting in significant revenue growth and operational efficiencies.

“We were able to transition the backend to BigCommerce with minimal disruption and no customer confusion, keeping the frontend exactly as it was,” shared Mark Vourlides, Marketing and Ecommerce Manager at TradeTools.

The final word

While a one-size-fits-all solution might be a quick fix for today's roadblocks, a monolithic platform won't sustain businesses in the long term. Businesses require a composable commerce solution that offers the necessary flexibility and agility to respond promptly to unexpected market shifts. 

The right time for adopting a composable architecture is now. Get in touch to discover how BigCommerce can help you unlock flexibility, accelerate innovation, and drive scalable growth for your business.

FAQs about composable commerce