If the word “replatforming” strikes a note of fear in your heart, that’s because it’s a bear. A big, burdensome bear. For that reason, many companies migrated to headless commerce.
But what happens when a company outgrows even highly scalable headless models?
That’s the moment when eCommerce companies often look to composable commerce — going deeper into process customization with an emphasis on modular architecture, open ecosystems and the linking of select business-centric components into a unified solution.
“Headless really referred to a time when the eCommerce platform was abstracted by [application programming interfaces (APIs)],” Elastic Path CEO Jamus Driscoll told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster. “You could run any experience on top of the APIs. What headless didn’t do, and what composable does, is it allows a level of control below” what he called “monolith commerce platforms.”
Speaking with Webster, Driscoll said that in 2022, delivering great eCommerce experiences at scale requires a reimagining of engagement across various channels and using systems that provide a personalized control over the end-to-end buyer journey.
Consulting with clients through the pandemic, Elastic Path was told repeatedly that the digital shift has rapidly evolved into something greater than the sum of its parts. Companies have found themselves shifting constantly to stay ahead of innovations in merchandising, marketing and customer experience.
“Digital is no longer a channel,” he said. “It’s the medium by which we’re going to be driving our business now and for the foreseeable future.”
See also: Composable Commerce Firm Elastic Path Raises $60M
Keeping the ‘Brand Touch’
If digital is no longer a channel, and is instead a necessary “medium” for businesses, the challenge shifts to maintaining brand feel while differentiating among countless similar businesses.
“Every experience with every consumer for every brand requires the brand touch,” Driscoll said. “That’s one of the other major changes that we’ve seen over time. It used to be just getting a shop online and selling you were going to expose your business to 25% to 35% growth — now, it’s about, ‘Great, I’m online, but how do I differentiate?’”
He cited the example of an Elastic Path customer that sells windows, noting the big-ticket nature of actual window shopping — that is, buying windows — isn’t a job for headless or other commerce platforms lacking in customization enabling, say, a timely handoff to save a sale.
“That buyer often wants to get an associate from the brand to come over and measure and make sure the windows are right,” Driscoll said. “A digital experience which started on a website now jumps to a remote selling agent who can pick up your experience in flight, measure your windows, perhaps make recommendations and then fulfill it online.”
It illustrates how composable can handle transactions more deftly, given that these platforms are modular, tailored to fit product, buyer, competition — the whole nine. As composable advances, it’s turning ideas into new solutions for constantly evolving needs.
“What was previously an idea that maybe one day we can do is now a reality,” Driscoll said. “We’ve seen a confluence of both a prioritization reset, as well as technologies advancing to the point where now aspirations that previously had to stay on the whiteboard are now jumping off the whiteboard and into reality.”
Read more: ‘Composable Commerce’ Enables Shift to Digital 3.0
Benefits of a ‘Best for Me’ Architecture
With the focus on greater control over what’s transpiring in digital channels, Webster asked if companies that have relied on platform seamlessness are ready to take it on themselves.
“For brands that have been in digital for, call it five years, they’re ready for more control,” Driscoll said. “Provided that you’re a business that’s been online for a little bit and you know what your vision is and what you want to achieve, then you’re ready to take the reins.”
That then becomes a matter of how brands calculate return on investment (ROI) on tech investments.
Conceding that different brands and sectors have varying ROI calculus — often revolving around a twin axis of growth and ease of use — he said, “With a composable commerce approach, you’re choosing best-in-breed components from across an ecosystem.”
This higher state of customizable control is resulting in “top line growth as a result of a brand executing its own vision, and bottom-line savings in terms of its ability to drive the architecture with selection of the components that are right for them,” he said.
Whether “more control” means at the experiential layer or beneath, in certain elements of business logic or process, Driscoll said brands should be clear on this before proceeding.
“You’re getting what’s typically called a ‘best for me’ architecture,” he said. “In that ‘best for me’ architecture, the brand has control to select all the components to decide if they want to change search or change the cart or change the catalog.”
Related: 60% of Merchants Enable Digital Profiles for Consumers
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