What is Composable Commerce?

Composable commerce is a modular web or native application ecosystem that federates business centric tools under one unified platform, designed by a business to suit their exact needs. This is accomplished by leveraging a dynamic collection or "stack" of microservices that each provide specific business capabilities, enabling development that is both flexible and scalable.

Gartner, an industry leader in data insights for business, recently included composable applications in their Top 12 Strategic Technology Trends for 2022:

"Composable applications are built from business-centric modular components. Composable applications make it easier to use and reuse code, accelerating the time to market for new software solutions and releasing enterprise value." (Source:https://www.gartner.ca/en/information-technology/insights/top-technology-trends)

Gartner also made a bold prediction in their 2020 report titled “Composable Commerce Must Be Adopted for the Future of Applications”:

"By 2023, organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation.”

More simply stated, by leveraging best-in-breed development solutions, composable commerce is a roadmap towards scaling and realizing higher revenue for your business.

How Is Composable Commerce Different?

The current state of online commerce finds many small businesses reaching for monolithic platform solutions like Shopify, WooCommerce or Squarespace Commerce. These are all great options, but if you plan on growing within your industry, they can be costly to scale and don't provide much flexibility when you decide to provide different business offerings.

Composable commerce is different. Rather than pay for one specific pre-composed solution that may not provide all of the solutions your business needs, you work with development teams to "compose" or design a specific application architecture wherein API-driven microservices work in combination to achieve all of your business goals.

Composable commerce is built on 4 main principles:

• Utilization of microservices to enable agile, flexible development
• An API-first architecture crucial for accelerated development and scalability
• Cloud Native service allowing your team to reduce operational dependencies
• Headless product / content management, decoupling the frontend presentation layer from the backend commerce engine

How Can Composable Commerce Help Achieve My Business Goals?

When you sign up for a Shopify store, you're offered a selection of plans with various features. If you have a developer, you can use Shopify as a headless PIM (product information manager) as well as utilize their "Buy" button - which gives you the capability of processing transactions using Shopify's checkout system. This is all fine and good, but if you are already paying a developer, why would you fork out an extra $9 USD ($11.43 CAD) just to be locked into a predefined product model? You could just have your developer leverage any headless CMS (content management system) or PIM and build you a custom cart with using an API from Stripe or Square, to name just two of many. Of course, you can also have a Shopify hosted store built on a variety of existing templates. For this, the most basic plan will cost you $29 USD (nearly $40 CAD, not including your custom branded domain), per month. Now, you still need to do all the work to set up the site and once it's done, you're still locked into specific functionality determined by the platform, with most quality plugins costing additional money, unless you have your own developer. And that once again brings up the question, if you have a developer, why would you lock yourself into a structured platform where every solution costs you more and more when you could have a custom developed solution?

This is the entire concept behind composable commerce - freeing yourself from the restrictions of monolithic commerce platforms, taking those sky-high recurring fees that are statically set, ensuring you pay a specific amount regardless of your site usage and putting that money towards a bespoke commerce architecture that solves your specific problems, paying only for what you actually use.

How Can Adrenalize Help Me With Composable Commerce Solutions?

We're glad you asked! Our very first project as a company was an eCommerce site for a client who wanted to use a commerce platform like Shopify - that is until we sat down and explained the benefits of composable commerce. It's been well over a year now since building their site and their cost to develop a composable commerce solution that achieves their every goal is now less than what they would have paid during that time to meet their needs with Shopify. That means they now only pay for their domain, API usage rates and transaction handling fees - a savings of nearly $100 / month!

But wait, there's more! By utilizing an SaaS (software-as-a-service) payment processing API to power their online sales channels, they are now able to scale their business by adding POS (point of sale) equipment at their storefront and have it connect to the same inventory system that powers their online commerce solution. Shopify allows that functionality also, but at a much larger cost and with much less flexibility in terms of available equipment.

Composable commerce is our bread and butter and we want to see you succeed in realizing your business goals. Get in touch with us today to learn how we can help transform your business today!