Composable Commerce 2022: Does it matter and Everything you need to know

Benefits of using Composable Commerce

Now that you know what Composable Commerce is, let’s explore what it can achieve and why you should know it in detail!

Composable commerce is the future of eCom, and it is here to redefine eCommerce capabilities and scalability for growing businesses.

Personalising and customizing your buyer’s journey

The customer’s journey has evolved exponentially in the past few years, and omnichannel touchpoints are the new norm.

Gone are the days when most of the buying decisions used to start with a simple Google search and dominating search engines meant dominating the whole of the industry.

Customer expectations have grown, and social media plays a big role in this. The buying journey of users often starts from social media platforms, emails, and other touchpoints. With an all-in-one solution, you get limited with the customisations for each of these touchpoints.

However, with Composable Commerce, you can bring in different sets of software solutions for each touchpoint and club them together seamlessly. This means you can have a separate:

• CRM to manage customer interactions, including periodic offers, wishes, and other activities
• PIM to manage the products both at the backend and frontend and make changes across all touchpoints from one place and at one time
• OMS to manage the orders and fulfillment
• The payment gateway that gives you the most competitive rates
• and many others

The best part is that all these solutions can come from different vendors, and you won’t be locked in for specific prices from the “main” or “one” vendor.

To understand this with an example, let’s assume your customer wants to browse your products on social media and then place the order for the same on the mobile phone; this process would be completed using two different kinds of software.

You can also automate the next steps of the process if the customer wants to return that particular order to your physical store. The product information will be linked to OMS and PIM and will be updated automatically at every part of the complete journey. You will not have to make manual entries and the:

• Product quantities will be updated automatically
• Total sales figures will be adjusted automatically
• Data will be updated in your analytics software
• and much, much more as per your customizations

Optimize and adapt to changes quickly and effortlessly

Optimizing current processes and channels and adopting new trends in the market is crucial to eCommerce success.

However, implementing a simple new feature like changing the position of products on your store’s search or an offer like BOGO can be a huge task when dealing with traditional CMS systems.

The pandemic showed us that making quick changes in your eCommerce strategy makes all the difference in capturing the growth in the market. Composable Commerce allows you to quickly make changes in one particular division of your business without hampering any other parts.

If a particular change in the cart or the checkout requires you to change your software vendor, you will now have the option to do so. In the future, this also increases the competition among PBC vendors, meaning better and enhanced support for you!

Unparalleled scalability

Scaling your operations has never been easier!

Do you think you have outgrown your current vendor and now have the volumes to negotiate a better price with a “bigger” vendor?

All you must do is make the decision, pick, choose and make the switch. This applies to all parts of the business, including OMS, PIM, Marketing software solutions, and all others.

This also means that you can scale specific divisions in your business while other parts can remain the same.

Save a large part of your expenses

Costing optimizations is one of the best benefits of Composable Commerce.

Traditional, all-in-one eCommerce solution vendors were able to charge a premium price for specific parts of the software because every customer had no option but to get the complete software from that vendor. This, however, is not the case with Composable Commerce.

You can easily negotiate with different vendors and reduce your overall expenditure.

Another part is the reduction in the management costs of operations. It is pretty common for businesses to have custom requirements that are not fulfilled in all-in-one software solutions.

This is especially the case with OMS and PIM software, as every company has different sales and marketing channels, and every company nowadays is leveraging the omnichannel marketing approach.

If your current software does not have the capability that you need to reduce manual work and increase efficiency, you can switch to different software and automate the majority of the processes.

This also means that you are free from vendor lock-ins!

You don’t have to wait until the contract expires. You will have the leverage to negotiate and work on terms that suit your business better.

Technology aligned to the future

The architecture of the Composable Commerce framework allows you to optimize your store for the future just when you need it. This means you will be the quickest in your industry to adopt new technologies and make changes effortlessly and efficiently.

Following the agile approach for your store

Composable Commerce allows you to follow an agile approach to your store’s operations and marketing. There are hundreds of ways of building your store’s sales channels and processes, and it is extremely difficult to guess which one would work better than the other.

Even guessing the types of software and the features that you should try is difficult, and Composable Commerce gives you the option to experiment with all of them. You can try different types of software arrangements for every part of your business and choose the best ones suited to your needs.

This also means that you can go with market leaders of every software, i.e., choose the best company and software for PIM whereas choosing another company for the OMS, which specializes in efficient order management.

This is called the agile or iterative approach to managing and growing an eCommerce business.

Unmatched Marketing Capabilities

Composable Commerce is especially redefining marketing capabilities for eCommerce store owners. You can now optimize your business not only for the user’s experience after they land on your website but even in the marketing phase.

To understand this, let’s assume there is a company offering software that optimizes your landing page as per different reactions from your Facebook ads and turns site interactions into data for analytics.

Integrating such a system into your traditional software would be a cumbersome task, but Composable Commerce will allow eCommerce companies to integrate such software with just a few clicks.

This applies to experimenting with all types of marketing channels and making quick changes as per the results you get.

Problems with Composable Commerce

Along with all these benefits, there are also a few challenges linked to Composable Commerce that I believe you should know about. However, these challenges are more operational, and with the right approach, you can avoid these mistakes and have a smooth system at your disposal.

Managing multiple vendors

Having the option to choose different vendors also comes with a few challenges. It has been seen that companies eventually choose 30+ vendors for different software applications, and managing the contracts, negotiations, and support with all of these vendors can become a challenge.

Also, the traffic volume will vary for every software and management, and operations issues would also be proportionate to these divisions.

However, having the right approach and choosing a limited number of vendors can help you avoid vendor management issues.

Factoring in the Total Cost of Ownership

Switching to Composable Commerce would require you to change your current infrastructure and adopt the microservices architecture.

This comes with the cost of migration and training your employees with the new systems.

You need to keep in mind other one-time costs as you plan to shift your architecture.

Managing different user interfaces

Every software will come with its own user interface, and managing 10s of UIs for your store can become a challenge.

However, this challenge is solved by eCommerce stores by building a universal UI and linking that to every software, so the usage for the end-user (i.e., You) becomes super easy.

Training your employees and the cost of experiments

For every new software that you add down the line, you will have to bear the cost of training your employees. This also includes the cost of experimenting with new features.

This can be a pro or a con depending on your requirements and the level of your business. However, this cost is a pro for most growing stores.

Is Composable Commerce the right fit for your store?

You need to consider a lot of factors before you make the decision of switching to Composable Commerce.

It is the future of eCommerce; however, it is not the answer for every store!

Here are a few questions that you can answer to ascertain if Composable Commerce is a good fit for your business.

1. The goals of your business

You can access your current and future goals to get an idea of your technological business requirements. A traditional system or an all-in-one platform can serve your needs if you are in your initial stages of growth.

However, with a large user base and traffic, the needs of your business will grow, and you will get the need to integrate new features, which will be possible only with Composable Commerce.

2. The current state of functionalities on your store

An assessment of the experience offered by your competitors and the one offered by your store can give you an idea of where you want to reach next in your business.

If you lack some features that can help you beat your competition and your current software restricts you from implementing it, Composable Commerce might be the answer you are looking for.

3. Total cost of ownership

Before you plan on shifting your store to a new system, analyzing the total cost of the transfer and other linked costs is always a good idea.

You should be aware of the linked maintenance costs and specific costs charged by different vendors for particular parts of your store like the PIM, CRM, OMS, and others.

BetterCommerce’s Composable Apps

BetterCommerce’s suite of Composable apps is helping companies level up their eCommerce stores without re-platforming.

The set of apps that can be used together or independently include:

• B2C eCommerce
• B2B eCommerce
• PIM
• OMS
• Experience
• Analytics
• Engage
• Subscription & Memberships

Each of these apps is designed to solve specific modern-day eCommerce challenges and is helping companies globally reach their goals, beat their competition, and reap early-bird benefits.

Based on the Composable Commerce structure, these apps are easy to integrate with any technical stack and allow scalability beyond measures.

Wondering if you are leveraging analytics to the fullest in your eCommerce store or not?

Is your order management and product information on different platforms optimized as per your growing needs?

Wondering if you are personalizing the shopping experience for your customers with AI-based recommendations and marketing automation?