E-commerce

How composable commerce lets retailers innovate

Composable commerce is a modular development approach to e-commerce that involves bringing together best-in-class services to power customized front-end user experiences.

Photo by istock.com

October 13, 2022 by Barbara Rybka — Chief Customer Officer, Commerce Layer.

For online shoppers, the experience of buying a product matters as much as the product itself. Here's one proof point: Conversion rates for a website with one-second load times are three times higher than those with a five-second load time.

But speed is simply the baseline. Today, competitive brands are those that deliver personalized customer experiences. Beyond a sleek website, intuitive layout, and fast interaction times, they deliver experiences attuned to each customer's personal preferences and desired action.

Here's how composable commerce makes it possible:

Personalized retail experiences at scale

Personalization is about knowing customers and anticipating their needs. It's about remembering them, removing barriers, making things easy. A personalized retail website is dynamic; it adapts to each user who visits and adjusts as that user interacts with it.

For example, a personalized retail website will…

• Automatically load in a visitor's preferred language, based on IP address, device settings, or selection from a previous visit.
• Render a landing page and search results based on browsing patterns and purchases.
• Present prices in the local currency as well as the locally preferred payment methods.
• Offer the most convenient delivery options based on the customer's location.
• Add special services based on brand loyalty and / or real-time actions, creating "wow" moments throughout the journey.

Personalization has always been the holy grail and requires both data intelligence and nimble systems. Designing personalized experiences, including localizing the purchase process at this level, is challenging with the legacy e-commerce platforms that still power many of today's biggest brands. Composable commerce brings the nimbleness required to adapt quickly to new opportunities, design new experiences, and innovate beyond the core foundation.

How composable commerce adds to personalized retail

First, a quick definition: composable commerce is a modular development approach to e-commerce that involves bringing together various best-in-class services to power customized front-end user experiences.

Each service supports a business capability, such as a shopping cart and checkout, promotions, product recommendations, etc. An alternative to one-size-fits-all platforms, composable commerce lets you select the services you need and also leverage the domain expertise inherent in each service.

The ability to combine best-in-class services and build your own gives your experienced design team the creative freedom and nimbleness to differentiate your brand.

The four core elements required to build any composable commerce platform:

1. Content management system.
2. Transactional engine.
3. Payment gateways.
4. Coding framework for development.

These services connect via APIs. This architecture enables the brand to start from the desired customer experiences and deploy the best tools and compose the best solution for their successful delivery.

The same services can support any digital interface (iOS, Android, smart devices, etc.), further extending reach and layering in context. Beyond the core elements, you can add on additional services such as search and personalization, as well as build your own unique services. This is the beauty and flexibility of composable commerce.

Composable commerce delivers on flexibility and speed

A key step in personalization focuses on localization. This entails adapting the purchase process to the local market's norms: currency, preferred payment methods, tax calculations, inventory management, delivery options, field formats, etc.

As a brand continues to scale internationally, the promise of composable commerce is that the most relevant payment gateway(s) can be readily added, including hyper-local ones. Brands can configure market-specific rules to create localized price lists and inventory strategies. And the shopping experience can be made accessible through the prevalent digital touch points in that market.

Conversely, localizing the user experience using a legacy e-commerce platform can be costly and slow down time to market. To accept multiple currencies, for example, you may have to pay additional currency conversion fees on top of transaction fees. Or, to avoid those fees, you'll create multiple instances of your website. When you make changes to one site, you'll have to synchronize content and stock across your stores.

Retailers on legacy platforms may spend a material amount of their time on maintenance, refactoring, or replatforming rather than ideating ways to create new value, such as pursuing a personalization strategy and composing personalized journeys.

On the front end, composable commerce can have a material impact. I mentioned earlier how slow load times can affect conversions. For every 100 milliseconds in page load time a retailer trims, transactions increase by 8.4% and average order value climbs by 9.2%.

Put succinctly: localize, optimize speed, gain sales.

Composable solutions are blazing fast because every service is optimized. When your transactional engine is exclusively a transactional engine, its entire focus is on correctly loading prices and promotions. When every facet of your platform is similarly optimized, performance naturally improves throughout the online journey.

Just as attractive to many retailers: when you leverage the domain expertise from best-in-class components like a transactional engine, content management system, or search provider, your in-house teams can focus on solving new problems and building new value for your customers.

Your goal is to unlock your team to focus on building differentiated experiences for your brand. They might, for example, test different messaging based on when visitors land on the site. Or invest in building incredible 3D or AR renderings to showcase products.

The result: Your brand shines through. Your customers are happy. And you optimize your team resources and bottom line.

About Barbara Rybka

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Barbara Rybka is Chief Customer Officer at Commerce Layer. Commerce Layer helps companies sell their merchandise through any digital channel (web, app, voice, IoT, etc.) by using the Commerce Layer's API. With an API-first solution, and an entire suite of developer tools, Commerce Layer customers can scale their businesses into multiple markets with ease.

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