Say Goodbye to Build vs Buy…

To Deliver Modern Customer Experiences, the Right Choice is Composable Commerce

Executive Summary

The digital commerce landscape is evolving rapidly. Customers expect seamless, personalized experiences across every touchpoint, and businesses must keep pace to remain competitive. Traditional monolithic commerce platforms are struggling to deliver the agility, scalability, and innovation required in today’s market. As a result, organizations are increasingly turning to composable commerce—a modular, best-of-breed approach that enables brands to assemble and reassemble commerce solutions to meet their unique needs.

In this white paper, we’ll discuss:

The limitations of traditional commerce platforms
The benefits of composable commerce
How to evaluate and implement a composable commerce strategy
Real-world examples of composable commerce in action

Introduction

“Cloud has given rise to lots of best-of-breed vendors and a very big marketplace. I mean it’s very much a meritocracy out there. There are probably 30 different CMSes retailers can choose from, but there’s only two getting the majority of the business because they’re the ones that are best-in-class.”

— Kelly Goetsch, Chief Strategy Officer, commercetools

The technologies at the core of MACH architecture include:

Microservices: A modern architecture that makes your IT team agile, possibly even SUPERSONIC.
API-First: 100% API-centric means you can consume any functionality independently.
Cloud Native: Huge promotions, giant spikes – no worries. Our multi-tenant, cloud-native platform is always there.
Headless: Choose your own front end: build from scratch or buy a packaged DXP. Put your customer experience front and center – we’ve got your back(end) covered.

The Composable Solution

“The future of e-commerce is composable. Fusing content with commerce is the way to power the stack your team wants, and the experiences your business needs.”

— Nishant Patel, Co-Founder and CTO, Contentstack

91% of IT decision-makers say MACH and composable architecture will help their company succeed by 2029, according to MACH Alliance research.

What is Composable Commerce?

Coined by Gartner® in 2020, composable commerce is a development approach that enables businesses to “leverage packaged business capabilities (PBCs) to move toward future-proof commerce.” PBCs are a set of APIs that deliver functions such as search, cart, or checkout and serve as building blocks to a composable commerce solution.

To embrace a composable commerce approach, businesses must have a technology infrastructure that enables PBCs to be integrated easily and without risk. This is accomplished through MACH architecture. This is why composable commerce and MACH architecture are intrinsically connected.

Composable commerce at a glance:

Decoupled Head(s): The experience layer is decoupled from application logic to support the growing number of touchpoints and a true omni-channel experience.
Digital Touchpoints: APIs connect commerce, content, payment, service, fulfillment, and other systems, allowing data to flow seamlessly.
Composable Commerce: Building blocks made up of composable applications containing independent capabilities to perform specific business functions, reusable across touchpoints.

The Mythical Control of Building Your Own

When an organization announces a strategy to build their own commerce platform, it’s fueled by the desire to have total control. Many leaders believe the only way to control the destiny of the customer’s experience, and thus the success of their business, is by building technology from the ground up based on their knowledge of their brand and strategic vision.

The fact is, as they’re the only ones guiding that destiny, they’re sabotaging it at the same time. What retailers sometimes don’t recognize is that with total control comes:

Lots of testing
Lots of developers
High maintenance

In a world powered by modern MACH service-based architecture, there’s no reason you can’t have total control while side-stepping the fundamental build process. Buying your core components doesn’t hinder your ability to control your commerce experience. On the contrary, it gives you more freedom.

First, you’re not really “buying” anything because all of your components are SaaS-based, so you can swap them out at any time. And, because the environment of composable is MACH-based and therefore agnostic by design, you can make modifications and updates, add custom features and experiment with new capabilities at any time without risk. You can make mistakes and fail fast.

Alex Shiferman, chief technology officer of Nuts.com, a pure-play online retailer, told the audience of a 2022 industry conference, “I come from an older world — the monolithic e-commerce platform world — where essentially most of the decisions are made for you. In a composable world, you have a ton of autonomy at a very granular level. And, that can be exciting, but it’s also challenging because you can make a lot of right decisions and you can make a lot of wrong decisions. So, with great power comes great responsibility — this is a perfect example. You have a lot of control, but if you try and that works, great. And, if it doesn’t, you’ve got to learn some from your mistakes.”

More Myths and Misconceptions

Most explanations that brands give for taking the homegrown approach are, at their core, dismissible. There may have been a grain of truth to some of them at one time, but others are simply false — and all you have to do is talk to your peers, industry thought leaders or consult analyst reports to gain insight that will refute any objections you might have. Here are some of the most common myths misleading retailers today.

“There’s no vendor out there that can provide the best-in-class commoditized commerce components we need at scale.”
While that may have been true for a long time, it’s not anymore. The introduction of cloud- and SaaS-based business models gave rise to a new breed of vendors — young companies who focus on doing one thing and doing it well. All you have to do is explore the Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce or the Forrester Wave™ to get confirmation there are qualified vendors out there doing an excellent job providing the commerce solutions retailers need today. They not only offer products better than what you could build yourself, but more importantly, enable you to focus on your unique differentiators and capitalize on the benefits of modern technology much more quickly.
“The only way to be the next Amazon is to act like Amazon.”
If you do the same things Amazon or Walmart does, your business will suddenly, magically, compete on that scale, right? Nope. There are many, many companies that have gone down that path and failed. Even Amazon is struggling today. It’s having the same issues as most retailers in keeping up with the continual evolution of commerce. As Doug Stephens, the futurist and bestselling author of “Resurrecting Retail: The Future of Business in a Post-Pandemic World” recently told Retail Dive, “Not only has the retail world closed the gap with Amazon, but the very nature of e-commerce has also fundamentally changed. Increasingly, retail is not something that resides on static, boring, search-driven websites (like Amazon.com). It now lives inside interesting, entertaining and engaging content and communities of interest. All things Amazon has never been very good at developing.”
“If we want to truly control our commerce experience, we have to build it in-house.”
When you build in-house, you hire developers, architects and engineers, then go to the board and say, “Give me $100M and I will build everything from scratch and make us the next Amazon.” Once it’s built (if it actually gets built) and goes live, those people who supported you are out of there. Maintaining the system, day after day, year after year, becomes somebody else’s problem — probably yours — to deal with for the next 10 or 20 years.
“Managing all those vendors is way too much work.”
If you think about it, you’re already managing a lot of vendors. If you are on a legacy system now, you’ve had to add a CMS and other things because it didn’t come with it, or if it did, it’s not up to par. The real issue is that companies don’t want to embrace the accountability that comes with a composable solution. You used to be able to go to one rep and they were accountable. If you’ve got five different vendors, it suddenly becomes your problem. For many leaders, that’s a big change. However, the truth is, if you have a good system integrator (SI) partner, you should be able to lean on them for support. They bring your vendors together and will help mediate how they interact. And then there’s the MACH Alliance, whose primary mission is to help you navigate this new composable landscape.
“It’s not going to be that hard to build it ourselves.”
Of course, you want to believe that you have the talent to lead the project, and your team has enough experience to handle an internal build. However, there are a plethora of respected commerce leaders out there who have done it, or tried to, and will assure you that it is incredibly challenging. In 2021, Greg Fancher, chief technology officer of American apparel retailer Express, shared how he made the decision not to build a new solution for the brand: “Build the whole thing – test like crazy, move over all the data and pray for the best – I’ve done that before. I’m not interested in doing the same thing again.”

5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Committing to an In-House Build

Do you have the right team in place to build and maintain a commerce platform for the next 10 years?
Are you prepared to invest significant time and resources into ongoing updates, security, and compliance?
Can you keep up with the pace of innovation in commerce technology?
Will building your own platform truly differentiate your brand, or will it distract from your core business?
What is the opportunity cost of focusing on technology over customer experience?

The Composable Approach: Evolution versus Revolution

“The only reason to build is for differentiation. You shouldn’t be building to build to the standard, you should only be building and modifying your code to differentiate yourself from the competition.”

— Jon Panella, Group Vice President, Publicis Sapient

There was no way to take this approach in the past. You couldn’t bring in a set of capabilities and services and take your time replacing parts to ultimately get to your end goal – and this is the key difference between traditional and modern commerce.

Evolutionary Best Practices

Now is the time to migrate. What are the fundamentals needed to embrace composable commerce?

Define your why
Before embarking on the path to transformation, you must establish your goals and your vision for the future. Take stock of the issues and challenges you face in delivering commerce to customers and include solutions in your end vision. Once your why is defined, share it with everyone in your organization. This will keep you focused and propel the project forward.
Gain buy-in (from both sides)
You can’t just shift the technology; you have to shift your organizational mindset. Your goal is to get everyone excited about the benefits of migrating to composable commerce – specifically the freedom it gives nontechnical digital teams to initiate projects autonomously. It’s critical to involve both business and tech teams at the beginning so they understand “what’s in it for me” and can provide input. If you wait until the end, there’s a great chance you may have to go back and make changes to adapt to the way different teams work and/or details you may not have considered. As Taher Khaliq, CTO of Trinny London, a UK-based beauty brand, explained, “With black-box platforms, all the decisions are made for you. You just need to fit into their workflow, their journey. What that means is IT needs to be far more aware ... it needs to be owned by the business as a whole.”
Do your due diligence
Run a full gap analysis to provide a big-picture view of the scope of the project and use the information to put together a complete plan. Once you have your prioritized list, the next step is to identify where it’s possible for you to achieve your ideal with functionality you can buy from best-in-class SaaS vendors. What’s left will be the features you’ll need to build. Involving a digital consultant or SI in this process can be incredibly helpful. Keep in mind, the migration process opens up multiple opportunities to consolidate and streamline your commerce operation, creating savings across the board.
Make commerce and content your core
There are many ways to get on the composable journey. One of the first questions retailers typically ask is, “Do I choose a product first or do I choose an implementation consulting partner first?” That’s up to you. Both options work. If you choose a consultant first, they can help you identify the best commerce and content vendors for your specific needs. They’ll also work with you to determine what additional capabilities you need and assess which of these are available to buy and which ones you’ll need to build.

On the other hand, if you already have commerce and content vendors in mind, you can start there. Make sure you are choosing the most robust, proven vendors as these are the two most important components for your core businesses. Don’t be afraid to ask for proof of concept before you make a commitment.
Leverage the resources available to you
Considering the complexity of commerce today, along with the fact that there are best of breed vendors out there creating products specifically for modern commerce and multiple industry resources to turn to for guidance, it’s perplexing that any retailer would consider DIY as an option.

Take the time to explore the Gartner™ Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce and The Forrester™ Wave for B2B and B2C Commerce as well as the Paradigm B2B Combine. All of these utilize a combination of data-driven metrics and customer feedback to deliver deep intel into the capabilities of the top commerce vendors, making them invaluable for making informed purchasing decisions.

Connecting with The MACH™ Alliance should also be included in your migration plans. As the first organization to advocate for MACH-driven architecture, its members have extensive expertise and experience in building composable commerce solutions. Supporting retailers on the path to digital transformation is engrained in the organization’s overall mission.
Rethink your team structure
Vertically organized teams are better suited for MACH architecture. Bringing together people with different skill sets to deliver and support a feature such as cart, checkout, promotions, etc. not only prevents bottlenecks in the migration process but speeds up releases over the long term.
Start small, innovate incrementally
Whether it was a microsite, a sub-brand, or a chunk of functionality that caused issues in the past, tackle your less important assets first and shift your digital business in phases. Employ the strangler pattern to replace pieces of functionality with microservices. Using this pattern, you test the new component in parallel with the old functionality and transition from old to new before eliminating or “strangling” it entirely.

This approach allows you to experiment with components and switch them in and out if they’re not meeting your expectations. It also eliminates any potential disruptions to your day-to-day business, giving you more control over the process and allowing you to recognize results along the way.
Deliver your differentiation
Always remember that the power behind the composable “buy and build” approach is that it ensures you can keep a razor focus on why customers shop with you. Whether it’s loyalty, custom kitting, bulk pricing discounts, fitment guides, virtual try-ons, it doesn’t matter, you can build it and deploy it. Plus, you’re able to continue to fine-tune and refresh what’s successful to continually deliver newness to customers, and you easily remove unsuccessful features. You’ll find that empowering your business teams to experiment with creative marketing promotions, expand into new markets, introduce products, host partnerships, add touch points, not only delivers results on your bottom line, it also increases productivity and improves job satisfaction.

The Partner Ecosystem

Choose the right CMS
Select the most powerful commerce engine
Find the expertise to bring it all together

Conclusion

Meet the Contributors

Publicis Sapient

Publicis Sapient is a digital business transformation company. We partner with global organizations to help them create and sustain competitive advantage in a world that is increasingly digital. Our expertise spans strategy, consulting, experience, and engineering, with a focus on helping clients become more agile, customer-centric, and data-driven.

https://www.publicissapient.com

commercetools

commercetools is the leading commerce platform built on modern MACH principles (Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native and Headless), allowing you to work with your commerce solution in a more agile, flexible and scalable way. commercetools enables businesses to create powerful, highly customized commerce experiences while reducing complexity and cost.

https://commercetools.com/

Contentstack

Contentstack is the leading Composable Digital Experience Platform (DXP) that empowers marketers and developers to deliver composable digital experiences at the speed of their imagination. Contentstack’s headless CMS and automation capabilities enable organizations to orchestrate content, commerce, and digital experiences across every channel.

http://www.contentstack.com