3 Benefits of Composable Commerce

As your company grows to meet the needs of a shifting marketplace, your platform infrastructure must evolve to support this growth. As you navigate this change, a key factor to keep in mind is the effect it has on your customer experience.

Companies with complex tech ecosystems need an easy way to make and manage changes to their content. This content should provide a cohesive experience to your end user, no matter what device they use. Using a ‘composable commerce’ approach to building sites is one way to simplify and future-proof this process.

In this article, we’ll dive into what composable commerce is, and explore its benefits.

Competitors: one click and loading seconds away

The power of composable commerce becomes evident when you look at the stiff competition in the eCommerce marketplace, and the attention to detail required to stay ahead of the pack when it comes to your customer experience. 

As more people head online to browse, the difference between them choosing you or your competitors often comes down to how easy to use and trustworthy your website feels. You gaining or maintaining market share depends on your ability to provide a smooth purchasing experience where people can find the right product when they need it.

There are a few ways that consumer buying choices are influenced by factors like site speed and overall experience. For example, almost 70% of consumers admit that a site's speed impacts their willingness to buy from that retailer. 

It’s also been shown that the first five loading seconds of a site have the most significant impact on conversions. A site that loads in one second typically has a conversion rate that is three times higher than a site that loads in five seconds.

It’s also expected that in 2021, more than 50% of retail sales in the US will be made on mobile phones. If sites are optimized for mobile, load quickly, and provide an overall fast experience, you’re more likely to see your users reach the end of the checkout process and complete a transaction. 

On the flip side, if your digital assets are missing these components or feel clunky and complex, it’s less likely you’ll be able to keep users — and customers. 

Composable commerce addresses these challenges, thanks to its unique philosophy of designing with the user in mind. The agile building blocks that make up composable commerce allow your infrastructure to be highly responsive to wherever your customer accesses your business.

Elements to obtain more conversions

As you build digital experiences for increasingly sophisticated users, your technology solution needs to be modular and customizable.

Composable commerce is an approach to developing digital assets that prioritizes best-in-class eCommerce components, or building blocks, allowing you to combine them to solve a particular business challenge.

Using composable commerce, as your business evolves, you’ll be able to:

• Improve search results by integrating artificial intelligence in your tech stack, as proposed by Algolia

• Add customer reviews to influence purchasing decisions with tools like Bazaarvoice

• Optimize the customer checkout process by including micro-solutions from expert providers in various elements, such as Elastic Path

Easily rebuild your infrastructure

With this approach, the idea is to develop a platform that is not tied to a particular system. Rather, it lets you create an infrastructure that can evolve quickly using modular services. There are three key elements to doing this well:

1. Build according to your specific requirements

Your goal is to create a system that gives you the flexibility to meet the needs of the moment. For example, if you need to add additional modules to your setup, this approach makes it easy to do. In this sense, following a ‘composable’ method helps you prepare for this building-block style of continuous improvement. As the business evolves, you can add solutions for specific requirements in combinations that support what you need. 

2. Include modular components

Gone is the idea of finding a do-it-all software, or internally taking on the daunting task of managing everything you need for your eCommerce site from scratch. With composable commerce, you can easily integrate and deploy single components independently, and still “speak” to the other.

3. Plan a targeted investment

In dynamic and highly competitive environments, the challenge is for your platform to scale with your business growth. If you’re looking to create a great omnichannel experience, start gradually. Aim to sequentially build the modules you need according to your business growth and consumer needs. Plan an investment aimed at improving priority aspects and, integrate the suitable modules at the right time.

Composable commerce benefits omnichannel

As businesses aim to advance their omnichannel strategies and dial into improving the customer experience, it’s critical that leaders consider an approach to building infrastructure that sets them up to evolve to future needs and goals. Building on top of a customizable, easily updated headless platform can achieve this agility. 

At Apply Digital, we have a deep understanding of eCommerce businesses and the tech needed to thrive. If you would like support in executing your strategy for digital transformation, please reach out to someone on our team, and we’d be happy to discuss how we can help.