Ecommerce is growing and so is the competition between brands and retailers. The point of composable is the ease of movement and instead of replacing your entire platform, replace parts when needed. Predictions go around saying that organizations adopting the composable approach will be able to implement new features 80% faster than their competitors building their platforms from scratch. No wonder there's hype out there.
For the past twenty years, almost every business has had to replace its platform every five years, give or take, to keep up with the customers' demands and offer the best possible experience for its users. It's important to keep up with the news and developments, considering what a good commerce stack should include even though the solution is both expensive and time-consuming. But now we've entered a new era.
Having a composable commerce architecture means that the systems in your landscape are built to work together. Cooperation is a large part of the system's value proposition. A composable commerce stack should not only be easy to integrate with, but it must also be open with its data and prepared for different actions you might want to apply in your systems. Changes in the system are exposed so that other applications can embrace it and build a common flow across several integrations. What we are facing here is possibilities and flexibility at their best.
An example could be a website that allows customers to build their own custom computers by selecting the specific components (e.g., processor, graphics card, memory, storage) that they want to include in the final product. The customer is able to "compose" the product by choosing from a variety of options, rather than being limited to the options that are pre-assembled by the manufacturer.
Making individual functionality work together is quite a clear contrast to previous generation systems. Everything had to fit together and breaking out parts of functionality to use in other systems was not easy.
For basic eCommerce operations, a conventional do-it-all platform has all the bases covered. It's an excellent solution when launching a small business or when you don't have enough skills in-house. But, when your business grows, your plans may not align with the product propositions of your supplier. It's time to find a new system that answers to your new idéas and functionalities.
Here's where composable commerce comes in. It allows you to take control, develop the front-end functionality your customers expect, and add the components you need to support new processes - without changing any systems.
So, is this meaning that composable commerce is for everybody? To answer this question it's essential that you understand what composable commerce will improve and what opportunities it can bring to your platform.
Therefore, before you do anything else, it will help to identify what your USPs:s are. Clarify to yourself what makes your eCommerce better than your competitors. If many of your USPs are in need of strong technical support, it makes it more likely that composable commerce is what you need. The chance that you'll find one system that is offering everything you need to improve all of your USPs is not very likely.
The value of composable commerce lies in the ability to select systems with clear, composable properties and put them together into a functioning whole by yourself. If you do this correctly, you radically reduce the risk of having to do a large, multimillion-dollar project again where everything has to be replaced. Instead, you can exchange and change the included parts afterward.
But everything certainly comes with a prize, and that mainly involves the right type of knowledge and a particular offering. And then there's the thing about fees and licensing of the different modules within the composable commerce stack.
Well, there's plenty, to say the least. You have the traditional monoliths when everything is built together and there are the modular ones, where you find a lot of the functionality you need and still can integrate and introduce new systems to gain the advantage against your competitors.
Geins Commerce is a new, cross-breed of the traditional do-it-all-monoliths and the newer composable platforms: It's built upon MACH technology, and gets you everything you need out of the box to build a global, competitive online business.
The idea behind Geins Commerce is that you should focus on building your business, rather than collecting IT systems. With Geins you get native modules taking care of everything from product management to sales, and further on to content and fulfillment.
And you can choose to replace any of the modules as you go, just as with a composable setup.
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