Modern business demands flexible commerce solutions — solutions that can accommodate and evolve with the ever-changing landscape of commerce within large enterprises.
This type of agility is often hard to attain for a lot of e-commerce businesses with their existing tech stack. Industry-wide, many enterprise companies have long used monolith e-commerce platforms to power their online stores — these types of systems both make it difficult to create the most up-to-date shopping experiences while also putting constraints on the engineering teams.
The solution? Integrated Composable Commerce as part of an overall strategy.
The commerce landscape we all know is without a doubt transitioning from legacy methods to modular technologies. This piece delves into how moving on an integrated composable commerce solution can unlock greater channel sales, and ultimately the path to richer HCL Commerce Cloud future-proofed e-commerce solutions.
What Is Composable Commerce?
“Composable commerce” is a term first introduced by Gartner in 2020; and this methodology of providing modular solutions empower business agencies to strengthen their tech stack seamlessly with best-of-breed solutions catering to peculiar business requirements. Put simply, this is possible by using pre-built modules (think of them as Packaged Business Capabilities or PBCs), that provide specific business functions.
There are four key tenets of composable commerce:
- Modular: Part or all of the system may be individually deployed and upgraded.
- Open: Applications are able to function well with all other system applications without vendor lock-in.
- Flexible: An independent stack, you can build commerce experiences with your own unique twist.
- Business-Centric: Fast and cost-effective change in response to changes in the business needs (in the merchant side).
Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs) – What Value Do They Add?
Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs) essentially bundle a list of business functions or processes that can be deployed as pre-built solutions. PBCs are a balance between monolithic architectures and microservices, ensuring that components work tightly together whilst still achieving separation of concern with each PBC acting as its own device. They offer pre-built and integrable modules designed to determine your business needs, such as e-commerce, customer relationship management (CRM), or supply chain management, among others.
Here are a few ways e-commerce businesses benefit from PBCs.
Reduced Complexity
While microservices offer granular control over individual functionalities, managing a large number of microservices can quickly become overwhelming. Integrated composable commerce focuses on integrating and combining independent capabilities to reduce this complexity. PBCs strike a balance by providing modular components without the excessive complexity associated with microservices architectures. This simplification leads to easier maintenance and lower operational overhead.
Faster Deployment
PBCs are delivered pre-furnished with crucial possibilities and efficiencies, accelerating their deployment for organizations. With an integrated composable solution, businesses have a complete solution so that they do not need to build and configure each of those components from scratch — using simple ready-made solutions made specifically for individual companies. By speeding up the delivery of code, an integrated composable commerce approach increases innovation cycles and provides faster to market possibilities.
Enhanced Scalability
Scalability is a critical consideration for modern businesses, especially in industries with fluctuating demand patterns. PBCs offer scalability by design, allowing organizations to scale their operations efficiently as their business grows. Whether it’s handling increased user traffic or expanding into new markets, PBCs provide the flexibility to adapt to changing business needs without sacrificing performance.
Embracing Packaged Business Capabilities: The Way Forward
As businesses navigate the complexities of digital transformation, adopting the right architectural approach is paramount. While microservices and monoliths have their place in certain scenarios, Packaged Business Capabilities emerge as a compelling alternative, offering a pragmatic solution to modern-day challenges. PBCs play a pivotal role in Integrated composable commerce solutions and are instrumental in establishing a successful business setup, enabling organizations to adopt a best-of-breed approach with agility and flexibility. It’s basically combining the best of the Monolith with the best aspects of Microservices.
By embracing PBCs, organizations can strike a balance between flexibility and simplicity, empowering them to focus on innovation and delivering value to their customers. Whether it’s optimizing e-commerce experiences, streamlining supply chain operations, or enhancing customer engagement, PBCs provide a solid foundation for building agile and scalable business solutions.
How Adopting An Integrated Composable Commerce Solution Can Improve Your E-Commerce Business
Tech will transform the commerce landscape, and businesses need to be ready not only to respond rapidly, but even predict future shifts in what customers demand.
The good news is that integrated composable commerce enables businesses to achieve customer experience — agility, speed, and scale by design. Which ensures differentiation from the rising competition hundred-folds in-market.
Build Personalized End-to-End Customer Experiences
Customer journey touchpoints have grown from “in-store” and “online” to marketplaces, social channels, IoT devices and myriad others. Consumers are engaging with brands in ways and through platforms never heard of before.
Designing a user experience with these features in mind entails flexibility that is not possible nor logical through a monolithic system, and here is where composable commerce can step in.
Respond Rapidly to Changing Business Needs
Under a monolithic system, any change to functionality can be complex. Integrated composable commerce is instrumental in enabling businesses to adapt quickly to changing needs without the risk of impacting other business capabilities within their ecosystem. On the other hand, integrated composable commerce lets you address only the functionality that you need to grow — without the risk of impacting other business capabilities within your ecosystem.
Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs
Customer acquisition costs are going up as a result of more saturated advertising channels and consumers having decreasing trust in ads. A modular approach, however, can help to adapt it in a nimble way with the technologies they might require to build long-lasting customer relationships and engagement.
Avoid Vendor Lock-In
Discover a better product from a different company? With a monolithic software vendor, your flexibility is often limited and you may have to wait until your contract expires — or buckle up for a potentially expensive replatforming process.
An integrated composable commerce solution, however, allows businesses to swap components in and out when it makes sense for their operations. With a modular build, you can swap components in and out when it makes sense for your business.
Embrace Integrated Composable Commerce with HCL Commerce Cloud
You know when you need to make a shift, you need flexible solutions with you. The HCL Commerce Cloud solution, within a headless commerce framework, allows for seamless decoupling of back-end e-commerce functions from the front-end user experience. Be it a new sales strategy being adopted, going into an untapped international market, or the newly added product line – HCL Commerce Cloud has got you covered with everything needed to transact online and helps enable your changing business needs at speed and scale.
One key area where best-of-breed offerings are delivering value to a wide range of businesses is the use of AI in composable architectures. Increasingly, and no matter whether they’re visiting a B2C or a B2B site, customers expect a better customer experience with personalized results. HCL Commerce Cloud comes with AI composable module that empowers businesses to sell more by tailoring personalized experiences that captivate customers
Adopt HCL Commerce Cloud’s Integrated Composable Commerce solution the way that best fits your situation, no matter your business model; and let’s shift together.
Get a commerce demo today and shift towards an integrated composable architecture. Embrace the future of e-commerce with HCL Commerce Cloud.
Founder Dinis Guarda
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