The trend for monolithic, all-in-one eCommerce software suites is over, and modern composable technology stacks, which Forrester and Gartner highly rate, are being widely adopted across the industry by forward-thinking brands; here’s why:

Design the experiences your customers want without customising your core eCommerce platform. Because composable technologies are fully decoupled from the front-end, you can design and build the experiences your customers want without customising your eCommerce platform.

Composable technologies are easier to work with, meaning you can increase the rate of development your teams can deliver. This is vital in keeping up with your competitors, responding to customer feedback and delivering business outcomes.

A composable, API-first microservices architecture will decouple your solutions, allowing you to simultaneously deliver multiple streams of work across different areas of experience. You will no longer need to wait for one improvement to be released before you can start to work on another area, meaning you will be able to release more features, more often with less risk.

With a connected ecosystem of API-first technologies, you no longer need to replicate and copy data in and out of systems to make it accessible to other systems or front-end channels. This is a crucial advantage of composable architectures; moving data directly between systems reduces the opportunity for data to go out of sync or be out of date, giving a better experience to the users who rely on that data.

Design and Engineering teams want to work with modern technologies and do innovative, high-value work. They don’t enjoy low-value support and maintenance activities which do not make the best use of their skills and experience. Because composable solutions are easier to support and maintain, they can liberate your high-calibre product teams to focus on delivering more innovative, experience-improving work.

A composable commerce replatform will be the last major re-platforming project you will ever need to do. By adopting a composable approach, all your component technologies and front-ends will be decoupled and connected via a mediation layer, meaning if you ever outgrow something or want to change one component of your solution, you can simply change just that one piece without impacting the entire composable ecosystem.

This is fundamentally different from re-platforming to an all-in-one monolithic technology, where everything is so closely coupled together that integrating into a new system would require extensive engineering effort and intensive testing and would usually require a long code freeze until the work is completed.

Each piece of technology in a composable architecture will be cloud-native, SaaS-based technology. This means the vendors will be responsible for maintaining and upgrading your technologies as part of your subscription fees. This releases budget and resources that previously would have been ringfenced for keeping your platform online and up to date to be used for more innovative activities. It also means your hosting infrastructure can scale up and down automatically according to demand so that you are only paying for the levels of cloud services that you are consuming.

This is a significant advantage of composable architectures. Each piece of composable technology can service all your front-end channels via a single mediation layer, providing your front ends with the data they need directly from the source systems.

Historically, if you had a monolithic website and a mobile app, you would have to build and maintain a dedicated integration solution for both channels, which required multiple integrations and resulted in higher maintenance and support overheads.

With composable architecture, you are liberated from the old-school, all-in-one monolithic technologies that try to do everything in one box. These monoliths may have been great at eCommerce, but they were often awful as a CMS or personalisation engine; they were also challenging to integrate without customising the core platform.

Composable architectures solve this by bringing together a mix of best-of-breed technologies that, when assembled together, combine to create a solution that meets your requirements without customisation or compromise. And by their very nature, composable technologies will always be open to integration as they are built API first, meaning they are intended to be connected to other systems.

Business users want to be free to trade their eCommerce channels without a dependency on development teams. But many legacy eCommerce solutions cannot support this independence or meet the expectations of the business without significant platform customisation. And the more you customise a platform, the harder it is to maintain or customise in the future.

In a recent market survey by commercetools, more than two-thirds of respondents (68%) said it takes their company three months or longer to take new commerce solutions to market and half of respondents (50%) reported that their organisation’s technologies had limited their ability to innovate as quickly as needed.

Modern, best-of-breed technologies are built to fully enable business users with their powerful back-office tooling and featured rich APIs, meaning business users can manipulate front-end experiences with greater independence than ever before. And when they do need developer support, the speed of delivery is much faster because the development only happens in the front-end, with no impact on any back-end system.