Composable Commerce with Elastic Path

Following text is an excerpt from conversation of Artur Urbanski – VP Consulting Hycom with Shaneil Lafayette from Elastic Path on customer experiences enabled by composable commerce architecture. For full interview please watch the video.

The way we buy hasn't changed much since Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994. When we want to buy something, we usually go home. We typically, go to the website where the products are presented, and we can choose from what we want and then fill out some kind of form and pay. During the same time, however, our digital life has changed a lot. Today each of us has a miniature computer in our pocket that is constantly connected to the Internet. And we not only have information at the tip of our fingers, but we can also use it immediately, when you want to buy something. What's more, devices that once had only one specific task, such as transporting us from place to place, recording music showing us the time or temperature in the apartment, also became computers. Nonstop connected to the Internet.

The last 10 years in the development of technology have offered us new opportunities to make customer life easier and shortened shopping journeys. Why couldn't I buy a higher top speed during the tour or buy high resolution maps simply on the watch? A traditional website with a list of products and a basket is not enough. We need a new mindset, a new eCommerce technology for this. Technology that it's modular and one component can provide that our client uses.  

The modular architecture of the solutions allows the use of available, mostly ready-made software elements, each of which provides a specific business function. The solution, built from modules, allows us to meet the specific needs of the company and its customers in the fastest possible and flexible way.

This is a completely different approach than in the case, off out of the box solutions that seem fast and easy to implement but make it very difficult for companies to differentiate and keep adapting the system to new business requirements and more and more complex customer parts.

Let's think of this example. As an amateur musician, I'm the owner of an electronic drum machine. It looks like this. It could tape 99 sets of songs and 99 slots for more rhythms. I bought it, and the company that produces it received money from me only once from one-time purchase of the device. But what if I could be provided with new sets off the sounds in a way that I could listen to them and buy them directly from the panel of this device? What if I could sell beats that I composed by myself to other musicians? The company could profit from the work off its clients by charging a percentage of each transaction.

The new Composable Commerce approach enables the creation of digital business platform to engage the client in these places and in this moment that are important for him. It can also change the way customers use our products and even more - it can also change the way we run our business.