Composable Commerce as the key for time to market improvement

What is Composable Commerce?

The role of Commerce is to manage and effectively drive a consumer’s purchasing process:

• starting with searching for products and browsing personalized offers, continuing with cart actions,

• ending with successful checkout, payment and relaying captured order to fulfillment.

Composable Commerce is the idea that organisations can simply buy and plug-in to their
Commerce Experience pre-built solutions and integrations that add business value. These commerce components can be combined into a custom application for specific business needs.

Composable Commerce does it by combining Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs). Each PBC is a feature or capability of the final application set. They can be offered by one or many vendors. For example, a PBC could be a shopping cart and checkout, promotions or engagement and personalization.

A composable approach uses various vendors who offer comprehensive functionality just for the one thing they are dedicated to. Having it in mind, it is not necessary to rely on one vendor who produces various functionalities in a monolith out-of-the-box application which may not be relevant or fit the business requirements and certainly will not be best of breed.

Composable Commerce in service of MACH architecture

Building Composable Commerce requires having architecture principles that are shared among all services that are implementing PCBs. The final goal is to have all the services running based on the same technical principals, often referred to M.A.C.H. acronym. It means that your PCBs must implement these four pillars:

• Microservices. Systems made of loosely-coupled independently developed components with well-defined APIs and functional boundaries. Architecture pattern that leverages composability for better scalability, performance and manageability.

• API-first speeds up and simplifies development. Inherent separation of layers provides flexibility and allows using best technologies while enforcing well-defined communication.

• Cloud computing as a primary paradigm of building optimal solutions. Infrastructure, Platform and Software as a Service provide flexibility, low entry cost and predictable TCO.

• Headless front-end architecture supported by solid API enables building tailor-made
  touchpoints for end-users. The lack of imposed front-end coupled with back-end allows seamless UX across all digital touchpoints.
  

Going with these principles will bring you to composable elements of your architecture, where every service is easy to integrate, scalable and ready to improve through an agile development process to catch up with your business requirements.

It’s important to realise that MACH, whilst a critical building block, is only a technical underpinning, to realise business value, the next step to composability and composed
solutions must be made.

Further information on Composable Commerce can be found here.

Why it's important to build commerce in composable way?

The most important thing of building commerce in a composable way is the flexibility of the corporate architecture which directly leads to the following business values:

• cost reduction of the implementation and maintenance

• improved time to market while introducing new products or features

• easy alignment with existing systems (PCBs)

• ability for progressive replatforming; swapping out components when the needs of the business change and/or a new and more appropriate software solution comes on to the market (as they both will)

“By 2023, organizations that have adopted a Composable Commerce approach will outpace the competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation.” Source: Gartner

The next advantage of having Composable Commerce in MACH architecture is to increase customer experience and conversion rate by keeping customers' centricity in onmichannels. Have a look here for more details.

The core of Composable Commerce

The concept of composability, which allows businesses to utilize packaged business capabilities to rapidly build, deploy and continuously optimize highly differentiated commerce experiences, is the very foundation for Elastic Path Commerce Cloud.
It is a solution that fully leverages the concept multi-tenant SaaS solution that provides true business agility using:

• Discretely defined services in headless architecture

• Availability in any touchpoint and user journey in omnichannel scenarios

• Orchestration of logic and data distributed alongside internal and external systems

• Design first approach towards agility in development of digital experience

• Microservices API for various business concepts

• Mature platform with auto-scaling for growth and peaks

According to Gartner, Elastic Path, was the first commerce vendor to build upon the great technical foundations of MACH and create business value for customers. Composable Commerce is the idea that customers can simply buy and plug-in to their Commerce Experience pre-built solutions and integrations that add business value. Elastic Path is unique in the Composable Commerce world, in that Elastic Path provides first line support for the Composable solutions in the Composable Commerce Hub.

Hycom is a founding partner of the Elastic Path Composable Commerce Hub and has already built solutions for the Hymate Chatbot and Contentful CMS system. 

Defining the future of commerce, Elastic Path develops the world’s most sophisticated enterprise commerce solutions. The company’s products, have helped the world’s top brands generate over $100 billion in over 170 countries. Customers from industries as diverse as retail, travel, telecoms, publishing and software enjoy the benefits of a flexible, open architecture that drives brand-defining customer experiences, facilitates business agility, and eliminates sales channel silos.

We're sharing our experience to give your company first place among the competition

Dedicated initiatives for various industries

Our teams cooperate closely with our customers to select the most suitable components for Composable Commerce architecture. Although clients and industries are different, a solid, complete and mature commerce solution needs to have certain elements in place. That's why we decided to prepare architecture proposals for each industry, to build a solid foundation for making project decisions simpler and faster. It streamlines the process of picking a reference solution architecture elements from our library (containing both logical/functional
description as well as a selection of technology components). We are regularly updating our reference architectures, based on experiences from new clients and our internal research activities, to keep them up-to-date.

ENCO

ENCO is a composable solution framework that leverages modern technologies and customer-centric delivery approaches to adapt to the rapidly changing market dynamics now and in the future. For now, it is a concept proposal of a composable customer engagement platform.

It contains an architecture blueprint and a set of functional components which can be used by energy and utilities companies to build their digital service platform. Components of the platform can enable customer self-service, e-commerce, personalization, recommendations,
gamification and customer experience management. The main characteristics of the concept are: composable, cloud-based, decoupled architecture, and consistent experience with multiproduct and omnichannel service.

The main benefits for energy provider can be:

• faster time to market with using proven components and standard integration architecture demanding the lowest possible changes in legacy IT systems;

• omnichannel experience consistency thanks to decoupled architecture, journey orchestration layer and experience management functions;

Here you can get more information about Enco - Hycom.digital platform that builds customer engagement.

Omnitel

It is a digital omnichannel platform for sales and customer service in a modern telecoms company that provides consistent experiences, engages customers and constantly improves their user experience.

From the backend side, Omnitel is being prepared in spirit of Cloud Native, basing on TMForum Open API. We're developing this platform in order to deliver a ready solution based on modern microservice architecture. This will allow our customers to speed up their implementation projects and achieve business goals in short time period. By this Omnitel platform, we would like to give our customers the opportunity to learn, how they can improve their time to market in telco commerce by taking our experience and verified solutions. Therefore we call it Hycom's telco accelerator.

Thanks to our involvement in TM Forum, Hycom is placed on the list of top system integrators of Open API according to TMForum's Open API economy report.

Here you can get more information about Omnitel - Hycom digital platform for telecommunications.

Contact Us

Before building commerce in a composable way, it is worthwhile to seek advice from a consultant experienced in implementing such a project. We encourage you to contact the author of this article by e-mail or directly on LinkedIn.