Approaching Composable Commerce Architecture
In this post, we'll go a bit deeper into crafting peak e-commerce customer experiences while driving greater efficiency.
One tool that may prove valuable to us is an emerging architecture called composable commerce. As a best practice, it offers promising benefits.
Like many modern architectures, composable commerce departs from traditional monolithic architecture.
Monolithic e-commerce platforms keep everything within one system. They usually support plug-in modules or APIs for enhancement and customization. Often, entire ecosystems emerge, populated by vendors offering solutions for specific needs.
With monolithic e-commerce platforms, the core e-commerce transaction footprint and its dependencies live under one roof. This includes everything from products and inventory to carts, orders, and payments.
Most SaaS companies offer monolithic platforms that you can extend via APIs and plugins. While SaaS platforms simplify infrastructure, they tend to be opinionated about everything from architecture and schemas to processes.
If we disagree with our SaaS provider's approach, our primary recourse is to switch platforms – though once we're invested in their ecosystem, migrating elsewhere can be costly.
This is one reason why companies choose custom platforms. Complete code ownership lets us match business needs precisely. That said, if adaptation and innovation are priorities, we need to avoid a monolithic architecture.
As a monolithic, single-codebase application grows, coupling becomes inevitable. Changing one thing can easily break twenty others. Worst of all, deployments are all-or-nothing – one bad release can bring down the entire platform.
Composable commerce architecture attempts to address many of these problems. However, before discussing it, we need to briefly examine "headless architecture," which underpins it.
Headless embraces an API-first architecture that cleanly separates frontends from backends. With headless, backends expose functionality through APIs that decoupled frontends consume.
Digital commerce frontends can take many forms: browser-based storefronts, mobile apps, and point-of-sale apps. APIs are designed to be abstract enough that any frontend, whether browser-based, mobile, or desktop, can use them.
This approach accelerates development, particularly when adding new channels or storefronts. Moreover, decoupling frontend from backend reduces the API performance optimization burden. It also lets us use specialized resources to deliver the storefront.
Cloud-native resources like Azure Static Web Apps or Azure Front Door can accelerate delivery of the browser storefront. Meanwhile, mobile app storefront delivery automatically benefits from app store scalability.
In a nutshell, headless means faster development, easier innovation, and better cross-channel scalability. And most of all, we get complete control over the frontend experience.
With that in mind, let's now look at composable commerce. Assume that we're already hosting a production commerce system.
We've recently begun stocking high-end products. Each product is a complex web of variants that express add-ons and enhancements. Storing this data requires a series of hacks and workarounds that push our platform to its limits.
To compound things, we plan to expand into a new international market. To create a user experience consistent with its local culture, we launch a new storefront. However, this adds significant overhead.
We now need to synchronize an already brittle collection of hacks across storefronts. And we need to reconcile every last microscopic difference between each product. This is operational madness.
This is where composable comes in.
Composable commerce takes the headless approach one step further by treating each backend system as a distinct entity with its own data store and API. Let's start with our products.
Instead of our product catalog being part of a monolith – or a series of disconnected monoliths – we now separate it into its own dedicated system.
We now build or buy a dedicated product catalog system designed to handle the complexity of product catalogs like ours. And it's specialized to centrally manage data that's published across multiple channels, accounting for internationalization.
We haven't avoided synchronization issues. But with single-source-of-truth centralization and smart data management tooling, our integration path is straightforward.
This is the composable way: treat each function (inventory, orders, purchasing, payment processing, etc.) as its own subsystem when needed. Then, choose the best-fit systems for each silo's needs. An added benefit is that specialized systems make it easier to delegate specialized roles.
Composable generally relies on textbook microservices, which require at least one adapter layer to simplify API interactions, i.e., the backend-for-frontend (BFF). We'll also need a dedicated orchestration system to ensure cross-system consistency.
So if it's not immediately obvious, this doesn't come without complexity, substantial engineering investment, or planning. As such, composable best serves enterprise organizations – often the ones with unique needs and resources needed to deliver.
Companies choosing composable likely want to unify their sales channels. They probably also want better scalability, more flexibility, more efficient internal operations, and faster time to market. And these are all things the composable approach facilitates.
