Composable Commerce: Accelerating Retail Development 

Modernize your e-commerce technology stack with personalization, curation and virtual consultation with modular add-on components, starting from where you are today.

The world is full of shoppers, and the ways they like to shop are varied and ever-changing. When the COVID pandemic took hold, for example, consumers had no choice but to increase their online shopping significantly, and some may never fully turn back to in-store specialty retail shopping.

The challenge for retailers is to meet their customers wherever they are and give them the shopping experience they want, be it online, in the store, or—more recently—as a blended experience that bridges those two worlds. Buying printer ink online may be easy, but buying specialty retail products—think cosmetics, shoes, bicycles, sofas, and camping gear—is harder and often requires some kind of virtual helping hand. A guided, connected retail experience is an ideal solution.

Unfortunately, most monolithic e-commerce platforms have traditionally been designed to get consumers from search to shopping cart as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. This results in minimal opportunities to provide the kind of personalization, curation, virtual consultation, and content management that the post-COVID world demands. Adding such features to existing e-commerce platforms can seem like a bigger challenge than developers are willing to accept, especially if they see the work as a complete top-to-bottom rebuild. What they need is an easier way to adapt, starting from where they are today. Modernization of the retail technology stack is critical not only for improving the shopping experience but also for deploying ideas, innovations, and features that capture consumers’ imaginations.

Composable Commerce: Building Blocks for Better Shopping

In recent years, headless CMS has been one strategy for modernizing experience more easily. Today, however, organizations are extending this to include all components of the stack, in which developers pick and choose best-of-breed elements from across the entire e-commerce ecosystem to get more power and flexibility into their e-commerce stacks smoothly and without compromise.

The interchangeable building-block nature of composable commerce gives retailers the chance to address complex specialty retail shopping needs and facilitate relationship shopping quickly, without overburdening developers. They can add new and reusable components via APIs and speed up the process with accelerators.

What kinds of features can developers add to the online retail experience?

- Personalization based on search and previous engagement
- Live streaming of relevant product-related content
- Smart fit features
- Virtual consultations with local sales associates via text, chat or video
- Integration of social media feeds, bringing influencers into the shopping conversation
- An array of online tools to increase engagement and loyalty
- Better tools for BOPIS (buy online, pickup in-store) shopping options
- New options for smart merchandising

By adding such features, shopping becomes less about aimless searching and more about having a rewarding experience, an experience retailers can optimize over time to boost engagement, conversion rates and the bottom line.

Bringing Composable Commerce to the E-commerce Stack

It’s interesting to note that very often, online retailers don’t fully recognize their own pain points because they’re stuck in a legacy mindset or simply aren’t familiar with the kinds of tools that could modernize their e-commerce stacks. That’s why it’s important not to start a composable commerce modernization discussion by dwelling on tech tools but rather by focusing on business goals, consumer experience relationship building, and market competition. What do your customers want today, and why can’t they have it right away? And if they change their minds tomorrow, how will you respond?

The next step is to fully understand the e-commerce platform currently in place, probing for places where its rigidity can be loosened and modernized by composable commerce modules with easy APIs and accelerators that help make quick work of implementation.

It’s also important to remember that retailers sit between their customers and their suppliers. Composable commerce can bring better smart merchandising to the e-commerce platform, helping retailers communicate with their suppliers to place orders, manage collections and kick off promotions, all with an eye toward increasing conversions. At a time when global supply chain disruptions have become the norm, keeping these lines of communication open and efficient has never been more important.

CI&T: Start From Where You Are Today

The operate stage defines and reviews internal processes and operating models to keep costs under CI&T's expertise in composable commerce has accelerated business impact for leading retailers around the world. By combining insight-driven digital strategy, customer-centric design and best-in-class engineering, CI&T brings ideas to market faster, generating immediate business results. When it comes to deployment, CI&T’s composable commerce accelerators can save up to 20 percent of deployment time.

CI&T never starts with a “rip and replace” strategy. Instead, we work to maintain the stability of the tech stack, with no need to scrap it and start over. Our experience in development means we know where to look for opportunities to streamline, helping retailers quickly improve the metrics that matter most: time on site, loyalty and conversion. 

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