''Commerce is complicated, composable commerce can simplify it'' - by Michael Scholz, VP of Customer and Product Marketing
With commerce continuing to rapidly evolve and new technologies and digital channels constantly emerging, it can be difficult for a business leader to adapt and deliver the experiences consumers want and expect today. On any given day, you might read a white paper on why you need to deliver omnichannel experiences, attend a seminar on the importance of connected commerce or hear a pitch about how to adopt a unified commerce strategy. It can be a bit overwhelming, even for a commerce expert.
Recently, I had an experience as a consumer that reinforced just how difficult delivering commerce is today. I decided to purchase an accessory for my SUV online, a seemingly easy task that quickly turned into a frustrating commerce experience. The process of finding the right product involved visiting the website of the Fortune 50 automaker, reaching out to various related communities on differing social media channels for advice and calling my local dealership. After finally confirming exactly what product would fit my SUV, I headed back to the website and hit checkout only to discover the accessory was on backorder for approximately two months. Needless to say, I was disappointed. I called back the dealership and thankfully they kindly offered to order it for me at the same price with an expected delivery in 2-3 business days. I got it the very next day.
We’ve all had similar experiences that left us shaking our heads wondering how something like this could happen with all the advanced technology available today. In my case, all I could think was that if the aforementioned automaker had a MACH?-driven composable commerce solution in place, I could have quickly and easily made my purchase. Its website would be able to support a much more robust search experience that could accurately match my vehicle specs to the correct size product, and its consumer website inventory management system could be aligned with its dealership system so I wouldn’t have received a product unavailable message. It could have been a seamless customer journey.
Many thriving brands —? Audi, NBCUniversal, Sephora, and Express to name a few — have embraced composable commerce to enable them to deliver enhanced customer experiences that drive sales. They gave up having to continually work around the restrictions of their rigid, monolithic platform to capitalize on the flexible, scalable environment composable commerce offers. Instead of being limited by the capabilities of the monolith design, they can explore as many channels as they want, experiment with omnichannel and multichannel strategies and expand into new categories and markets. Basically, they gained the freedom to give their customers choices they couldn’t deliver before.
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This isn’t to say that every brand should embrace every new innovation, strategy or channel that arrives on the scene. For example, if you know your customer isn’t on TikTok, then don’t invest in having a presence on that platform; or if they’re not part of the demographic buying products with cryptocurrency, you certainly don’t have to enable crypto payments. The point is, you want to be able to experiment, do what’s best for your business at your own pace, and deliver the experiences your customers want with ease and without risk. Unfortunately, if you’re still running your commerce on a monolith, it’s simply not possible.
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These legacy platforms were introduced to support a single ecommerce channel — the desktop computer. When the introduction of smartphones disrupted the industry by turning online shopping into a mobile experience, suddenly everyone started talking about implementing multichannel digital commerce strategies. Then, social media platforms started enabling commerce and omnichannel became the buzzword defining the ideal customer experience. I’d argue that at this point in the evolution of commerce, brands are realizing they might not want to present the same user experience on every channel. They’re finding that delivering unique experiences based on the audience segment they’re targeting and the channel can drive better results. As a result, the multichannel strategy is having a bit of a renaissance.?
The difference this time around is that modern technology, specifically headless and composable commerce, enables brands to run multiple frontend experiences through a single backend. So, no matter how many different channels or how many unique experiences you offer, all your product and customer data is centralized in one place, giving you greater ability to analyze and leverage it while at the same time delivering a better experience for your customers. This emerging concept — unified commerce — is becoming the more accepted vision of what commerce today should look like.
Whether it’s multichannel, omnichannel, connected, unified or whatever is coming next — you should have the ability to embrace any or all of them — but if you’re not where you need to be from a technology perspective, you can’t. While figuring out the best way to move forward may seem incredibly complicated, here’s the good news. Composable commerce isn’t just a trendy buzzword, it’s a technology approach that can absolutely simplify it for you.