Headless commerce was only the beginning — composable commerce goes deeper with solutions that fit your business to a tee

Every business that dealt with existential angst during the onset of the global pandemic knows that ecommerce—going digital—was the only way to survive when the majority of life was under lockdown. Two years on, organizations are now dealing with a new reality—the acknowledgement of unpredictability and chaos at a time of skyrocketing growth. The reopening of all aspects of life—offices, malls, mass attractions, in-person events, travel, and more—and a positive forecast signalling strong ecommerce growth through 2024 make it all seem like everything is on the up and up. But businesses ought to be prepared, as an impending recession looms, making it a very good reason for businesses to remain nimble and agile.

In the time that you've embarked on digitalizing your business, you might have discovered that because so much has changed around us in recent times, your needs might also have surpassed any of your original plans, and, indeed, even any off-the-shelf solutions you had your eye on. The complexity of retail is mirroring that of the global economy—unpredictable, continuously changing, and rife with problems, from the supply chain to inflation to real estate woes as people return to work.

Sometimes, finding the right solutions might just be akin to finding the golden key that can open any door. In fact, more likely than not, you're going to find that nothing quite fits your exact needs.?

That's because every business is different.?

Composable commerce—The zig to your zag

In continuing to make sound judgments on your investments in your digitalization journey, you need to ask yourself these big questions:?

• How do you ensure your investments are enabling you to remain agile in the face of constant change??
• What do you invest in to help your business thrive??
• Where are your customers? Are they at home or in the office? What is an effective omnichannel strategy and how do you actually roll it out??

These are just some questions, and there are many others. From my vantage point, the biggest favour you can do for your business is to ensure that your digitalization efforts, no matter the size, be centered on people. And that’s why a composable commerce approach makes sense because it gives your teams the flexibility and elasticity they need to shape technology to your organization's exact needs while making everything as cohesive as possible.

Off-the-shelf solutions that promise end-to-end capabilities aren’t necessarily a bad thing. But they're not likely to meet all your needs, especially when today’s fast-moving business landscape demands that you respond just as quickly.?

The reality is there are just a lot of nuances in the types of challenges businesses face, but in a reductive manner, what they all boil down to is that the way to solving them often introduces complexity to processes, operations and workflows. That's why businesses often end up picking custom-built applications to solve specific problems that third-party solutions won't. As time goes by, these same businesses will likely find themselves having to integrate these custom solutions with third-party applications to complete core parts of the experience they’re creating. See? Complexity.

Composable commerce, on the other hand, recognizes that you need to pick the most suitable solutions, no matter where they're from, and it serves as the backbone for the platform(s) you're building.?

The flexibility of a low-code development platform

With our VTEX IO, for instance, brands gain the ability to build the experiences they want in a low-code development platform that plays well with other solutions. Suddenly, brands can connect to other data sources easily, and embrace new capabilities at any time.

It doesn't even matter if you're not API-adherent on day one or not. That's how superbly flexible VTEX IO is. To give you an example, VTEX provides a content management system (CMS) that doesn't depend on whether your business is built on APIs. VTEX IO simply provides you a world of options in creating the customer journey you've always envisioned. (Just say when!)

With?VTEX IO, you can simply create a new layer on top of the commerce platform that you already have. This new layer can orchestrate the data and capabilities from both VTEX and third-party applications to deliver contextual experiences across the customer journey.?

Carrefour Brazil: How VTEX IO enabled the joy of shopping for more than 13 million customers

If you've any doubts at all about composable commerce and the power of VTEX IO, just look at what we did for Carrefour Brazil. Outside of its native home, France, Carrefour Brazil has the largest market presence in the world, with more than 13 million customers relying on the grocer for their daily needs. Comprised of 241 hypermarkets and 41 supermarkets, Carrefour Brazil sells more than 25 million products annually, and has more than seven million product SKUs in its line-up, including groceries and non-grocery items, covering everything from electronics to fashion.?

With VTEX IO, Carrefour Brazil gained increased resilience to scale dynamically to handle peak orders and volumes traded, something it couldn't achieve with its legacy platform. In fact, VTEX enabled Carrefour to handle cyber-events like Black Fridays with nary a concern. VTEX IO also gave Carrefour Brazil the ability to build truly tailor-made solutions by combining pre-built services from VTEX with custom-built and third-party applications.?

By partnering with VTEX, Carrefour wholly embraced composable commerce to decouple their front- and back-end, so that customer experiences are managed separately from commerce functions, allowing the brand to unify experiences so that promotions are matched consistently no matter the channel. Furthermore, Carrefour is able to leverage the same checkout system across systems for a seamless customer experience, no matter where they're shopping from—the store, PC, or smartphone.?

Ultimately, composable commerce is about letting you mix and match best-of-breed third-party solutions and tailor them to whatever your needs are. And it works no matter the size of your business today.

Whether it's content, services, data, or building a better customer experience, composable commerce goes beyond integrations to provide the foundation for you to seamlessly create and deploy specific composable experiences right down to the minutest and most esoteric needs. At the same time, it empowers you to develop a unified customer experience—just like we did for Carrefour Brazil.?

?If you want to learn more about how composable commerce can help with your ecommerce business, feel free to reach our team here for expert advice.?