Composable commerce is a flexible approach to building an eCommerce system that allows businesses to select and merge a variety of best-of-breed vendors and components, resulting in customized solutions. In contrast to the traditional monolithic approach, all components are derived from a single vendor and are tightly integrated.

Composable commerce enables teams to create an ecosystem that is customized to meet their organization’s specific business needs. For example, an eCommerce store selling trainers chooses the best vendors for particular functions. It chooses Shopify for the eCommerce platform, Stripe for the transaction processing, Algolia for the search engine, Yotpo for the customer reviews, Contentful to manage the content (CMS), and ShipBob for order fulfillment. This seamless integration of multiple best-of-breed vendors allows the store to have a highly customized, adaptable, and flexible platform that can easily be updated to meet the needs of the business. A monolithic commerce, however, lacks that same versatility. Utilizing a single system, customizing, and advancing specific elements requires updating the entire platform, which is a time-consuming process.

Besides modularity, flexibility, and best-of-breed solutions, composable commerce is characterized by its scalability, time-to-market, and minimized TCO ( Total Cost of Ownership), all highlighting its simplicity and assets. Composable commerce enables businesses to scale specific components independently to handle their growth efficiently without slowing other functions like customer support and shipping. Displaying its resilience by showing the system can operate if one component falters. The modular business model accelerates time-to-market by working on the existing services they have instead of starting from scratch and utilizing APIs to connect to different services, allowing businesses to add new features without major delays. The tailored commerce also reduces TCO, giving businesses the advantage of only paying for the components they need. 

However, composable commerce can be complex. As it involves combining multiple services, it can be difficult to manage and arrange them. PIM (Product Information Management) solves this as it’s a single source of truth for product data. It makes sure that all the components have accurate, up-to-date information, and avoids data silos which helps maintain that the data is consistent across various channels. It decreases time-to-market even more with composable commerce. Along with PIM, composable commerce increases customer sales and conversion rates and reduces return rates and operational costs. This overall improves customer experience as it guarantees that they receive the correct information, and strengthens customer loyalty to brands and enterprises, as composable commerce selects the best vendors to provide and deliver the best functionality.