From social media apps to smart IoT devices, commerce is inside every aspect of today’s digital way of life. Selling products demands more than a single channel or one commerce avenue.

So, how are businesses adapting? According to Gartner, organizations adopting a composable approach will have the advantage – outpacing the competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation.

Today’s businesses need future-ready commerce
An outdated commerce platform can impact your ability to connect to new systems or integrate with best-in-breed technologies. But there’s no Swiss-army-knife, one-size-fits-all solution for commerce technologies. It’s why we see so many hyper-specialized products on the market.

As a business, you must select and connect best-of-breed products to create the optimal user experience. That’s what composable commerce is – it’s selecting the best individual products that easily integrate with your stack, eliminating technical debt and removing any dependencies for your commerce strategy.

Think of it like the iterative evolution of technology. Five years ago, mobile phones were less technologically capable and electric cars were in their infancy, but now both are experiencing innovative leaps in technology. It’s the same for commerce platforms.

Old platforms are evolving into composable platforms, allowing you to build your commerce strategy based on specific customer needs. For example, instead of a commerce platform handling payment security and processing, you could use a payments provider to ensure you’re supported by perfect-fit solutions.

MACH changes everything
To seize the power of a composable e-commerce approach, businesses are adopting solutions that use MACH architecture – a set of technological principles behind new, best-of-breed technology platforms.

• Microservices – these are individually developed, deployed and managed business functions that enable the composability of Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs)
• API-first – by seamlessly weaving two or more complementary applications or services together, you can bring your composable e-commerce strategy to life
• Cloud-native – scalable and adaptable, cloud-native gives you the freedom to access individual components on-demand, eliminating the need for upgrades
• Headless – the decoupled nature of headless applications ensures the customer interface is continually approved, allowing you to extend across any number of endpoints

What does this mean in practical terms? Despite the benefits of MACH architecture, many businesses still use legacy e-commerce platforms with monolithic architecture. While monolithic architecture has played its part in e-commerce, it lacks the scalability, flexibility, and agility required by dynamic, competitive businesses.

Take this hypothetical scenario, for example:
As an online clothing retailer, FashionFiesta began its online journey using a monolithic e-commerce platform. But as the company grew, challenges with scalability, flexibility, and deployment of new features to market quickly became apparent. To overcome these, the retailer transitioned to a MACH-based headless e-commerce solution.This change allowed FashionFiesta to adopt a microservices approach that separated individual functions into distinct services, such as payment processing, inventory management, and user authentication. Specific updates and scaling could then be completed without costly disruption to other services.The transition also provided API-first functionality, allowing for the seamless integration of third-party solutions. This meant the retailer could quickly adopt a new AI-driven recommendation engine to suggest products to its users and offer an enhanced shopping experience. Combined with the cloud-native design of MACH architecture, the retailer is enabled to scale at will, whenever demand dictates. This elasticity ensures optimal performance, even during unexpected traffic spikes.

With a new headless approach, FashionFiesta’s backend and frontend were decoupled. The brand was then able to quickly revamp its website design or launch a new mobile app without lengthy backend overhauls. And these initiatives were easy to expand to other platforms, like smartwatches or voice assistants.

Sitecore – exceeding expectations
We’re already seeing high expectations from businesses exploring composable commerce, something that’s been accelerated by the functionality and customer experiences introduced by big brands like Amazon. But for customers, it’s an accurate search feature that often makes or breaks a good shopping experience.

With Sitecore Commerce Cloud, your business can address these challenges and simultaneously deliver an exceptional customer experience. Introducing two products: Sitecore OrderCloud and Sitecore Discover.

Sitecore OrderCloud is an API-first, headless e-commerce platform that allows businesses to add users, products, candidate catalog categories, and take orders. However, it has a very different architecture to other platforms out there. Think of an electric engine from Tesla and a combustion engine from BMW – both create a power output while being entirely different under the hood. Sitecore OrderCloud does the same work as a traditional platform, but its difference lies in the flexibility and agility it gives businesses.

Product search is a challenging area to get right. Sitecore Discover simplifies search by providing an immense amount of capability to improve the customer experience. It equips businesses to push compelling AI-personalized product recommendations to their audience that are based on previous analytics, browsing history, and interests, for example.

Combined, you get a solution that’s as future-ready as it is composable, flexible and scalable. Plus, it’s cloud-based, so you can forget about infrastructure costs and network security to focus on what matters for your business.

These amazing abilities have been confirmed by independent analysts as Sitecore has been named a “Leader” in the IDC MarketScape for Worldwide B2B Digital Commerce for Midmarket 2023-24 Vendor Assessment.

Composable commerce matches your growth
Sitecore OrderCloud’s agility and flexibility are perfect for solving complex e-commerce problems. Imagine a coffee bean producer that sells in bulk to distributors, wholesalers, retailers, and local coffee shops. In this B2B scenario, distributors may want to buy pallets of coffee beans while retailers and local coffee shop owners may only want small bags. With Sitecore OrderCloud, these different orders could be managed independently, ensuring complete flexibility should business requirements change.

The same can be said for businesses that expand internationally after starting with a smaller platform in one country. Expanding introduces new challenges to navigate, but Sitecore OrderCloud allows you to scale efficiently, offer prices in various currencies and present content in different languages.

The future is composable
The first step towards a composable future starts with identifying your best-of-breed commerce platform and an experienced partner you can trust. Sitecore Commerce Cloud is built to help you navigate complex B2C e-commerce environments and private marketplaces, with the option to explore D2C commerce too. Combine this with Avanade’s broad technical expertise, and tapping into the power of composable commerce just became easier than ever.

Note: This blog was originally published by Naveed Ahmad at https://www.avanade.com/en/blogs/avanade-insights/experiences/sitecore-commerce-cloud