The Future of Composable Commerce: 3 Trends in Global MACH Adoption

The retail industry has shifted towards greater support for MACH-enabled technology and composable commerce in recent years. Case in point: the MACH Global Research 2024 report found that 91 percent of IT decision-makers say this architecture will be instrumental to their organization’s success by 2030.

But what is MACH technology? For retailers, MACH is a way of building a flexible, future-prepared digital ecosystem that creates the best customer experience possible. Using MACH as the backbone of platforms can help retailers quickly capitalize on trends and changing customer demands.

As the transition towards MACH-enabled composable commerce continues, key themes are emerging surrounding pressure to upgrade IT, legacy debt hurdles, and crucial competitive benefits. Let’s dig into these themes and discuss how this transition will impact retail for decades.

1. Withstanding IT Innovation Pressure

In an industry like retail in which customers have hundreds, if not thousands, of options to choose from, innovation is oftentimes seen as a key differentiator. However, knowing how and where to innovate can be a challenge as the industry is constantly evolving.

In fact, 75 percent of IT decision-makers feel pressure to innovate. For 90 percent, this pressure stems from increasing customer demands and a fear of being left behind by the competition. Despite these concerns, 38 percent of IT infrastructure is still legacy.

However, companies that transition to focus more on MACH principles are better prepared to shift towards a culture of ongoing innovation. The “plug and play” approach of MACH technologies and a composable architecture empower retailers to continuously evolve their ecosystem piece by piece with the right technology needed in that moment.

As a result, shoppers have access to top-tier experiences and retailers stand out from the competition while remaining ahead of the pressure to innovate.

2. Investing in Long-Lasting Technology

While retailers may desire to innovate, this goal can be expensive and time consuming.

Currently, IT departments with over 75 percent legacy technology spend 71 percent of their budget on upgrades. This “legacy debt” limits a retailer’s ability to jump on sudden shifts in markets and exceed customer expectations. Even worse, 49 percent of organizations spend over a month developing a new service.

Composable MACH architecture makes it significantly more cost effective and efficient for retailers to upgrade the customer journey and deliver new experiences.

Organizations that use MACH technology for more than half of their customer-facing infrastructure are more likely to roll out improvements at least once a week. And, of the businesses that do make adjustments at that frequency, 82 percent believe they're ahead of their competition in terms of innovative experiences. This is because MACH technology allows retailers to utilize composable and best-of-breed technology that enables faster implementation of customer-facing improvements. And, due to the nature of MACH technology’s composable architecture, new services can be deployed with a significant reduction in risk as there's less dependency between services.

Investing in MACH is financially sustainable and can help retailers re-invest the saved money back into the customer experience.

3. Driving Innovative Experiences That Matter

Finally, MACH architecture empowers retailers to be customer-driven, bold, agile, proactive and early adopters of modern experiences.

This visual shows that organizations that have significantly increased their proportion of MACH infrastructure are more likely to display these values than those that have kept the same or decreased the proportion of MACH infrastructure.

And 89 percent of IT decision-makers in the U.S. shared that MACH has been very or quite important in helping their organization meet customer expectations in recent years. What’s more, the greater the proportion of their IT infrastructure that is MACH, the more likely decision-makers are to believe that MACH has been important in helping them achieve success.

The more an organization embraces MACH, the greater the benefits it reaps as a result.

The Future Starts Now With MACH

MACH helps businesses, including retailers, become customer-driven, bold, agile, proactive and early adopters of game-changing technology. MACH investments can also reduce legacy debt and time-to-market for innovative experiences.

We’re thrilled that the future of composable commerce is here and ready for retailers to embrace it by leveraging MACH architecture.

Holly Hall is managing director of MACH Alliance, a not-for-profit industry body that advocates for open and best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystems.