Regardless of the time, location or platform that customers choose to interact with their favorite brands, they expect a personalized and engaging experience. And for businesses that can deliver a unified experience, meeting customers' heightened expectations is a great opportunity to outperform rivals. In fact, 80 percent of customers admit that the experience a company offers is just as essential as the goods and services it offers.
For many brands, a traditional commerce stack built on a monolithic architecture might seem like the ideal option for achieving an omnichannel customer experience. This structure combines all the tools a business needs into an all-in-one system, including a commerce solution, a content management system (CMS), personalization engine, analytics, and other tools. However, organizations can struggle to achieve a modern customer experience with this approach due to bottlenecks, which leaves shoppers wanting more.
Composing a Better Strategy
To overcome system bottlenecks that can prevent data sharing among content sources and inhibit new services reaching customers, many businesses are moving towards a composable commerce strategy instead. By taking a composable commerce approach, organizations can adopt a best-of-breed approach to digital commerce and can select the best tools and components to fit their unique needs.
1. Make products available on multiple channels.
With composable commerce, e-commerce stores can make businesses’ products available on multiple channels. Instead of just one desktop e-commerce site, virtual stores can be launched on different platforms like Instagram, TikTok or other mobile applications. With composable commerce, brands are empowered to manage their products from one location to another while still maintaining the visibility to see the entire customer journey.
2. Composable content to suit different use cases.
Because composable commerce supports better data management, it also offers the benefit to businesses of increased reusability. E-commerce brands can use composable commerce to create content for different use cases. The content for each use case can be managed easily in the backend using a headless CMS, while product availability and pricing data can be pulled from an e-commerce platform.
3. Leverage best-of-breed tools.
Forget about relying on traditional or legacy tools that don’t allow your business to innovate. Instead, turn to a composable commerce approach that leverages best-of-breed software. With a composable commerce strategy, businesses can build the customer experience with ease by upgrading websites, applications and portals for their brands under one portfolio.
4. Optimize application performance.
Composable commerce enables brands to improve their application performance, which makes customers happier and more likely to shop with the brand again. Having a composable commerce strategy, brands can unify their tech stack and swap out outdated components. As a result, this can lead to a stable yet flexible stack, meaning no more unnecessary crashes and the ability to update content and replace components when needed.
5. Introduce agile workflows.
With composable commerce being able to connect different tools in the tech stack, it’s possible for businesses to build agile workflows so that their internal teams can move quickly to create the omnichannel experience that their customers want.
6. Reduce TCO and increase ROI.
Monolithic systems are more susceptible to security breaches. They encourage you to pay for tools that you might not need, and thus won’t be used to their full potential. With a composable commerce strategy, however, businesses can reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the e-commerce system by only selecting the tools they need. This allows them to focus on increasing return on investment (ROI) and enhancing the customer experience by introducing new loyalty and promotion programs.
7. Increase scalability.
Lastly, composable commerce allows brands to swap out outdated components for modern solutions where they see fit. This makes it easier to increase scalability to deal with more demand and respond faster to evolving customer expectations.
Achieving Loyalty
A true omnichannel customer experience rewards customers by providing a consistent experience across all channels. Creating this environment for shoppers will help to foster customer loyalty no matter where, and how, they buy from the brand.
By leveraging composable commerce to build a customized stack, it’s much easier for businesses to achieve that all-important omnichannel experience.
Michael Lukaszczyk is the co-founder and CEO at Hygraph. He's a SaaS builder with a product focus and 19 years of web development experience.
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Michael Lukaszczyk is the co-founder and CEO at Hygraph. He's a SaaS builder with a product focus and 19 years of web development experience.