Marrying Content and Ecommerce with Composable Commerce

When a movie gets rave reviews, it’s not uncommon for the studio to order the production of a sequel. Sometimes these sequels flop considerably, but classics are often born that span more than just a second film. Franchise movies like Star Wars, The Dark Knight, and others are a few contemporary examples of excellent follow-ups to already great movies.

A sequel is simply the next stage of a film that continues to tell the story and further develops the idea. For ecommerce businesses that were introduced to the concept of headless ecommerce, the sequel is on the horizon, and it’s known as composable commerce. Headless commerce allows us to choose the best frontend experiences. But composable commerce goes a step further, enabling businesses to select the frontend experiences and the backend components that make up their ecommerce stacks.

Uniting content and commerce along the entire customer journey is a key goal for major enterprises. But what if the current tools can’t adequately implement the desired content marketing strategy? Headless commerce can help in many ways, but the composable commerce approach does an even better job.

Composable commerce is a modern approach to ecommerce that provides businesses with the option to choose best-of-breed technologies to build their ecommerce stack. Business capabilities are bundled as separate microservices enabling enterprises to separate concerns and reduce complexity.

For example, a monolithic ecommerce solution might provide an ecommerce platform that includes features for managing a product catalog, processing payments, initiating delivery, and more. While it may be convenient to have all of this functionality together, a company might find another alternative on the market that provides more options and flexibility for each specific task. Composable commerce allows them to leverage these services and create an ecommerce stack that is customized to their needs.

Traditional monolithic platforms don’t allow organizations to break their rigid molds. While the out-of-the-box functionality may keep things simple, companies are left with a cookie-cutter approach to building their commerce experiences. The headless commerce approach provides more freedom, but it comes with the cost and effort to build new frontends and requires businesses to have talent on staff to get the most out of it. On the other hand, composable commerce can provide both freedom and simplicity.

Many organizations are now considering the composable commerce approach due to their need to embrace content commerce or content-driven commerce, where content is strategically integrated into the customer experience and throughout the entire customer journey to give customers a high-quality shopping experience.

According to Gartner, ‘application leaders responsible for digital commerce should prepare for a “composable” approach using packaged business capabilities to move toward future-proof digital commerce experiences.’

Turning to composable commerce helps companies integrate content marketing tools into their sales processes, leveraging a CMS, personalization tools, CRM, and more to enhance the experience.

The customer journey has pivoted from brick and mortar stores and spans several digital channels. However, the experiences on these channels and several ecommerce shops were once limited to simple product information and SEO text. Nowadays, customers want to be informed, inspired, and entertained throughout the buying process. There are many content personalization examples that highlight the importance of this. Traditional commerce platforms can place limitations on the experiences created, and while headless commerce makes it easier to embrace these additional channels, business users still need extra tools at their disposal.

Businesses want to capitalize on the benefits of creating modern ecommerce experiences, including product differentiation, increased customer loyalty, and engagement, more sales, and an overall positive customer experience.

Embracing the composable commerce approach allows businesses to implement a content commerce strategy. The right CMS enables them to manage both; however, organizations need to have the fundamentals in place at a technical and marketing level to cater to developers and marketers.
 

The most important aspect of implementing composable commerce is an open, modular platform that enables businesses to package different services into components and swap them as necessary.

A composable commerce platform must have robust APIs that enable the seamless integration with other systems and various frontends channels, facilitating a content-driven commerce strategy. By separating the frontend from the backend, organizations can deliver to a wide range of digital touchpoints.

One of the drawbacks of monolithic architectures and suite systems is that integrations can be complex and challenging. Composable commerce systems need to support flexible integrations so that organizations can choose the tools that fit their tech stack, including those that are yet to be created.
 

Composable commerce is meant to help businesses create better shopping experiences for their customers. The marketing features necessary to enable this include:

Marketers shouldn’t feel like they need to consult their IT teams every time they need to create landing pages, microsites, or other content experiences. A composable commerce platform should provide visual, WYSIWYG editing and facilitate fast and easy content creation and editing.

Headless and composable commerce provide access to new frontends to publish content. Marketers need to be able to create content once, then publish and reuse it across various mediums.

Content and ecommerce experiences need to cater to worldwide audiences. Content translation and localization is necessary to adapt to different culture, language, and audience requirements.

Marketing teams need access to analytics to gain insights about incoming traffic and know whether or not their visitors are converting into buyers.

Marketers need to be able to tailor content based on behaviors and previous purchases, as well as define segmented audiences to create personalized experiences.
 

Composable commerce lets businesses reap the following benefits:

With composable commerce, companies have the freedom to choose the best-of-breed tools that are the best fit for a particular job. For example, rather than being restricted to the personalization capabilities provided by a monolithic platform, they can choose the best software on the market. Or, as their ecommerce shop grows, they may need to change how they ship products. Composable commerce allows them to select an emerging SaaS solution that simplifies the shipping process if they so wish.

Composable commerce gives retailers and merchants increased flexibility. Without being locked into a suite vendor, they can quickly adapt to changes in technology and the marketplace. By using an API-first or microservices-based approach they can respond to market trends, integrate new channels, or leverage new data more easily.

Implementing composable commerce enables businesses to add tools and scale as necessary to cope with increasing demand on their ecommerce stores.

Creating an omnichannel ecommerce experience becomes much easier for marketing teams as organizations embrace composable commerce. They have the flexibility to create marketing campaigns that span websites, mobile applications, digital kiosks, and more. That is why an omnichannel strategy for content marketing is one of the pillars of successful B2B commerce.

Magnolia’s composable DXP and headless CMS offer the fastest way to launch modern digital commerce experiences. It also allows organizations to fully embrace composable commerce and create multi-channel shopping experiences.

Open and modular architecture: Magnolia allows you to choose the best building blocks for your ecommerce stack and to easily integrate them via APIs.

Connector Packs: Magnolia offers many pre-built connectors that extend Magnolia by capabilities provided by other digital experience systems, making integrations with commerce, analytics, marketing automation, or digital asset management systems very easy.

Content platform for ecommerce: As the #1 content platform for ecommerce, Magnolia enables you to create better ecommerce experiences and a seamless shopping journey for your customers.

Want to learn more about ecommerce? Check out these Digital Leadership Lessons From Bleddyn Williams about being faster to market in ecommerce.