By Nigel Hunter
The modern consumer is everywhere, online, offline, in-store and out of store, can you meet those consumers no matter where they are? And more importantly do you have the ability to reach those consumers if they go somewhere else? Being able to quickly turn what was previously a marketing only channel into a sales channel is an essential feature of a truly flexible business who wants to be able to sell to their consumers regardless of where they are. If you can’t say yes to these questions, then it’s likely that replatforming to a more composable architecture will empower your business to meet those consumers.
So, what is the benefit that migration to a composable architecture gives a merchant when they’re trying to meet their consumers?
A Fragmented Journey
If you are currently on a monolithic platform, then it’s likely that you do not have simple and easy ways of being present in all the right arenas to compete for your consumers attention. When you replatform to a composable architecture you are better positioned to use best of breed systems and connect them around your core e-commerce engine. This provides you with the opportunity to work out what best of breed means for you specifically and what systems you need to put in place to remain flexible in order to keep up with changes in market trends and demands.
For example, you could have an organisation which markets online on multiple different social platforms but doesn’t then have the ability to sell in those social platforms. Replatforming to a composable architecture can benefit with inbuilt and native integrations to accelerate the use of these channels as sales channels. A good example of this is BigCommerce to TikTok. This prebuilt connectivity means that merchants are not starting from scratch to enable that social platform as a sales channel, providing an easy path for them to reach those customers.
Composable architecture gives increased flexibility when interlinking different systems using API first approaches, which can remove some of the traditional blockers found in typical monolithic solutions.
So, when talking about meeting consumers it’s important to understand where consumers are and what paths they take. As stated before, they’re in multiple places, they can begin a journey on one channel and end the journey on another. To the consumer, they want the ability to use many channels and a consistent approach across them. As an example, a consumers could start, but not finish, their journey online, before deciding to then go to your physical store. Often, there a disconnect between those when using monolithic applications and connecting them is complex and costly. From a consumer point of view, this disconnect means the customer starts their journey again in the new channel and the in-store staff aren’t even aware of what they were doing in the other channel.
These are just some of the scenarios that can play out which means a merchant isn’t able to meet the customer where they are resulting in broken end to end journeys.
In a composable world they offer improved ways to connect systems together, to support an improved end to end customer journey across the channels your consumer is using. This ensures you can reach your consumer where they are.
Future Ready
When moving from monolithic to composable, there are various options you can select as a merchant to make the best use of the best of breed systems in the market that can further your ability to reach your customers.
Staying with a monolith approach is always an option, you can still integrate other platforms on your monolithic platform. You can develop the integration yourself and bolt on those best of breed systems, but in doing so you’re likely replacing functionality that already exists in the monolithic with other systems. This results in you now paying for both that new system and also still paying the price for the monolithic despite not needing or using that functionality you’ve replaced anymore.
This approach can be very time-consuming and costly. Whereas in a composable world, you have the ability to build out a wider infrastructure which naturally integrates using defined patterns instead of custom integrations with a monolith.
It may be that right now, you are able to meet your customer as you don’t need to introduce these new channels, such as TikTok. However, 5 years down the line your consumer can change extensively, so you need the ability to follow them, adding new channels and functionality as needed to meet these new consumers.
Are you thinking its time for a change in platform? Get in touch today for comprehensive consultation.