In recent years, the ecommerce industry has witnessed significant trends and shifts in the conventional paradigm. From consumers wanting to access a commerce platform from different devices to customers relying more on real-time product information, the changes have put many businesses in a compromising position. First, the traditional monolith architecture is not so flexible that the business can adapt to these emerging trends fast. Secondly, it is also quite difficult to deliver an omnichannel buying experience across all channels due to technical and functional differences.
To help businesses overcome these challenges, Commercetools has come up with a new development concept termed Commercetools composable commerce. It provides businesses the independence to choose best-of-breed components and amalgamate them to create a customized and top-notch commerce storefront for the users. However, as tempting as it sounds, implementing composable commerce with an existing business architecture is not everyone’s cup of tea. Considering this, we have prepared a checklist to help B2B and B2C businesses implement composable commerce and take their operations to the next level.
Identifying business and consumer needs
First of all, it is crucial to run a full-scale analysis of the business and consumer requirements before proceeding with Commercetools implementation. Without having a clear picture of the business processes and their loopholes, it won’t be possible to decide the technical and functional components required to build the composable storefront. Furthermore, not taking customer demands into consideration might lead to failure since the storefront won’t be able to meet the current market trends and demands.
Building a flexible and agile architecture
Once the business and customer requirements are analyzed and listed down, professionals need to focus on building the architecture. Ideally, most commerce businesses still use the monolith architecture for their website or application. Since it has frontend and backend layers integrated rigidly, it is not possible for developers to deploy code changes or new functionalities without impacting the business performance and continuity. Owing to this, professionals should adopt a radical approach, like building a MACH-based architecture. Here, headless architecture is mainly followed to decouple the frontend from its backend layers. Further modularity and scalability are achieved through microservices where the process services and components are decoupled in the backend layer. This creates a higher level of agility and flexibility, ensuring businesses can work independently on the storefront and the business logic layer.
Evaluating and selecting all building blocks
Once the architecture is built, ecommerce businesses need to decide on the building blocks or components to include. For instance, professionals should choose the list of Commercetools APIs that will help establish seamless communication between the decoupled frontend and backend layers. Similarly, businesses also need to choose the order management software, shopping cart design, customer data software, and so on. Once the building blocks are chosen, it will become easier to amalgamate them and develop the entire e-commerce website or web app for real-time users.
Seamlessly integrating with third-party platforms
The next step is to choose the required Commercetools integrations required for facilitating the major functionalities of the ecommerce platform. This will include choosing third-party integrations like ERP, CMS, customer data management software, and many more. Once done, businesses can easily extend the software’s functionalities without having to develop the features from scratch.
Creating an MVP-based prototype
Developing and deploying the composable commerce storefront and backend layer straightway will never do any good. This is because the large-scale implementation comes with numerous risks and challenges which will further slow down the business processes and reduce customer satisfaction and engagement. Owing to this, every business should create an MVP or Minimum Viable Product prototype. This will help them to test the ideas regarding the composable storefront and make any change if required. Furthermore, it will also help businesses identify the potential risks and work on solving the shortcomings before beginning with full-scale Commercetools implementation.
Focusing on compliance and security protocols
Since the composable commerce platform will deal with sensitive user information and confidential business data, focusing on security protocols and layers is crucial. From developing the governance framework to determining risk management protocols, there are numerous actions to be performed. This will help secure the APIs and backend business logic layer with optimal encapsulation so that the commerce platform won’t be exposed to security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, it will also help businesses to meet industry compliance without facing any legal complications.
Conducting end-to-end testing rigorously
It is crucial for every business to schedule an end-to-end testing cycle of the composable commerce application prior to releasing it in the market. From penetration and load testing to conducting system and user acceptance testing, there are several test schedules which need to be organized. Based on the testing results, bugs need to be fixed and the components involved with the commerce platform can be optimized.
Conclusion
There is no doubt that Commercetools composable commerce can open a host of opportunities for every e-commerce business. But before implementing this development approach, preparing a proper strategy is crucial so that the failure risks can be mitigated and the store performance can be optimized further.