'Composable commerce': only meaningful if it adds value to your business

Significant changes to your online infrastructure ideally begin with a discovery phase, a holistic process to explore and define your needs, goals, and requirements. In practice, this involves three parallel tracks: business, customer, and technology. Each track informs and complements the others: 

• Business: Focuses on revenue generation, key performance indicators (KPIs), and the operations required to achieve them. It also includes market vision and growth plans, such as international expansion.
• Customer: Centers on the customer experience and journey. By interviewing clients across all segments, you can uncover challenges, buying drivers, and customer behaviors—often different from what internal teams assume.
• Technology: Examines your existing IT landscape, including integrations, data flows, IT principles, and platforms/tools that align with the needs identified in the business and customer tracks. 

In the technology track, you identify specific requirements and match them to potential solutions. Your implementation partner should provide a shortlist of options tailored to your needs, enabling efficient decision-making. 

Tinkering Under the Hood 

Next you get to work. Once you've outlined your requirements, it's time to take action. A multidisciplinary approach is crucial to ensure no single department dominates, avoiding outcomes that are either: not business-oriented, misaligned with customer needs, or technically infeasible or too expensive. 

Some practical guidelines include: 

• For small businesses a full-suite solution often works best, offering manageability within a single system.
• Composable commerce with best-of-breed solutions is more achievable.
• Proven combinations of solutions (accelerators)—such as a particular commerce engine with a compatible CMS, PIM, and frontend—can jumpstart your implementation using best practices and methodologies. 

Composable commerce is flexible and agnostic, allowing diverse systems to integrate. However, the complexity of implementation depends on your organization. For example, if building on Salesforce, having in-house developers with relevant experience can make a huge difference. And in large organizations governance is critical to determine role-based access. 

A commercial rationale can help guide these technical decisions effectively. 

Focus on Reducing Friction 

Such projects can take months or even years, especially for large organizations replacing entire infrastructures. Quick wins are essential to reassure stakeholders and budget holders. These wins typically involve addressing the most significant pain points identified during discovery, such as: 

• Time wasted on content management,
• Customers struggling to find products,
• Performance issues during peak times (e.g., holidays),
• Inability to promote high-margin products online. 

Addressing these issues provides momentum for the project. It’s crucial to solve real problems and not let sentiment dominate decisions. Involve users throughout development by validating solutions with mockups, wireframes, and A/B testing. Ensure all users can adopt the new system, whether through key users or training sessions. 

KPIs Validate Your Success 

Every pain point tackled creates its own business case with unique KPIs. These KPIs demonstrate ROI by answering: what numbers do we need to achieve to tick off the expected profit? Well-defined KPIs keep stakeholders satisfied and are vital during and after implementation. 

Continuous KPI monitoring helps drive ongoing improvements. As my colleague Ruben Frijns explains, task-oriented reporting ensures that decisions are not only data-driven but also goal-driven. 

Composable commerce should never be the starting point for your online strategy. Ultimately, the goal is to deliver value to your customers and your business, which is measurable through KPIs. Technology is merely a tool to achieve this. Once decoupled, you can rapidly adapt your composable landscape with new tools and innovations. However, the discovery phase might reveal opportunities for quicker wins in other areas. Start every project with a holistic view of your business, customers, and technology to identify the best path forward.