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Interest in composable and headless architecture for e-commerce solutions has grown enormously in recent years. Composable offers many benefits but also comes with costs that are often not talked about. In this article I want to give a balanced view of the pros and cons of the different paths available when you shape your systems landscape.
Tobias Bergström at Commerce Mind was recently interviewed by the e-commerce company Litium for their newsletter. As a fully independent e-commerce expert, he was asked how he sees the development of B2B e-commerce over the slightly unreal horizon of 5 to 10 years. We thought we would share his thoughts here.
Choosing an e-commerce platform is not simple. At Commerce Mind we try to keep track of the market and have a process for choosing well and for the long term. It is not easy, but we are here for you if you need support. There are no perfect choices.
'Go headless, and the hard part is solved.' A claim I have heard many times in recent years. The freedom to pick isolated systems that fit your specific needs, that can be swapped out, that can scale, where you pay only for what you use. It sounds like a dream. But if it really is that simple, why is not everyone doing it?
When you are looking for a new e-commerce solution or platform, there are terms often used as arguments for why you should pick that particular vendor. The labels are many: accelerator, framework, boilerplate, starter site, storefront, kick-off code base and so on. Let us try to untangle what they are and why they exist.
For quite a few years it has been a natural aspiration for ambitious e-commerce operators to move towards a best-of-breed architecture, adding more and more SaaS services. But with a weaker economy, post-pandemic conditions and high interest rates, more players are starting to focus on operational efficiency and cost.
As the various systems used in digital commerce become more capable, the complexity of deciding where information and logic should sit only increases. The most common systems in use today for retail and e-commerce were built at a time when things were more isolated. So how should you think about it today?
There are many KPIs, and sometimes you may wonder which one is the most important. But maybe there are other things that matter more, or how should you think about it?
Many factors move customers further down the funnel and, hopefully, all the way to the transaction. The customer journey you mapped out in PowerPoint at that workshop a few years ago was logical and sound, but it has very little to do with your customers' reality today. Your customers now have a wealth of information at their fingertips thanks to an abundance of digital devices and information and transaction channels. Today's customer journey is largely omnichannel and involves plenty of activity that has nothing to do with you as a company. So how do you drive your e-commerce conversions and optimise your buyer's journey?
