Recent years have brought unprecedented opportunities and challenges to the e-commerce space. While the pandemic sparked explosive growth in online retail, retailers are still having to deal with the relentless pace of technological advance as well as more general shifts in customer behaviour and expectations.
It’s now mission-critical for enterprises to fortify their market position and secure their staying power by future-proofing their core retail systems. The best strategy to achieve this lies in composable commerce – a modular digital approach that allows businesses to customise their tech stacks by choosing best-in-breed solutions to suit their unique business needs. Composable commerce lets businesses quickly adjust to new market trends and changing customer demands without having to completely overhaul their existing systems.
To stay ahead, modern enterprises must invest in digital technologies that provide the flexibility to respond to unexpected changes while adapting to customer and business needs of the future. While the current macroeconomic climate may be looking tough – encouraging business leaders to make only cautious and conservative moves – a failure to stay relevant in the digital space could spell doom for even the most robust online operators.
“Businesses need to protect their digital investments and not succumb to the natural organisational response in budget-cutting during economic downturns,” says Shannon Ingrey, APAC VP & GM for leading Open SaaS e-commerce platform BigCommerce. “Downturns should cause organisations to tighten their discipline around digital investments – such as a laser focus on customer experience and revenue-generating tech like e-commerce platforms – so the anticipated value is fully realised.”
BigCommerce’s recent white paper on the issue, The time to modernise is now: why enterprises need composable commerce, encourages businesses to be forward-thinking about what their customers expect, while better understanding their changing e-commerce needs now and for the future. The paper shows that by adopting a composable approach, enterprises can create a tailored e-commerce experience to meet the unique demands of their customers both today and tomorrow.
For businesses that do respond to the challenge, the benefits can be almost immediate. Recent Forrester research shows that companies committed to a future-fit technology strategy show revenue growth accelerating at 1.8 times the speed of their peers. Meanwhile, independent research suggests that those resisting change will rapidly find themselves as outliers in the market – the move to improve has seen 79 per cent of enterprises setting themselves on the path from legacy “monolith” systems to “MACH” (microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native and headless) technologies that allow a best-of-breed take during e-commerce re-platforming.
“This is a huge market,” says Ingrey. “The composable approach will only continue to grow as more elements of digital experiences are developed.”
Numerous Australian businesses have turned timely e-commerce re-platforming into retail success stories. Jimmy Brings, one of Australia’s largest express alcohol delivery services, partnered with BigCommerce to create a new storefront offering enterprise-level power far exceeding its former limitations.
“The company’s existing technical infrastructure had evolved organically over time, resulting in technically fragmented mobile apps and websites that were not built for reliability or scalability,” explains Ingrey. “The new storefront prioritises enterprise-class integrations and flexible APIs, ensuring it best supports each stage of the shopper’s journey from the moment they enter, search for their desired products and complete the purchase.”
Built on BigCommerce’s headless architecture through Deity’s Commerce Composer, the new system provides Jimmy Brings with complete control over their entire e-commerce operations while offering the flexibility to integrate new technologies and keep data orchestration on the next level. Other BigCommerce partners on the platform completed the tech stack – including Talon for the promotion engine, Contentful for extensive content management, Algolia for search optimisation, and Stripe and WPay for payments. The PWA-based solution provided a more cohesive experience that has proved easily maintainable and flexible, helping Jimmy Brings deliver better customer satisfaction.
The outcome of the company’s re-platforming exercise was a new storefront that enabled Jimmy Brings to innovate with new features and services that helped them stay ahead of customer demand, meeting their promise of delivery within 30 minutes of ordering. It also allowed the company to orchestrate the entire journey, minimising disruptions and accelerating future growth.
By protecting digital investments and implementing the organisational discipline required for value realisation, enterprises will find themselves ahead of competitors and better prepared to scale. Composable commerce allows businesses to future-proof their digital investments while providing the agility to respond to changing market conditions. Those that embrace this approach will be well-positioned to thrive in the coming years.
For more information about composable commerce, click here to download BigCommerce’s recent white paper “The time to modernise is now: Why Enterprises Need Composable Commerce”, or visit bigcommerce.com.au to live chat with a team representative.
