Software giant SAP is jumping into the composable commerce ring, admittedly later to the game than smaller competitors but pitching it as providing greater flexibility, scalability and maturity than members of the growing MACH Alliance of headless, cloud, API and microservices-based vendors.
Composable commerce means, how commerce will happen in a world increasingly built on cloud-native architecture, headless tech stacks, API plugins and microservices. Retailers are facing pressure to balance the need to create compelling buying experiences with the imperative to rationalize costs while increasing tech stack agility.
A unified commerce strategy goes a step further than omnichannel, delivering increased agility, personalization and flexibility by integrating all aspects of commerce and connecting back-end and front-end operations into a single cohesive system. Everything is brought together to enable a personalized experience across touchpoints.
Monolithic architecture is notoriously inflexible and difficult to scale, as any business that has tried to integrate it with other tech platforms and APIs can attest. Increasingly, brands are growing tired of big bills for relatively small changes, slowdowns and crashes and other disruptions, leading many to explore the option of microservices.