Uniform blog/Composable Commerce: Build your online store today
Composable Commerce: Build your online store today
Composable Commerce: Build your online store today
Offering customers the ideal browsing and shopping experience requires many tools for your e-commerce platform. Fortunately, with composable commerce, companies can choose the best tools for their site’s features, regardless of vendor, and build a store shoppers value, appreciate, and visit again and again.
Even so, companies must apply composable commerce in the right context. For all that being able to pick the ideal tools for your business is an amazing advantage, you must leverage them correctly.
Understanding the e-commerce ecosystem
Your e-commerce ecosystem comprises the tools that support the following features of your store:
- Site search. The right tool can revolutionize your site’s search experience. For example, with premium plug-ins, your audience can easily locate the exact brand or product they’re looking for. Also, a remarkable tool like Algolia renders site search an integral part of a riveting shopping experience.
- Checkout. Checkout plug-ins create an intuitive, quick, and seamless buying adventure. Certain platforms, such as Bolt, Vitals, Slide Cart, and Cart Upsell, also integrate cart-abandonment flows to help raise conversions and make the most out of visitors.
- Payment processing. Besides supporting multiple payment options, companies that offer robust payment-processing tools like Square encrypt transactions, notably customer data, for security. Also important are speed, dynamic pricing, and mobile wallet.
- Order fulfillment. These are tools that manage inventory, orders, and shipping. An example is ShipMonk.
- Customer reviews. Social proof is a paramount selling tool with which you can request, organize, and display customer testimonials. Check out Pendo.io, AskNicely, and HappyOrNot for examples.
- Productivity management. To monitor performance, internal tools, such as Hubstaff, track KPIs to keep teams on target vis-à-vis revenue, sales, and marketing objectives.
- Communication. Given the high speed of e-commerce, teams need a platform on which they can share important information with and serve consumers in real time. Popular options are Monday.com, Zoho Cliq, and Workmates.
- Marketing. Potent marketing tools, e.g., Brandwatch, Omnisend, and Mailchimp, blast promotions, product launches, and sales to audiences across channels, saving time and energy in addition to reducing errors when compared to individual posts on a platform.
Adopting a composable approach for e-commerce
Composable makes assembling all those tools into the perfect e-commerce ecosystem possible. Thanks to headless CMS technology, e-commerce platforms can generate experiences with best-in-class tools for implementing features—a concept that’s the crux of digital experience composition.
The emergence of headless technology broke the link between front-end apps and back-end systems. Nowadays, instead of relying on all-in-one, suite-style systems, businesses are free from vendor lock-in and can choose the tools that best meet their needs—regardless of the e-commerce platform.
Recognizing the importance of composable commerce
Since today’s consumers constantly desire innovative and immersive ways for evaluating and purchasing products and services, composable plays an integral role in successful e-commerce. Hence, you must compose the ideal shopping experience by orchestrating the tools that power your store’s features—both on the front end and the back end.
Note, however, that not all organizations are ready for the composable approach. A prerequisite is to have the required resources available and organizational maturity. When considering composable commerce, answer these questions:
- Are the needs of your business intricate enough to merit a transition to composable?
- Does your team have the digital savvy and resources to manage a site with curated products and brands?
- Are you willing to experiment with and invest in new technologies?
- What’s the ultimate goal of your brand?
- Do you know how to set up a scalable architecture?
If the answers show that composable commerce would be a good fit for your brand, you stand to gain many benefits, as described below.
Create personalized and compelling end-to-end customer experiences
With composable, you can select the best-in-class tools for your platform’s features, combining editorial and product data into one seamless customer episode.
Additionally, you can reassemble content into a more cohesive shopping and browsing event. Instead of having to search for the brands or products they want, consumers can display them all with just a few mouse clicks.
Adapt to changing business needs
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 caused drastic and swift changes worldwide, so much so that, to stay competitive, e-commerce had to adapt post haste.
Companies that already boasted a composable approach didn’t skip a beat. They implemented new delivery methods and inventory-management practices on the fly, carrying on business as usual. In fact, as the pandemic raged and buyers clamored for vendors who could adapt to the new reality, the well-positioned e-commerce platforms realized some of their best revenue numbers.
Choose best-of-need solutions
Composable frees you up from depending on one particular vendor. You’re no longer into what’s the most popular or “what everyone else is doing.” Moreover, composable makes the tools that work the best for your business available, no matter which platform you are on.
Differentiate your business
To succeed in e-commerce, instead of blending in with the rest of the industry, companies must find ways to stand out, one of which is through a composable architecture. By selecting and using the tools that are just right for your needs, you can build a digital experience unique to your business and customers.
That’s where traditional, single-vendor commerce architectures fall short. Because one vendor supplies all the tools for every facet of the shopping experience, some features might not be the perfect fit for achieving the goals of your business and target audience. Composable puts the power back in your hands.
Seeing composable commerce in action
Below are two real-world examples that illustrate how composable commerce can transform your business and how your platform’s components come together within the framework.
Uniform and Algolia
Uniform and Algolia work together in several ways that drive conversions:
- The search page, which, though many users’ first interaction with a retail site, is often neglected. E-commerce teams that are on Uniform can take control of this page, managing the presentation, pagination, and filters that visitors can apply in searches; offering options to stimulate conversions; and promoting key products or new brands.
- Personalization of the default products presented on a search page, which Uniform and Algolia can implement with existing data or through site behavior, e.g., categories, price ranges, or products visitors have already viewed.
- Creation of product-detail pages (PDPs) and automation of recommendations at scale, through which Uniform and Algolia can raise conversions and upsells. With Algolia Recommend, a Uniform component can intelligently show more options by suggesting products that match what the visitor is looking at. Because this feature makes use of Aloglia’s database, the results are automatically updated as Uniform adds new options. Alternatively, commerce terms can, by means of search, display complementary products, such as high-end coffee beans on the PDP for a luxury coffee grinder. Both approaches are incredibly effective and engrossing.
Uniform and Salesforce B2C Commerce
Uniform’s partnership with Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud creates outstanding shopping experiences in a modern, scalable, and fully composable stack. Here are the behind-the-scenes benefits:
- Instantly integrate your composable storefront. Uniform’s prebuilt integration for Salesforce Composable Storefront (PWA Kit) connects your store to the rest of your stack, reducing the time required for management tasks from months to minutes.
- Put merchandisers in control. With Uniform Canvas, you can quickly and easily control every aspect of your shoppers’ experience: from building custom product and category pages with authority over the front-end presentation and live preview to omnichannel publishing without developer assistance.
- Unleash connected content and commerce. By working with Salesforce and any of Uniform’s 15 prebuilt CMS integrations in a single interface with live, responsive preview, you can raise demand and grow sales through compelling PDPs and marketing content.
- Drive conversions with personalization and testing. The inline testing and personalization tools are so intuitive and effective that you can quickly become adept at them and boost revenue by giving consumers exactly what they want when they want it. From small experiments to far-reaching CDP integration, Uniform deepens and improves shopping experiences at scale.
You can then perform these notable tasks:
- Build more compelling PDPs faster. Uniform makes it a smooth sail to build captivating commerce experiences with content from across your stack, raising operational velocity and eliminating the silos common to multivendor solutions.
- Start fast, stay flexible. Uniform’s integration model eliminates the project phase of manually integrating glue code, dramatically cutting time to value and offering long-term flexibility to innovate through new technology.
- Foster personalization and performance. Since Uniform delivers commerce content to the CDN edge, you can drive conversions with inline personalization tools without the normal trade-offs in slower page loads and lower SEO.
Building your e-commerce stack
A potent e-commerce ecosystem is integral to your store’s success. Be sure to dedicate efforts to the tools for the tasks described in the section Understanding the e-commerce ecosystem. Doing that will for sure move the needle in your business.
Doubtless, selecting and learning to use the right tools for your store’s components can be overwhelming. Uniform is here to help. For details on how to transform your business through composable commerce, schedule a free demo with us.
