Vector vs Keyword Search: Why You Should Care
Search has been around for a while, to the point that it is now considered a standard requirement in many ...
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
Search has been around for a while, to the point that it is now considered a standard requirement in many ...
Senior Machine Learning Engineer
With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies enabling services such as Alexa, Google search, and self-driving cars, the ...
VP Corporate Marketing
It’s no secret that B2B (business-to-business) transactions have largely migrated online. According to Gartner, by 2025, 80 ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Twice a year, B2B Online brings together industry leaders to discuss the trends affecting the B2B ecommerce industry. At the ...
Director of Product Marketing & Strategy
This is Part 2 of a series that dives into the transformational journey made by digital merchandising to drive positive ...
Benoit Reulier &
Reshma Iyer
Get ready for the ride: online shopping is about to be completely upended by AI. Over the past few years ...
Director, User Experience & UI Platform
Remember life before online shopping? When you had to actually leave the house for a brick-and-mortar store to ...
Search and Discovery writer
If you imagine pushing a virtual shopping cart down the aisles of an online store, or browsing items in an ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Remember the world before the convenience of online commerce? Before the pandemic, before the proliferation of ecommerce sites, when the ...
Search and Discovery writer
Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer just the stuff of scary futuristic movies; it’s recently burst into the headlines ...
Search and Discovery writer
Imagine you are the CTO of a company that has just undergone a massive decade long digital transformation. You’ve ...
CTO @Algolia
Did you know that the tiny search bar at the top of many ecommerce sites can offer an outsized return ...
Director, Digital Marketing
Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly moved from hot topic to everyday life. Now, ecommerce businesses are beginning to clearly see ...
VP of Product
We couldn’t be more excited to announce the availability of our breakthrough product, Algolia NeuralSearch. The world has stepped ...
Chief Executive Officer and Board Member at Algolia
The ecommerce industry has experienced steady and reliable growth over the last 20 years (albeit interrupted briefly by a global ...
CTO @Algolia
As an ecommerce professional, you know the importance of providing a five-star search experience on your site or in ...
Sr. SEO Web Digital Marketing Manager
Hashing. Yep, you read that right. Not hashtags. Not golden, crisp-on-the-outside, melty-on-the-inside hash browns ...
Search and Discovery writer
We’re just back from ECIR23, the leading European conference around Information Retrieval systems, which ran its 45th edition in ...
Senior ML Engineer
Sep 8th 2021 ecommerce
Composable Commerce is often referred to as what comes next for the Retail industry. Gartner predicts that “By 2023, organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace the competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation.”
In this case study, we illustrate the power of a Composable Commerce approach via a specific theme: how to drive more value across all customer touch points from one of your most valuable assets: your product catalog.
But first, what is Composable Commerce?
Composable Commerce is the approach of building commerce systems by connecting, or composing, best-of-breed components into custom applications solving specific business needs. Those components are defined as Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs), which represent well-defined business capabilities such as checkout or search.
This approach brings many benefits to organizations who adopt it, including higher agility to adapt to customer and marketing trends, higher flexibility to deliver differentiated experiences, and easier implementation of experiences across all touchpoints.
On the technical level, Composable Commerce requires those PBCs to be built upon technologies that allow such flexibility and connectivity. The MACH definition sums it up well:
MACH – Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, Headless
MICROSERVICES – A microservice performs a set of actions that addresses a specific business functionality, making it easy to adapt to different and changing business needs.
API-FIRST – APIs expose the microservices, managing the underlying data, functionality, and connectivity between the different microservices.
CLOUD-NATIVE SAAS – Software-as-a-service leverages the full capabilities of the cloud, including the storage, hosting, and scaling of each microservice.
HEADLESS – Ensuring that the front-end interface is completely disconnected from the back-end logic and various microservices, thus allowing engineers to update the UI or the microservices without impacting other parts of the system.
In a traditional monolithic ecommerce platform architecture, scalability and complexity present the biggest limitation. As a platform grows larger, it becomes more difficult for the engineering team to fully understand the processes and dependencies that impact their ability to iterate fast. The results are: slow start-up time, mistakes, and decreased efficiency, caused by the need to constantly redeploy the entire application on each update.
Headless architecture allows freedom and flexibility by removing the link between front-end and back-end. Site content and UI elements can be instantly changed with no effect on the back-end infrastructure. The modern API-first approach offers the internal teams (product, marketing, and merchandising) to iterate online omni-channel experiences and test new strategies with high agility and scalability. Flexible headless commerce architecture allows companies to create a customized tech stack, and to choose the best API components for their unique use-case, without the need to compromise due to platform elements dependencies or complexity.
An example of MACH eCommerce store architecture can look like this:
Three essential and complementary elements of a successful eCommerce online store:
Legacy monolithic platforms are falling short on every aspect listed above, limiting the agility, revenue, and growth of modern eCommerce businesses. The Monolithic “eCommerce in a box” is a one-size-fits-all solution that is readily available to any competing business, while the leaders of the industry, such as Amazon, are able to leverage their custom built online shopping experience to win the customers loyalty and boost their revenues. While a smaller retailer might not be able to afford the amount of engineering resources available to eCommerce behemoths, MACH approach allows them to achieve a similar level of online shopping experiences at a fraction of a cost. The flexibility of handpicking the best in class components for each function, enables retail businesses to position themselves at the same level of the big players.
With the Headless approach to eCommerce, different apps can be built to serve multiple purposes for different consumer types, such as shoppers and store associates.
In the next blogs, you’ll discover how this approach can help you create innovative applications based on your product catalog.
Product Manager
Powered by Algolia Recommend