Rapidly Scale Retail & DTC Ecommerce Through Composable Architecture
Learn how composable architecture can address omnichannel ecommerce concerns and help you rapidly scale your retail, DTC, or marketplace operations.
As the world of ecommerce grows, so does the breadth and diversity of customer purchasing behaviour. To keep up with changing market trends, brands need to diversify and iterate quickly as customers seek individualized experiences across multiple sales channels.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the rise of multichannel sales, how composable ecommerce compares to monolithic architecture, and the importance of localized pricing.
What is composable ecommerce?
Composable ecommerce is a direct response to the growing ominichannel needs of the retail ecommerce market. An approach defined by its a-la-carte, modular architecture, components can be replaced on-demand without affecting other parts of the ecommerce stack. This allows developers to choose the best technologies based on customer data and market dynamics.
Ecommerce goes omnichannel
Retail ecommerce accounted for approximately USD $5.2 trillion of global sales in 2021 and is forecasted to grow to USD $8.1 trillion by 2026. Yet, retail ecommerce accounted for only 19% of total retail sales, leaving tremendous opportunity for growth through alternative digital sales channels.
As your ecommerce platform or marketplace scales, your customers expect seamless, performant, omnichannel retail customer experiences (CX) that acknowledge alternative touchpoints such as social media, marketplaces, and comparison shopping engines like Google Shopping or Vendazzo. They expect to see products in their local currency, with tax-inclusive pricing. According to research by Ingenico, one-in-four shoppers will abandon their cart when their preferred local currency is not offered. Composable architecture allows you meet this expectation through rapidly integrated solutions like Reach Drop-In, enabling you to scale easier and faster.
DTC’s culture of iterative evolution
Despite the low barrier to entry in the DTC (direct-to-consumer) space, traditional retailers still have a clear advantage, with an established online sales infrastructure and millions of advertising dollars to burn every year. This requires smaller retailers to be more reactive to market trends and more tolerant of risk. Lesser-known brands must be willing to pivot quickly and fail upwards, resulting in a culture of continuous iteration, evolution and re-invention in the retail & DTC spaces. When managed correctly, this tactical trial-and-error can pay off big. Composable components like Reach Drop-In allow you to flip the switch on different payment methods and implement local pricing strategy with little hassle.
Monolithic ecommerce is a waste of time (for you and your customers)
On the dev side, multichannel CX and a culture of re-invention have created a situation where traditional, monolithic ecommerce solutions block your organization’s ability to respond to ever-changing market conditions.
Monolithic architecture requires developers to abide by existing frameworks and conventions, which makes it tedious to integrate new sales channels or analytics tools, test new campaign strategies, or A/B test new customer experiences.
Performance matters. Back in 2006, Greg Linden (then at Amazon) discovered through A/B testing that every 100ms delay in page loading caused substantial drops in ecommerce revenue. Because monolithic solutions often depend on a single central data store, they require elaborate caching solutions to ensure adequate website performance and deliver high conversion rates. Furthermore, periods of high traffic and sales can grind these solutions to a halt entirely, even with proper load-balancing measures in place.
Composable is faster, cheaper, and more flexible
This is why many organizations have begun to implement composable elements into their retail ecommerce solutions.
By keeping each component physically separate, development and marketing teams can rapidly test and deploy new functionality such as alternative payment methods or vanity pricing rules without breaking or re-configuring existing systems.
Composable architecture allows for distributed, static front-end solutions that cater to the needs of different customers and sales channels. Because they are pre-rendered, static front-ends load in mere milliseconds, and scale infinitely by design.
The same goes for the back-end. By leveraging edge functions and serverless microservices, organizations no longer need to maintain a single entity that handles business logic, content management, and payment processing.
Edge/serverless functions run code per-function, in a sandboxed instance that dies when the function has completed. This means serverless functions can be scaled virtually infinitely, so your ecommerce or marketplace application can securely interact with payments interfaces like Reach’s Drop-In API without worrying about downtime or denial-of-service issues.
In 2019, MANSCAPED made the decision to switch from their legacy Shopify-based store to a composable commerce application. By confining global operations to a single composable codebase, the MANSCAPED team found it much easier to ship changes at scale.
Adopt composable at your own pace
By nature, composable architecture can be adopted incrementally.
Most existing monolithic ecommerce solutions provide a REST API, allowing development teams to begin their composable transition by building a headless front-end. Once the headless front-end is running, teams have the freedom to rapidly deploy any number of new microservices that work in parallel with (or replace functionality of) the legacy platform – without consideration for its framework or conventions.
Reach Drop-In is a key component of your composable ecommerce transition
Our Drop-In API is an all-in-one, plug and play payments solution that is flexible and easy to integrate, making it the perfect payments component for your composable ecommerce application.
Drop-In leverages our extensive Merchant of Record network, which helps your ecommerce solution scale into international markets through localized pricing, fraud management, and access to market-leading FX rates.
Give global customers the choice of 40+ payment partners, including installment and alternative payment methods, as well as tax-inclusive checkout pricing that eliminates your global tax compliance risk.
Learn more about Reach Drop-In:
Reach • 2022 Customer Demo Video
Our low-code integration is simple and straightforward:
Reach Drop-In – Full Integration Tutorial & Developer Walk-through
Want to learn more? Book a demo today.