Astound Digital is a boutique digital consultancy that leverages technology, data and AI, design, and marketing to deliver award-winning digital commerce solutions for the world’s most innovative brands.
In the newest episode of The E-Commerce Toolbox, Kailin Noivo sits down with Anton Grebener, Head of Revenue, and Stanislav Publika, Senior Technical Director of Composable Commerce, to explore headless and composable commerce.
Headless Versus Composable Commerce
Oftentimes headless and composable commerce are used interchangeably to refer to the same concept. While they are very similar, Stanislav explains that there is a distinct difference. Specifically, headless commerce is the architectural approach, whereas composability is the business concept.
Stanislav goes on to explain that there are four pillars of benefits to consider when considering a move toward a composable approach.
The first is customer experience. Taking a headless approach allows you to be flexible in choosing a variety of components from UI libraries, allowing you the option to enhance speed and delivery which will improve your user experience.
The second is technology choice. Taking a headless approach helps you to avoid reliance on a single system. This means that you will be able to simply replace components as and when needed without worrying about cost or performance effects.
The third is cost efficiency. Composable systems are built from widely known technologies, which means it will be easier and cheaper to find developers compared to traditional commerce systems which require highly skilled, niche developers.
The fourth and final pillar is scalability. Composable solutions are cloud-native, thus allowing unique, custom developments to scale independently without affecting the performance of the main system.
Business Impact of Switching to Composable Commerce
Moving to a composable system does not mean you have to start from scratch. There are many pre-composed solutions and reference architectures available across industries that can be used as templates, and you can work with accelerators like Astound Digital do, whenever you deploy new technologies.
In doing so, Astound has seen concrete evidence to suggest that using composable systems is beneficial for website development and deployment. For example, they saw one case with 70% faster loading times and 50% higher mobile conversion rates and another with 30% more page views across all sites and a 20% less bounce rate on mobile.
It seems like a clear positive, but Anton explains that even with these clear improvements to performance, you do still need to monitor whether these actually translate into a financial KPI.
Mitigating Risks of Switching to Composable Commerce
If you are considering moving towards a composable system, you have to be aware of the risks that come with it and how to mitigate them.
The biggest risk comes when you aren’t clear about your business objectives. Whenever you experiment with new technologies, you need to understand what it should lead to, what you are trying to achieve, and what you are trying to improve. Otherwise, you’ll be wasting time and money. Once you have determined these goals, Anton recommends bringing on a technology expert who can target your experimentation toward your business goals.
Both Anton and Stanislav recommend taking the change step by step. Consider going headless first and then composable. Many people underestimate how much time and effort goes into switching from a traditional model to composable, so start with the minimum viable product and iterate from there.
Focus on what’s feasible, not what’s possible.
Listen to the Full Episode Below!
Listen to this episode of The E-commerce Toolbox: Expert Perspectives with Anton Grebener and Stanislav Publika to find out more about headless and composable solutions.
👉 Apple: https://apple.co/3RSpdxe
👉 Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3zrMjEF
