How to Explain Composable Commerce to Your CEO

As a digital commerce leader, you’re making important decisions every day, driven by the need to boost revenue and give customers the best buying experience possible. However, success doesn't happen in a vacuum; the most accomplished business leaders equip themselves with the right tools to get the job done in the most proficient manner possible.

Since the introduction of the term in 2020, composable commerce solutions have emerged to provide the flexibility and scalability critical for meeting business goals. However, digital teams often struggle to attain buy-in from their CEO on new technology adoption — and composable commerce's nuanced nature can make it especially difficult to present. Busy executives are accustomed to hearing about “revolutionary tech,” and need assurance that a new tool will offer sufficient return on investment. The most brilliant commerce ideas won’t help your business without executive approval. Below are tips for bridging the gap between the digital team’s good intentions and the inherent resistance to adopting changes in technology.

1. Define composable commerce — in plain language.

If you’re unsure where to start, open the pitch to your CEO with this: Composable commerce allows brands to bring unique digital visions to life while continually optimizing customer experience and boosting conversions. Once you’ve gotten their attention, get right to the point with specific benefits, including the ability to:

• quickly launch new experiences and continuously optimize existing ones;
• bypass traditional digital commerce limitations to increase conversion, average order value (AOV), and customer lifetime value;
• stay current by meeting modern technology standards; and perhaps most importantly
• work in increments, starting with one experience, without having to rip and replace your current e-commerce platform.

Composable commerce allows you to choose preferred best-of-breed digital commerce vendors for critical functions like search, cart and payment.

2. Highlight the benefits of a composable commerce approach.

Next, you’ll want to stress the business benefits:

• Revenue generation: Composable commerce allows brands to drive revenue with unique commerce experiences. According to Gartner, businesses with high composability can expect revenue growth of 7.7 percent per year; businesses with low composability expect less than half of that growth.
• Speed and agility: Composable commerce empowers digital teams to move fast. You can implement a composable architecture within months, sometimes weeks. And as business needs change, you can act fast to swap vendors. Providing examples of similar organizations that have gone composable is an excellent vehicle for appealing to the C-suite (see below for use cases).
• Sterling customer experience: No CEO needs an explanation of the critical need to continuously sustain and find new ways to improve customer experience. Historically, brands have been forced to fit their commerce business into inflexible monolithic legacy architecture resulting in clunky checkouts, fruitless site searches, and disappearing carts. Composable commerce allows your brand to create innovative experiences that intentionally boost revenue and improve loyalty. According to McKinsey, brands that improve customer experiences increase revenue by 15 percent and lower costs by 20 percent.
• Lower total cost of ownership (TCO): Building and integrating new features require less time and money with composable commerce. Over time, composable solutions are less costly than traditional legacy platforms because development and IT costs remain low. On average, composable commerce brands save weeks of developer time and costs.

3. Address the elephant in the room: risk vs. reward.

Composable commerce is a lasting solution that uses MACH (microservices-based, API-first, cloud, and headless) architecture. The microservices in MACH architecture mean individual business functionalities are independently developed and managed. No re-platforming is required, and changes can be made in increments vs. all at once — saving your company money and de-risking the deployment.

4. Show, don’t tell: brands that have already gone composable.

According to Gartner, organizations with composable capabilities will improve digital innovation speed by 60 percent by 2026 (relative to 2022). Stress to your CEO that composable isn't a speculative or unproven technology. Top brands across industries, products and audiences — including your competitors — have already gone composable:

• Konica Minolta, a multinational technology and manufacturing company, uses composable commerce to power its B2B digital commerce with a GDPR-compliant digital ecosystem for a global market.
• Serena & Lily, a luxury furniture and interior design brand, uses a B2C composable commerce model that enables the company to uniquely leverage its storefronts as a showroom to support its central selling vehicle — its website.
• Pella, a well-established brand that sells doors and windows for residential and commercial properties, uses a composable approach to support — and enable — its highly complex, custom-configured purchasing experience online.
• Vivrelle is a members-only luxury accessory exchange. Originally operating on a home-grown commerce solution, the company needed more muscle to scale successfully. Vivrelle found it using composable commerce.

Regardless of the effort it may take to get your CEO on board with moving to a composable approach, composable commerce architecture is the gateway toward future-proofing your technology. Without the need to re-platform, businesses can easily customize their online store experiences using a composable solution to better meet customers’ needs simply by creating a unique and differentiated customer experience. Anxiety around errors leading to downtime or increased complexity can be justified by describing this approach's incremental nature, which virtually removes the risk from this initiative, a significant benefit to communicate with business leaders. The performance-optimized capabilities of a composable commerce architecture are undeniably critical for future-proofing your digital commerce initiatives.

Kristin Hambelton is chief marketing officer responsible for marketing and business development at Elastic Path.