Composable Commerce Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities

Our survey of 79 decision-making professionals found that eCommerce platform selection has gained significant focus in the past 12-24 months, becoming a “high” or “strategic” priority for 71% of respondents. Organizations are also noting a shift in preferences that favor best of breed or composable commerce stacks.

• The adoption of modern eCommerce solutions is still young, and a majority of respondents indicated that they are still using first or second generation systems. Only 9% have adopted third generation composable ecosystems, though 43% of respondents currently intend to move in this direction.
• Today, 70% of respondents view composable, best-of-breed toolsets favorably, up from 45% only two years ago. The rapid change is attributable to new challenges faced during the pandemic, and an increasing rate of change. Organizations want to avoid “lock-in” with outdated systems and are looking for top solutions that can augment productivity in an era of tight staffing and limited resources.
• The #1 inhibitor of greater composable adoption is the availability of integration resources. Respondents are cognizant of the long-term payoffs for composable solutions, but they lack the resources to undergo these transformations immediately. The long-term trend favoring composable ecosystems looks to have durability as these headwinds clear.
• The acceleration of eCommerce refreshes accompanies multiple “sister-trends” in the wake of the pandemic, including the rapid rise of cloud infrastructure and SaaS adoption. These compressed trends are causing organizations to revisit their eCommerce stacks and avoid the mistakes of the prior decade. Respondents seek interchangeable solutions that mitigate vendor lock-in or the downsides of rapid industry change.
• Improved functionality and reliability are top two reasons that organizations are increasingly in favor of composable solution sets, according to our survey.
• Results show how immature organizations are in deploying modern content management and analytics solutions – executives in our survey see these two areas as key areas of improvement and modernization for enterprises of all sizes.
• While composable commerce requires a modest increase in resources, feedback from our survey indicates that the gains in productivity and business outcomes more than offset the needs of maintaining best of breed systems.