Transform your retail experience with Composable Commerce by Elastic Path

After its re-invention in recent years, online retail is settling into a new cadence. Forward-thinking retailers are using this opportunity to improve the customer experience (CX) and deliver a truly unified, omnichannel experience.

To achieve this, retailers are adopting flexible composable architecture and applications. This flexible approach breaks down the traditional silos between multiple channels that can cause a disjointed experience. It also integrates marketing and operations into a single platform. With a composable architecture as the foundation, retailers can then build digital retail solutions and implement new features 80 percent faster than the competition.

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we firmly believe in working backward from our customers’ needs. We have developed composable commerce services to help retail businesses like yours create customized, flexible, modular, and scalable solutions. By combining robust AWS infrastructure and services with AWS Partner offerings, you can rapidly innovate and deliver personalized shopping experiences to your consumers.

In this blog, we highlight the importance of composability and how AWS Partner Elastic Path is supporting retailers on their composable commerce journey.

Compose yourself—the future of commerce is here

Why is now the right time to implement composable commerce? Because 96 percent of retail executives are familiar with it and believe it will remain a viable technology over the next five years. These findings come from Elastic Path and Retail Dive’s State of Composable Commerce 2023 report, which surveyed 200 retail executives at companies with $100 million–$3.5 billion in annual revenue. The report found that when providing exceptional shopping experiences, retailers believe in composable commerce’s API-first, best-of-breed technology approach.

So, what are the topline benefits of composable commerce?

Innovate today and be flexible in the future

For most retailers, switching to composable commerce is integral to quickly delivering an exceptional CX. The switch also helps them fulfill innovation potential while retaining future flexibility.

The Elastic Path report highlighted key benefits for brands adopting composable commerce, including:

• Increased speed to market (26%)
• Rapid integration with other technology tools (26%)
• Agility in addressing shifting marketing and consumer trends (26%)
• Consistency of user experiences across touchpoints (24%)
• Development of a highly differentiated digital CX (22%)

Consider Elastic Path customer Vivrelle, a luxury accessory membership club. Vivrelle has thousands of SKUs, serialized inventory, and a growing variety of products and customers. Composable commerce has helped Vivrelle innovate product merchandising and use top vendors such as Avalara, Algolia, and Stripe. And, because of composable commerce’s modern, modular, and MACH-based architecture, Vivrelle’s innovation hasn’t reduced future flexibility as customer expectations evolve.

“There’s no way any of us knows how commerce technology will look in five years, but having a flexible core will make it easier to adjust,” says Jeff Neil, vice president of software engineering at Vivrelle.

What’s holding you back?

The report also found that perceived barriers about implementation time and difficulty were holding retailers back from unlocking the value of composable commerce. If composable commerce helps brands offer exceptional experiences without sacrificing flexibility, why might retailers feel hesitant to launch and expand composable solutions?

In a word: time.

Findings revealed that 60 percent of surveyed retailers think adding third-party technology to commerce solutions takes more than six months. For post-implementation retailers, 69 percent report that implementing a composable approach took more than six months. (For this same group, 27 percent say implementation took more than a year.)

For many retailers, adopting composable technology involves several months of suffering through a costly and arduous re-platforming process before realizing business value. Understandably, this eats into profit margins and stifles innovation.

The good news? The right partner can help you leapfrog the painful bits.

Elastic Path makes the transition painless and fast

Elastic Path breaks down composable barriers to help retailers meet business goals. It offers a retailer-forward, unique approach to unlocking commerce innovation. With the ability to Unplatform™, brands can use modular, composable products to solve specific commerce problems, piece by piece—gaining business value fast.

With Unplatforming, unlocking the power of composable commerce doesn’t require replacing an entire platform or disrupting a current commerce solution. Adding third-party technology to a solution takes minutes, modular products boost conversion and accelerate revenue-boosting merchandising, and a connective framework keeps a multi-vendor solution from becoming costly or complex.

Rebecca Hicks, ecommerce product leader at Pella Windows and Doors, says that her company now offers differentiated, dynamic direct-to-customer experiences through Unplatforming. “Elastic Path Composable Commerce gives us the flexibility and confidence to solve our challenges and take advantage of new opportunities in a modular way, so we don’t have to complete a massive rip-and-replace re-platforming project.”

Elastic Path’s modular products address specific commerce challenges retailers face:

Retailers want integrations with leading vendors. Elastic Path’s Integrations Hub offers instant-on, no-code integrations from top vendors, reducing composable implementation costs by 60 percent or more.

Retailers need leading catalog and product management capabilities to stand out. Elastic Path Product Experience Manager empowers merchandisers at brands like Serena & Lily to launch dynamic bundling, loyalty catalogs, and other revenue-boosting experiences without code or intensive IT work.

Retailers want to launch high-converting shoppable landing pages fast, without having to code. Elastic Path CX Studio offers merchandisers a no-code visual editor, extensive A/B testing, and other capabilities.

Retailers have to offer 1:1 personalization based on first-party data—not just broad audiences and personas—to maximize conversions, Lifetime Value (LTV) and revenue. Elastic Path’s Twilio Segment integration supports highly personalized storefronts and dynamic content, even for brands without large technology or data teams, such as Vivrelle.

“We were able to implement the Twilio Segment integration in a matter of minutes and expect this to save our engineering team over 60 percent in data analytics implementation time long-term,” says Neil. “The impact on our members was immediate, and we can see members finding bags they love faster than ever.”

Retailers need confidence and peace-of-mind to manage a multi-vendor solution. Composer, the only iPaaS purpose-built for commerce, is a connective framework that keeps a multi-vendor solution working in sync.

Retailers want to test, optimize, and scale commerce experiences that drive conversions and revenue. The Pre-Integrated Store is a turn-key online store with Elastic Path’s family of modular, composable products, as well as two frontend options and pre-integrations with industry-leading vendors. It can go live in 90 days to support a specific sub-brand, business model, or region, and can scale over time to support other parts of the business.

Elastic Path offers retailers what they need for modern commerce without risk or disruption.

Get the full State of Composable Commerce 2023 report to learn about how retailers are using composable commerce and the challenges they face around commerce innovation.