Composable DXP: What is Composable for Content and Commerce

In a world where speed and innovation have become the expected norm, companies need to develop relevant, engaging, and contextual digital experiences, adapt and evolve them quickly, and deliver them across multiple channels in near real-time. Which is why Monolithic digital experience platforms (DXP), with their rigid constructs, tightly coupled architecture, and static processes are proving inadequate at meeting business goals or market demand.

Monolithic DXPs have numerous significant drawbacks, despite the number and variety of features offered in a single product. In fact, this very richness in features - and the complexity and overhead that results from it - is proving to be one of their key weaknesses. As a result, most brands and retailers use only a small fraction of the features and functionality provided by their DXP suite. For example, creating a simple, yet engaging and impactful digital experience with a monolithic DXP suite can be quite complex, requiring a team of trained professionals. Also, it is difficult to integrate with other software, making it a challenge to decompose monoliths, modernize tech stacks, and deliver task-based solutions. For a truly personalized user experience, it's critical to use a composable DXP.

In contrast to traditional or monolithic DXPs, a composable platform offers multiple ways to design the digital experience, allowing for a true best-of-breed approach. It integrates numerous systems using microservices architectures. According to Gartner, by 2023, organizations that adopt an intelligent composable approach will roll out new features 80% faster than those that use a suite of applications or bespoke solutions.

But what exactly does composable DXP mean, and how does it contribute to better content and commerce experiences? Read on to find out.

What is a Composable DXP?

The composable DXP approach aims to provide greater flexibility and customizability. In contrast to monolithic DXPs, composable DXPs break down data silos and address integration challenges. The purpose of composable platforms is to provide increased flexibility, greater agility, easy management, speed of implementation, more customization, and the ability to enhance the existing tech stack.

Customers and visitors can enjoy personalized experiences based on contextual factors by leveraging microservices that interact easily through APIs. By doing this, you can implement new features and functionalities without having to write code.

Composable DXPs serve as the backbone of digital content. You can integrate it with existing processes and infrastructures. By integrating the composable DXP into your existing marketing stack, you can manage content, automate marketing, fulfill eCommerce orders, and analyze data. You can connect with your customers more effectively by using this single access point.

Organizations can provide better digital experiences to their customers by reducing time-to-market. With the fast delivery of new features, thanks to a decoupled architecture that reduces interdependence, organizations can experiment and innovate with new strategies, which is far more difficult, complex, and fraught with monolithic platforms.

Benefits of a Composable DXP

In terms of benefits, composable DXPs help you create meaningful, personalized, and memorable customer experiences. In addition to these, it offers other specific benefits as well.

• Customizability: One major downside of traditional or monolithic DXPs is vendor lock-in. It prevents businesses from customizing solutions, essentially forcing you to design your entire strategy around the platform. It limits creativity, innovation, and growth. That’s not the case with composable DXPs. Composable DXPs allow businesses to plan, launch, experiment, and adjust initiatives based on their results. You can tailor each piece of your tech stack using a best-of-breed approach to meet your goals.
• Rapid development: It allows you to transform ideas and prototypes into real-world solutions and successful marketing campaigns. A traditional platform requires more training, which reduces the productivity of your team. On the other hand, a composable solution allows you to be more agile and focused and work at a more granular level without affecting others to gain insights and measure the effectiveness of your content quickly.
• Customer-centric approach: Thanks to this greater flexibility, a composable DXP gives organizations the ability to put the needs of the customers first. It acts as a central point of insight into customer behavior, allowing you to change your strategies and assets based on the information you learn over time. Using analytics and reports, you can see how your customers connect with your digital experience across every channel. You can create omnichannel experiences and deliver campaigns that promote sales across all channels such as the website, mobile app, and social media.

The MACH-Approach to Composable Commerce

Consumers increasingly expect seamless and integrated customer experiences across all touchpoints of e-commerce. According to Gartner, businesses that deliver exceptional buying experiences grow two times more than those that provide average experiences.

By leveraging packaged business capabilities (PBCs), digital commerce businesses can deliver exceptional experiences. Users can access more data and move it between multiple systems with increased connectivity. However, you must note that connecting different digital asset management tools, client data platforms, and marketing engines won't necessarily lead to success.

Headless solutions have become increasingly popular when creating composable digital experiences. When combined with the MACH approach, you can provide higher reliability, greater agility, better productivity, and a scalable solution. MACH stands for four modern principles of technology:

• Microservices: A collection of lightweight, deployable, maintainable, and scalable services that provide consumers with infinite choices.
• API connectivity: Makes it possible for services to be connected in a flexible ecosystem that you can set up as you want.
• Cloud nativity: Cloud-native solutions are offered by an outside vendor as a service, giving them unlimited scalability at an affordable cost.
• Headless infrastructure: A headless architecture separates presentation from logic to enable channel-independent integrations.

How Composable DXPs Enable Content & Commerce Experiences

To achieve ultimate flexibility, you must use technology that embraces all MACH principles to deliver better content and commerce experience.

Integration with eCommerce Platforms

Composable commerce lets digital commerce businesses leverage packaged business capabilities to deliver those unique customer experiences.

It revolves around the concept of enabling digital commerce businesses to provide exceptional customer experiences that result in better agility and flexibility. You can utilize a variety of high-quality SaaS services that are tailored to your business needs so that you can build unique capabilities into the solution yourself if you need them.

For instance, a standard composable stack can include the following services: ShipStation for fulfillment, TaxJar for tax management, Stripe for a payment gateway, Elastic Path for commerce, and many more.

Flexibility

Composable digital experience platforms provide a seamless integration experience thanks to the APIs central to these platforms. It integrates with any platforms, tools, and microservices, provided they too are accessible via APIs.

Several companies provide online shopping or transactions that would include an eCommerce API in their DXP, such as Product Information Management (PIM), Product Experience Management (PMX), and Product Content Management (PCM).

Customization

With an open ecosystem, it's possible to create quality solutions by bringing together accelerators, third-party applications, pre-built UI components or entire front-ends, precomposed solutions, and best practices.

Commoditized commerce capabilities such as carts, and product catalogs are on the rise with composable DXP growing in popularity due to the rising importance of customer experience. There are dozens of stores to choose from, and personalized experiences may be a determining factor in this decision.

By combining customer and product understanding with analytics and reports, companies can improve every aspect of customer interaction and create a breakthrough in eCommerce customer service.

Adopting Composable Commerce for Better Digital Experiences

Due to the increasing demand for high-quality content and digital experiences, businesses increasingly opt for the best-of-breed options and systems that they want. The use of composable DXPs bolsters the move towards best-of-breed platforms and headless architecture. As a result, enterprises can tailor a solution to meet their specific needs.

With a composable DXP, you still need to choose the tools that best fit your needs. You can leverage PBCs like Sanity, Contentful, BigCommerce, CommerceTools for your content and commerce solutions but must select each solution component and then tailor and integrate them to suit your organization's unique needs and use case. While it is true that the greater freedom and flexibility a composable DXP approach offers brings with it an inherent degree of increased complexity, requiring a somewhat greater digital maturity within the organization, there are countless partners and consultants - such as Salsita - that can help companies meet these challenges

In that way, customers of all digital maturity levels and commerce experience levels can benefit from headless commerce. Companies can then accelerate their time to market and tailor their solutions to meet their unique requirements, enabling them to best their competition, exceed customer expectations, and exceed sales goals.

Salsita provides you with all of the assistance you need to get your composable DXP up and running, and help finding the right tools to integrate into your tech stack. Contact us if you’re ready to start composing your digital experiences.