Using Composable Commerce to Increase Basket Size

The e-commerce landscape has always demanded rapidly changing technology to keep up with consumer trends. Today, many companies are scrambling to switch from their current omnichannel strategy to what is being dubbed unified commerce. Unified commerce calls for a composable commerce environment to gain advantages with improved flexibility. It creates a customized tech stack solution based on best-in-class software to seamlessly support the omnichannel customer journey.

As a result, C-levels gain a complete view of how their businesses interact with customers, management systems, and products. However, you need to understand how best-in-class tech manages the many facets of e-comm to find the right combination to increase basket size. When C-levels understand how each technology functions on its own, they can learn to leverage “headless commerce” and experience basket optimization.

1. eComm technologies are becoming more specialized

Composable commerce enables retailers to become more agile and gain an advantage with increased speed to meet changing customer demand. You can also respond intelligently to disruptive trends. Many tech companies are focusing on becoming best-in-class in one facet of e-comm, as opposed to trying to accomplish everything. While this is better than the Jack of all trades, master-of-none approach, it still leaves e-comm companies lacking critical functions. Composable commerce enables you to benefit from highly specialized, leading-edge technologies to complete each critical function expertly, so you have the perfect tech stack.

2. What is ‘composable commerce’ and why is it best practice?

As you’re probably catching on, composable commerce selects best-in-class commerce components and combines them into a customized solution. The “composing” enables you to achieve a perfect combination of tech, creating Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs). The PBC has a special capability within the application, usually composed of third-party software.

One e-comm company might want a shopping cart and checkout, with a touch of PIM, while another might need marketing capabilities, supply chain management, and marketplace uploading features tacked on. The main idea is that composable commerce enables you to use the best vendors for each function to create a single comprehensive platform instead of using a one-size-fits-all that only performs the most basic function for each component.

Cloud-Native

Using a “composable” approach also leverages cloud-native business capabilities enabling you to create a practically future-proof digital commerce platform. As a result, it is quickly becoming the state-of-the-art strategy e-comm businesses prefer. You create headless commerce, separating the front end and back end of an e-commerce application so you can build what you need when you need based on how you want it to work. In turn, you improve the customer experience because your agility enables you to keep up with emerging touch points without updates to both your front and back end. Cloud architecture also reduces the need for time-consuming upgrades, as each tech company manages this for you.

3. Composable commerce: Working in tandem to increase basket size

With a PIM, brands can connect directly to their creative marketing software, enabling both technologies to perform on a more effective level. Product information and enriched catalog creative work together to convert customers. A PIM automates the attribute-assigning process for brands, providing them with incredibly granular product imagery options they can use for A/B testing. In addition, a centralized hub lets you pull enriched data from one location instead of spending time searching for information.

The PIM + enriched catalog creative combo creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts when these two tools work together – the very basis of composable commerce. They build off each other, so your product feed becomes more productive and efficient. You increase basket size by:

  • Updating and improving: A single source of truth makes it easy to enrich existing data, so customers have the information they need to make informed purchases.
  • Onboarding new items: Established conventions simplify onboarding new products to expand offerings while improving information quality so customers can make more purchases.
  • Creating seamless marketing: Your marketing experts can enrich product information with descriptions that are brand appropriate and create an omnichannel shopping experience across all touch points to instill trust and increase sales.
  • Improving customer experience: Consistent, high-quality information and content across the most trusted marketplaces expands your reach while improving customer experiences.

Technologies are enhanced when used alongside complementary best-in-class tech.

4. A new freedom to experiment

With composable commerce, you have a testing ground to try different methods and practices for leveraging technologies together. As an API-first architecture, the functions work independently yet symbiotically, enabling you the freedom to add or remove solutions to remain agile.