Most literature about composable-commerce talks about composable as if it were a boolean choice: you either go composable or you don’t. The MACH Alliance has exasperated this problem by having a very strict definition of “composable.” This works well in their favor, but it does the entire industry a disservice.
When you take their view, composable is a very scary endeavor: the choice is either one monolithic, inflexible, but cheap solution or a million composable, flexible, but expensive point solutions. For most businesses, making the switch from one to the other is complex, if not impossible, which leads to a lot of frustration on both sides of the discussion.
Instead, brands should treat composability as a spectrum: you can have a big monolith (e.g., Shopify) and connect it to a more specialized point solution to get the job done. Brands do it all the time when they use an ERP, WMS, PIM, etc., with Shopify, but no one would really consider that a composable architecture—even though, for all intents and purposes, that’s exactly what it is.
This is a good example of how Be wary of flawless ideas: we have created a strict definition in our industry for a term, but the reality is much more nuanced.