Composable commerce may be a choice

When composable-commerce is a choice, it should clearly and directly inform your business strategy. That means asking (and continuously re-asking) yourself three questions:

• What are the capabilities that you’re unlocking by going composable?
• How is your brand going to leverage those capabilities?
• What is the expected impact of that strategy on your bottom line?

By asking these three questions alone, you can dispel a lot of the biased fluff around composable commerce because you’ll often find that:

• composable is not unlocking any meaningful capabilities for your brand, or
• those capabilities cannot be leveraged by your team at this point in time, or
• the impact of leveraging those capabilities is negligible.

For example, composable allows you to create rich editorial commerce experiences. While this statement is true in isolation, ask yourself:

• Could I create a rich editorial commerce experience without going composable? Can I get 80% of the way there with a fraction of the effort?
• Once I have the technical infrastructure to enable editorial commerce, do I actually have the right team to execute that strategy, or is it an empty aspiration?
• What is the return on my investment? Do I actually believe that editorial commerce will generate so much incremental business to offset the cost of going composable?

All of these questions need to be stress-tested because they will have very good first-order answers, but once you start digging into them, you’ll find that many of them are empty promises.