Happy customers aren’t found, they’re made. Every time a customer visits a store, they bring expectations: they want to find products quickly, they want to pay a fair price, wait in line for a reasonable amount of time, and use their preferred method of payment at the register. When stores provide those things, customers have good experiences, leave happy, and come back. 

Those principles hold for ecommerce experiences too, where customers don’t visit an all-in-one brick-and-mortar location in person, but nonetheless, expect things from the shopping process, like product images and videos, fast page-load times, secure payment gateways, and so on. 

In fact, there are so many different things that customers want from the online shopping experience, it’s practically impossible to deliver them all — or is it?

Okay, yes — it is probably impossible to create the perfect online shopping experience. But with best-of-breed ecommerce, we can get pretty close. 

In this post, we’re going to explore what best-of-breed ecommerce means, how it’s different from traditional approaches to building online stores, and why it could be the better option for your online commerce ambitions over the long term.

What is best-of-breed ecommerce?

Best-of-breed ecommerce represents a different approach to building your ecommerce website. That approach essentially involves identifying and integrating the best technology solutions for the specific commerce functions of your online store, in alignment with the shopping experience you want for your customers. 

Best-of-breed doesn’t just apply to ecommerce. It’s an approach that can work in any context in which developers want to identify the component parts necessary to optimize a technology solution. For example, taking a best-of-breed approach, a financial institution would seek the best trading platform, the best risk management software, and the best CRM system for their tech stack. Meanwhile, a healthcare provider would look for the best patient management system, the most secure record filing system, and so on.

For online retail, it can mean finding the best content management system (CMS), the best order management system, the best production information management system —  or whatever integrations you think are needed to optimize the online shopping experience. 

But we said best-of-breed ecommerce is a ‘different’ approach to building online stores — so different to what? Let’s take a look. 

Best-of-breed vs. all-in-one ecommerce

The alternative to selecting component parts of your tech stack, is to opt for an all-in-one ecommerce solution, from a single provider, which bundles predefined capabilities. 

All-in-one solutions offer out-of-the-box convenience, and are designed to get your website up and running quickly. They’re often referred to as ‘“monolithic” because the back-end administrative layer of your store is tightly coupled to its front-end presentation layer, which is also referred to as the ‘“head’.” Here, technical code is tangled up with site content, and there isn’t really scope to change or customize the appearance or functionality of your store once it has been deployed. All-in-one solutions can also result in missed opportunities thanks to vendor lock-in, or costs sunk into parts of the platform that are never implemented.

That’s all fine if you need to start selling quickly, but what happens when your brand gets a little further down the road? Maybe you have a growing customer base? Need to optimize pages for mobile phones or wearables? Integrate the latest payment processing innovation? Launch a marketing campaign in another country? All-in-one systems don’t let you adapt or change your store as it grows — if your vendor hasn’t built the feature into the platform, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to do it. 

Best-of-breed ecommerce offers a way forward. 

Headless and best-of-breed ecommerce

In headless ecommerce, there is no frontend head of your tech stack. You build every aspect of your presentation layer with a laser-like focus on optimizing your customers’ experience, assembling its component parts like modular building blocks, with all communication between them handled by application programming interfaces (APIs). 

Headless ecommerce systems can be completely composable, in the sense that they also don’t have a prepackaged back end. In a composable environment, developers have complete freedom and flexibility to build and optimize every individual part of their tech stack.

That flexibility is what makes best-of-breed ecommerce possible, essentially giving you the freedom to choose the most suitable modular components for your ecommerce stack and the commerce functions you need for it to perform.

Best-of-breed ecommerce promises more than enhanced customer experiences: it enables brands to future-proof their online presence. In a composable environment, you aren’t locked in to a single vendor, so if a better (or cheaper) tool comes along, you can shop around multiple vendors, swap out the old for the new, and keep iterating to ensure that your site stays ahead of the curve — and the demands of the market. 

There’s much more to say about the idea of composability— it’s one of the principles that powers the Contentful platform. For now, let’s take a closer look at what it means for best-of-breed ecommerce, and the practical ways in which it helps you. 

The benefits of best-of-breed ecommerce

Scalability and flexibility

While all-in-one ecommerce solutions are rigid and inflexible, best-of-breed ecommerce solutions make scaling easy — not just in terms of expanding the size of your website to meet increased traffic demands, but adding new features and capabilities, or swapping out apps that are surplus to requirements. Online markets can change quickly; having a flexible, future-proofed site capable of reacting to trends and customer demand is a valuable asset. 

Vendor choice

All-in-one ecommerce solutions lock you into a single provider. That’s not necessarily a bad thing if you’re looking for consistency, but it does mean you’re completely beholden to that company’s product support, their updates, their security measures, and so on. Best-of-breed ecommerce systems help you avoid vendor lock-in. If you don’t like some aspect of your tech stack, or find something better or cheaper, or that offers a competitive edge, you can switch vendors easily. 

Cost savings

While all-in-one solutions sometimes require smaller upfront investment, over the long term, it’s likely you’ll need to pay for workarounds to the limitations of the system, or find that some functionalities become redundant. Best-of-breed solutions often represent a greater initial investment, but offer excellent cost efficiency because you’ll be paying only for the apps you need, and you’ll be able to streamline your entire solution further over the long term.

Personalization 

You, rather than your vendors, are best positioned to understand who your customers are and what they want. With best-of-breed ecommerce, you can use that insight to create a tech ecosystem that serves the personal needs of your customers. The scope for personalization goes even further with the integration of advanced analytical tools, including artificial intelligence (AI) modules, which can predict customer trends and behaviors and ensure visitors to your store find exactly what they’re looking for. 

Omnichannel experiences

All-in-one ecommerce solutions are typically optimized for a single online channel (usually desktop). This limits the scope for content to be used across different devices, campaigns, territories, and so on, and means that you need to either create new content, or copy and paste existing content across channels — a process fraught with inefficiency, potential formatting hazards, and inevitable human error. Since they are, by definition, headless, best-of-breed ecommerce solutions don’t have those problems. With APIs connecting the back end to the front end, content can be created once, then used and reused endlessly.

Innovation

The best-of-breed approach gives you space to experiment with your ecommerce framework with much less risk than an all-in-one solution, and so it allows you to hop onto waves of cutting-edge innovation when it's useful to do so. You can test and integrate new ecommerce features and specialized tools without disrupting the day-to-day operational status of your store, and reposition your brand quickly to take advantage of emerging market trends and opportunities.

Best-of-breed ecommerce vs. all-in-one ecommerce

Now that we understand the benefits, let’s look at some of the key comparisons between the best-of-breed and all-in-one approaches to online commerce.

Building your best-of-breed ecommerce platform

Your best-of-breed tech stack isn’t going to build itself — and why would you want it to? 

Being able to create and hone an optimized ecommerce framework is what makes best-of-breed so useful. So, what does that process look like? Let’s go through the key stages.

Knowing what you need 

Review the performance of your existing stack to identify pain points and gaps in existing capabilities. That review will help you conceptualize your new framework, determine the kinds of features you’ll need to integrate, create a content model, and zero in on the specific technology that will power your website, or give you a competitive edge. A best-of-breed approach offers (almost) limitless possibilities, but you won’t have limitless time to launch your site. 

Assessing vendors

Getting the most out of a best-of-breed ecommerce solution means understanding the tools that are available to you, and how they will complement other modules within your stack. Once you’ve modelled your best-of-breed ecommerce framework, you can begin researching the vendors and apps that you’ll need to create it. Many vendors, including Contentful, offer free account tiers which allow you to try out new integrations before you buy or subscribe. 

If you’re taking your first steps into the best-of-breed landscape, it might be particularly useful to familiarize yourself with the MACH Alliance (microservice, APIs, cloud, and headless) as a way of finding and selecting vendors that are going to help you achieve your vision.  

Assessing the skills market

An often overlooked aspect of technical strategy is assessing the availability of skills in the market — skills held by a range of personnel, including full-time employees and contractors, and entire teams working as systems integrators or implementation partners.

Many older monolith solutions require specialist platform skills. Those skills become increasingly expensive as developers move away from those older platforms, and re-skill into newer technologies — a trend that shrinks the available talent pool.

Headless and composable technologies, on the other hand, benefit from a large, and growing, pool of talent in the tech market. Many graduates and younger developers are native headless developers, meaning that the cost of staffing your project can be spread across multiple different experience levels.

Aligning strategies

Your best-of-breed journey isn’t just about the technical capabilities of your website, and it’s critical you align the back end of your commerce solution with your frontend content strategy needs. 

In practice, this means helping your coders and engineers work with content experts (designers, editors, marketers) in order to identify apps, ensure the framework is functionally optimized, is accessible for non-technical users, and, ultimately, delivers the experiences you need it to deliver for customers. 

Exploring APIs

APIs power best-of-breed ecommerce solutions, facilitating communication between apps, and across the back end and front end. This means you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the relevant APIs, and the relevant API documentation, in order to ensure the functionality, and smooth-running, of your framework. 

Horizon scanning

Best-of-breed ecommerce solutions are defined by their potential for growth and evolution over the long term. To get the most out of your online store, you’ll need to embrace that momentum, keeping an eye on emerging trends, technologies, and anything that might shift your market position. The more effective your horizon scanning, the better positioned you’ll be to quickly adjust your ecommerce framework, scale to meet new demand, and outpace competitors. 

Embrace best-of-breed ecommerce with Contentful 

Best-of-breed ecommerce isn’t a goal, it’s a launchpad. By embracing the possibilities of composability, you can design a tech stack that transforms your customers’ shopping experiences. 

Contentful understands that power, and we’ve built our platform to unlock it. The Contentful® Composable Content Platform leverages APIs to make a vast ecosystem of microservices available. Create your website with Next.js, use Ninetailed to personalize your content, handle payments with Shopify, and manage content with Contentful — whatever you want for your online store, we’ll help you find the tools you need to build the best version of it. 

Ready to start building your ecommerce website? Get in touch today. 

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