From composable content to composable commerce

Composable commerce integrates product information and commerce tooling to fulfill unique commerce needs, scaling with your growing organization while connecting to your existing workflows and providing flexibility when you need it.

In practice, composable commerce is a way to extend beyond the basic functions of traditional commerce systems. A composable commerce approach lets you differentiate your brand with unique integrations and capabilities that help teams work faster and deliver more impactful customer experiences.

How do composable commerce and composable content fit together?

Content is the heart of every customer experience. It inspires, informs, and guides people through the customer journey. Combining a composable content management system with commerce tooling brings together the two components you need most in composable commerce: great content and seamless commerce functionality.

Brands are under immense pressure to deliver flawless ecommerce experiences every time. Slow loading times, a poor checkout experience, problems with your mobile app, an outage on Cyber Monday, or recommendations that miss the mark can all lead to lost customers and bad online reviews.

To make things harder, customer expectations keep rising. While many brands are still struggling with mobile and messaging consistency, customers are demanding more personalization, new technologies like augmented reality (AR), and the ability to move seamlessly between digital marketing channels and in-store experiences.

Meeting growing customer expectations is impossible when you’re dealing with the limitations of legacy systems. These outdated tools slow time to market, increase the risk of performance issues and outages, and eat away at your ROI with their ongoing maintenance costs.

Brands that want to improve their commerce game need more speed, agility, and creative freedom than they can get from legacy systems built on monolithic architecture. They require a tech ecosystem that’s scalable, reliable, and grants them the right level of control over brand content.

Benefits of composable commerce solutions

Composable commerce lets you assemble the exact tools you need

No business’s needs are one-size-fits-all. Combine the latest personalization, localization, advanced analytics, and AI-based tools with the tools you already know and love. Composable lets you give teams the optimal tools to do their jobs, and easily evolve your tech stack as needs change.

Check out our Marketplace for an idea of how many options you have for extending your capabilities and customizing your technology stack.

Lower risk, lower cost than traditional monolithic platforms

Most composable solutions are cloud-native, SaaS-based tools that are more cost effective than older software or on-premise solutions that you have to maintain. They’re easier to try out because you’re not locked in.

See how Shiseido cut content development costs by 50%.

Fewer constraints = more speed

With a composable approach, you create building blocks that teams can quickly assemble and reassemble into new experiences. Marketers can react quickly and take advantage of real-world events and trends. Developers can reuse components to launch new products faster or enter new markets. The people closest to your products get the tools they need to make updates in minutes, instead of submitting a ticket and waiting days or weeks.

See how BMW deployed 140 dealer-specific websites in five weeks.

Strong governance and unified content keep messaging consistent

A composable commerce solution with strong integration and orchestration features makes it easier to strike the balance between flexibility and control. With Contentful, brands can keep messaging consistent while giving teams the ability to experiment, personalize content, and unleash what we call “structured creativity.”

Learn more about the advantages of a composable commerce approach with industry experts from Salesforce, 64labs, Merkle, and Contentful.

The beauty of composable commerce is that it’s not all or none. You can pick and choose where a composable approach will add value, instead of replacing all your tools at once.

For example, traditional commerce platforms are powerful tools, but everyone using them gets about the same capabilities, and the same weaknesses. They’re great at transactional functions, but they lack the features and capabilities brands need to create inspiring experiences that stand out in a crowded market.

With a composable approach, you can choose to replace your commerce platform with a composable commerce platform, or you can enhance your existing commerce tools with composable solutions for content, search, personalization, etc.

Enhance your existing commerce platform with composable tools

Enhancing your existing commerce system with composable tools can improve messaging consistency, streamline operations, and add capabilities like enhanced personalization, AI-generated content, and advanced analytics. All without a painful — and costly — rip and replace.

Rapha saw growth in nearly every area of user engagement when they adopted composable commerce powered by Contentful. Read the case study.

Ace & Tate empowers developers and creatives to bring stories to life

Storytelling is a big part of building brand loyalty for Amsterdam-based eyewear company Ace & Tate, but a limiting commerce platform and the lack of a content platform made it hard to bring campaigns and stories to life.

Ace & Tate made the move from a suite to a composable commerce stack, starting with the Contentful Composable Content Platform, and integrating purpose-built tools, including Ninetailed and Shopstory.

The new composable commerce platform, supporting 11 markets and five locales, enabled Ace & Tate to launch 30+ campaigns in eight months.

“With Contentful and Shopstory, our creative team has more flexibility. Even the developers and product designers were like, ‘Wow! This is amazing.’” — Sheri Kruzel, Head of Digital Product

Read the case study.

Bang & Olufsen connects online and in-store experiences with a composable commerce solution

Luxury Danish headphone and speaker maker Bang & Olufsen struggled to connect online and in-store experiences. The brand relied on a monolithic platform that combined ecommerce tools with content management, but failed to support omnichannel delivery.

Bang & Olufsen adopted Contentful as its composable content platform. It then integrated commercetools, one of several ecommerce tools available in the Contentful Marketplace, to customize its composable commerce platform.

The results:

• Connected browsing-to-buying experiences.
• Launched in-store digital signage.
• 60% increase in conversion rates.
• 27% increase in average order value.

Read the case study.

See more examples of composable commerce in action and check out the retail guide to composable content.

Composable commerce takes your brand to the next level today and lets you future proof your technology stack so you won't fall behind as emerging technologies, like generative AI, drive more changes.

No matter what changes the future may bring, content will always be the heart of every customer experience. This is why a composable content platform should be the center of your composable commerce architecture.

The Contentful Composable Content Platform helps brands solve for complex needs, manage large-scale operations without outages, drive efficiency across global operations, and enable omnichannel personalization.

Our partner ecosystem lets you choose from the best vendors so you can spin up seasonal lookbooks with Shopify, add product information with commercetools, and experiment with the latest AI applications.

Learn more about how Contentful can power your composable commerce solution.

Up next: Composable content for marketers

A guide for marketers on leveraging composable content, including strategies for digital teams to create flexible, scalable content for modern marketing needs.