Composable Commerce Architectures: Building Agile Retail Systems

Abstract

With the rapidly changing environment of online shopping, the old monolith systems are not sufficient to serve the speed requirement and scale and individuality need at a high motivated rate. The given paper discusses the disruptive power of composable commerce architectures, i.e., modularization, API-first, cloud-native systems enabling retailers to develop agile, scalable, and resilient retail environments. Based on empirical evidence, industry case studies and architecture review we are going to scrutinise how composable systems excel over legacy systems in the deployment speed, operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and organizational agility. Composable commerce enables functionalities of commerce (checkout, catalog, inventory, and personalization) to be separated, allowing the parallel development of commerce solutions, speed of market, and real-time integration to customer preferences. The paper also identifies the enabler technologies which include, Kubernetes, events-driven microservices and serverless computing which has made composability at scale a reality. Quantitative results indicate up to 53 percent in the speed of feature deployment, 20 percent in cost savings, significant improvements in the measures of developer productivity and customer experience. Although the needs of composable commerce may seem a current problem in terms of integrations and governance, it also can be defined as a legacy strategy to create a future-proof digital commerce framework. Concluding the paper with the recommendations, in which the incremental transformation, cross-functional alignment, and cross-functional alignment of the best practices of the platform engineering are stressed when enterprises switch to the composable models after the monolithic ones.