How to Overcome Resistance to Change: 8 Business Reasons to Migrate to Composable Solutions.

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Business Benefits of Choosing a Composable Setup

While most business leaders are investigating and embracing this total industry shift, many will be left wondering, as the majority of the real benefits of Headless commerce are lost in translation between the technical and business teams.

To try and bridge this gap, read some of the most common statements from composable commerce ambassadors and representatives, and the reasons behind these bold claims. So, let's dive into it.

1. The Composable Approach Positively Impacts Customer Experience and Conversions

In a recent interview with PYMNTS.com, Julie Mall from Elastic Path explained it well, stating:

"The 'composable commerce' approach leverages a range of best-of-breed vendors, 'composed together,' to give retailers and brands a set of ready-made solutions that allow enterprises to create their own unique customer experiences. These capabilities are made available through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), giving a plug-and-play aspect to creating the overall customer experience."

One of the great advantages of the MACH approach to composable technology is that you can find "out-of-the-box" microservices and integrations with ready-made APIs. These are highly configurable to create unique customer experiences and journeys. These applications focus on delivering an omnichannel shopping experience by focusing on technologies such as PWA, at speeds that older monoliths cannot compete with.

On-site speed is the No. 1 driving force that moves a customer from being a casual browser to a loyal and repeat conversion in your sales funnel. The performance-optimized omnichannel capabilities of composable commerce applications are undeniably essential for future-proofing your eCommerce business.

According to a recent study by Unbounce,

"Customers are less likely to purchase from an online retailer with every second that passes after the page loads. For every additional second of load time, conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42%. Nearly 70% of consumers agree that page speed impacts their willingness to buy from an online store."

Slow page speed affects conversions and threatens the customer experience. The percentage of consumers who express annoyance rises to 54% as a company's mobile page load time increases, and 80% of customers report that slow pages are more frustrating than those that have crashed.

Switching to a composable technology stack allows you to create a unique and differentiated customer experience. Companies can easily customize their online store experience with a composable commerce platform to better meet the needs of their target customers. This can result in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as higher conversion rates.

2. The Composable Approach Increases Revenue

Composable commerce allows retailers to create a super-fast and seamless shopping experience across all channels, including online, mobile, in-store, and social media. It also heavily emphasizes website and mobile performance, which is increasingly critical to your eCommerce success.

Faster websites ➨ better performance ➨ increased conversions ➨ higher revenue

How much does composable commerce impact the revenue of eCommerce retailers? In recent case studies, we have seen some retailers achieve significant gains. Some have increased mobile revenue by as much as +131% and conversion rates by +140%.

Furthermore, we found that the benefits of composable architecture extend beyond online sales. Retailers who have adopted this approach have also seen an increase in offline sales, as well as customer loyalty and satisfaction.

3. Composable commerce improves web performance

As mentioned above, composable applications are built with performance in mind. With a strong emphasis on delivering super-fast solutions that already meet the rigorous demands of both search engines and consumers, it takes the burden of optimization off your shoulders.

Composable developers focus on creating solutions that already comply with Google's Core Web Vitals speed ranking requirements. The Core Web Vitals report measures the performance of your pages based on field data (real-world usage data).

According to Google, "Page performance matters because longer page load times have a severe impact on the bounce rate. If page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 32%. And if the page load time increases from 1 second to 6 seconds, the bounce rate increases by 106%."

4. Migration to a composable tech stack will save you money and reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)

The cost of ownership is not a simple, straightforward calculation. Enterprises often focus on certain types of expenditures and lose sight of the total expected cost in the long run. Fees associated with changing and upgrading the commerce stack are one of the most commonly overlooked expenses.

Companies often make plans for the present, but when times change, businesses have to undergo significant shifts that are expensive to manage within a pre-established budget. Furthermore, if companies want to keep up with rapidly changing consumer trends, upgrades and updates will be inevitable, which makes it crucial to anticipate what these future expenditures will be.

Enterprises should be prepared for the following changes:

• eCommerce system upgrades

• Maintenance

• Updates or changes made by third-party technology partners

• Backend changes to meet business needs

• Developing new user experiences to keep up with customer demands.

These adjustments can be costly with conventional legacy platforms because their rigid architecture makes modifications more complex, which drives up development costs. Composable solutions, on the other hand, offer greater adaptive capabilities and reduce the total cost of changes by about 40% compared to inflexible legacy platforms.

Utilizing comprehensive composable solutions, such as Vue Storefront Frontend as a Service (FEaaS), can save a company up to 8 months of development time and $500k in go-to-market costs.

As mentioned above, launching a new website is not the total sum of calculating TCO. The ongoing maintenance and updates throughout its lifespan significantly determine exactly how much you pay for your solution.

This is where composable solutions with a high level of pre-built code (Vue Storefront out-of-the-box frontend) truly make a difference to your bottom line in the long run. The vendor will continuously improve their product and performance, deploying it seamlessly to your technology stack.

5. A Composable Setup will Future-Proof Your Store

Composable commerce utilizes a headless architecture that decouples the frontend UI (presentation layer) from the backend business logic (eCommerce platform).

You can then use only the components you need to build the entire technical infrastructure from various best-of-breed solutions dedicated to smaller, specific tasks that communicate via APIs. These include individual applications for your UI, content management, payments, search, and more.

Switching to composable allows you to:

• Future-proof your store by remaining agnostic: You have complete freedom to choose the applications you need; there is no vendor lock-in or "one-size-fits-all" system. You can customize your store from the UI to the hosting and retain ownership of your customizations.

• Increase operational efficiency: A composable commerce platform can help companies streamline their operations by making it easier to manage inventory, orders, and other backend processes. This can lead to reduced costs and increased profits.

• Stay ahead of the competition: By rapidly adapting to changing market conditions and customer preferences, businesses using composable commerce can stay ahead of the competition.

• Enter new markets: With composable commerce, companies can quickly launch and manage multiple online stores in different countries or regions. This can help them expand their reach and grow their customer base.

• Drive innovation: Composable commerce provides businesses with the flexibility to quickly experiment with new ideas and technologies. This can help them drive innovation and stay at the forefront of the eCommerce industry, while also retaining top talent. Top developers enjoy working with the latest technologies.

6. Migration to a Composable Architecture Positively Impacts Your Dev and Marketing Teams

The most successful companies know how to retain top talent.

Developers at the forefront of the latest technologies love what they do, and composable commerce offers them just that. It allows them to be agile and flexible while focusing on design, content, customization, and optimization. Building your store's user interface on a high-code solution also increases their sense of product ownership, as all customizations are owned, not rented.

On the other hand, your marketers will experience a sense of independence because composable architecture allows them to freely update and customize features on the frontend without interfering with the backend business logic. This also inevitably improves the customer experience because the latest content is constantly updated without potential website downtime.

7. Migration to a Composable Architecture is Faster and Safer than Replatforming a Monolithic System

Your main reason for considering replatforming is the potential gains from switching to a different technological solution. That being said, the primary deterrent for most online businesses is the time required to migrate their platforms, which is usually long. But this process can be shortened (and secured) by using technologies uniquely suited to composable commerce, such as the Strangler Fig Pattern (or Strangler Pattern).

The Strangler Pattern is popular in the architecture and build of a composable store. The goal is to "strangle" the old monolithic application over time by replacing it with smaller, more controllable microservices, step by step. This allows for a phased approach to transitioning from monolithic to composable architectures, which means you can control your risk and expenditures. It also allows you to track performance improvements for every single application.

If you are highly risk-averse, this approach is ideal, which leads us to our next point.

8. You can migrate to a composable architecture incrementally while still operating on your current eCommerce platform.

Using methods like the Strangler Pattern makes it easier to migrate your eCommerce store to a new architecture without having to rebuild from the ground up in one go. If you want to quickly improve customer experience and boost performance, replacing the frontend of your legacy system is a good place to start.

By migrating the UI (frontend) to composable applications, you will immediately see improvements in SEO, CX, and UX metrics. You can continue to use your current eCommerce platform and business logic while simultaneously improving and personalizing the presentation layer (UI).

The Time Has Come to Break the Status Quo

Overall, the composable tech stack is a flexible and powerful way to run a business. If you aren't using it yet, now is the time to switch. Designed to make your life easier as a business owner, the advantages of migrating to a composable tech stack far outweigh the reasons for resisting change.

By using the best tools for every job, you can avoid the headache that comes with trying to use one platform for everything. And if something goes wrong with one component, you can simply replace it without having to redesign or rebuild your entire store.

Let's talk! About how your eCommerce business can migrate to a composable tech stack without wasting time and immediately improving performance and customer experience.

Original author: Estelle Slabbert