(US and Canada) Composable commerce has quickly become a trending buzzword infiltrating our vernacular within Chief Digital Officer (CDO) circles. Composable commerce is a modular architecture that allows eCommerce brands to choose every single part of their tech stack exactly to their liking.

While composable commerce has been on an uptrend over the past few years, today, it’s found its home amongst enterprise brands and eCommerce platform companies alike. The largest eCommerce platform in the world, Shopify has now recognized the significance modularity has for enterprise brands. Under the guise of its product Commerce Components, Shopify has ventured head-on into composable commerce and put itself up against players like Commerce Stack, Elastic Path, and Kibo.

Being both a cloud-hosted monolith platform and a company with a US$75 billion market cap, that is a major turn for Shopify — one that very well signifies the future of commerce tech stacks.

So why the monumental shift in strategy?

1. Composable commerce is easier for monolith platforms to sell into

Shopify has come to the realization (and has probably always known) that its top offering is Shop Pay (i.e., its checkout). With Shop Pay, customers can easily checkout with third-party payment options or use payment methods stored on their mobile devices or computers.

According to Shopify, Shop Pay increases checkout speeds by 4x the average checkout time and boosts conversions by 1.72x. Even the brands that aren’t on the Shopify platform and only use the Shop Pay feature typically see a substantial lift in revenue.

However, Shopify has realized that instead of pitching the whole kit and caboodle of their monolith system, which forces enterprise brands to make a much larger decision involving multiple stakeholders, offering the checkout systems via composable commerce is a less risky, smaller switch for brands.

Because at the end of the day, although brands stand to gain from using Shop Pay, from the perspective of an enterprise brand and CDO, the cost and risk of using Shop Pay by migrating to Shopify’s entire platform often far outweigh not using Shop Pay at all.

2. Enterprise-level brands have been making shifts to composable commerce for years

With moves to headless environments and the use of 3rd-party Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Content Management Systems (CMS), direct-to-consumer (D2C) enterprise brands have been building themselves strictly modular for some time now.

The shift to modular builds progressed organically over the past 4 years after Shopify retooled its theme architecture for both speed and extensibility. In that same time frame, Shopify knew that the pivot to modular was coming. And instead of fighting against that pivot by doubling down on their monolith offering, they’ve chosen to lean into it.

If you look at large brands like Parachute Homes and Athletic Greens, the primary use of Shopify is Shopify’s Checkout and Order Management Solution. With Shopify’s Commerce Components release at the beginning of January, Shopify can now fit into an Enterprise brand’s modular architecture and provide additional modular benefits beyond just its checkout.

Since enterprise brands are often hesitant to move their whole tech stack over to Shopify’s platform, Commerce Components aims to provide greater flexibility for businesses and allow them to handpick their desired Shopify features.

3. Composable commerce solutions simply make Chief Digital Officers happy

Chief Digital Officers take the less risky path. Always. No matter what. Because there are always so many moving parts in a tech stack being managed by a CDO – a CDO simply does not want to give away all the goods to one company. CDOs don’t want to put all of their eggs into one basket. And in their view, monolith architecture is that basket.

Now, Shopify’s entrance into composable commerce allows CDOs to take a serious look at a platform that their Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and CEOs have long been asking for, but that they have always resisted betting on completely.

So what is composable commerce, exactly?

Going off the definition of composable at the beginning of this article, you could think of composable commerce and CDOs as similar to a music conductor building an orchestra. So that the conductor (the CDO) can achieve the exact sounds a music piece needs, they modify the instruments (the components) playing in the orchestra (the architecture).

This means their CMS, loyalty system, CRM, etc., are all now selectable to what they want, and everything just works together seamlessly. Gone are the days of monoliths. But we’ve recognized that complete control via microservices is also not the answer.

That’s where composable eCommerce finds the sweet spot. And with it comes a new age of digital transformation that takes the best scenarios from the two opposites of monolith and microservice.

What is the difference between composable commerce and headless?

Composable commerce should not be considered the same as headless. Headless is the starting point of taking one aspect of a monolith (i.e., the head) off of the behemoth. Composable should be thought of as “What if everything else could be swappable? Like the arms, the torso, the feet?”

Likewise, composable is not the same as microservice, where you might think a single fingernail or knuckle should be swappable.

If you are currently working under a large monolithic platform or have gone the complete opposite and built a bespoke microservice-driven platform, composable commerce is the middle ground you should consider.

It gives you the best of both worlds, allowing you to choose which systems you want, and which systems you don’t. Then, it is your responsibility to be master integrators vs master builders.