Today’s businesses, especially ecommerce, are focused on innovation, flexibility, speed, and scalability. These needs are making businesses turn to modern headless commerce architecture to power their ecommerce experiences. A composable approach makes your applications more efficient and reliable.

In traditional ecommerce platforms, the frontend and backend are tied together and as such lack flexibility. When you want to customize a feature, you have to ensure you don’t break some other feature. Most of the time, you cannot add or alter any feature without affecting others.

In composable commerce, however, you can extend the features without disturbing or altering existing components. Additionally, composable commerce components can adapt to different environments easily.

Composable commerce platforms are flexible: the frontend and backend are not tied together; they are loosely packed. In short, you can say composable commerce applications are more service-oriented.

This article explains what composable ecommerce is and its features. It also highlights some of the leading composable commerce platforms.

What is a Composable Ecommerce Platform?

Composable commerce is a strategy that lets you select best-of-breed ecommerce components and merge them into a custom application.

Composable commerce uses MACH (Microservices architecture, APIs, Cloud, and Headless). In addition, developers can use other technology stacks like Jamstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) and other modern technologies.

Composable commerce as a software architecture or platform separates the frontend (UI) from the backend (business logic).

It also allows you to build a flexible ecommerce stack by selecting best-of-breed components/technologies. Let’s take an example of a composable commerce shop. Here, this shop might use various solutions or platforms to address different issues—shipping, adding content/products to the website, processing payments, and so on.

Let’s take an example of a composable commerce shop. Here, this shop might use various solutions or platforms to address different issues—shipping, adding content/products to the website, processing payments, and so on.

These solutions might come from different vendors or may be even pre-built, but for customers, it is a single ecommerce store. In other words, you can “compose” several components into a custom application that performs specific business functions. When you make changes or fix issues in one solution, it will not affect others.

In a similar way, when you want to add a feature or a component, you need not upgrade your entire application. You can always choose the best-in-breed solutions for different components and functionalities and still your application function as a unified solution.

Why Do We Need Composable Commerce?

Composable commerce is the future of ecommerce industry; with its robustness and distributed approach, it is fast becoming a powerful tool in ecommerce industry. Below are some of the reasons composable commerce is important:

• Composable commerce is built by taking speed and flexibility into consideration. This approach is committed to keeping up with the customers’ demands and giving them engaging experiences.
• The composable commerce approach does not rely on only one vendor for all the functionality. Instead, it utilizes various vendors and thus offers robust, comprehensive functionality to its customers.
• Since composable commerce “composes” various components, the breaking of one component does not necessarily mean other components will fail.

What is PBC?

In composable commerce platforms, PBC stands for “Packaged Business Capabilities”. You can simply envision PBCs as building blocks for your ecommerce store.

Each of these PBCs is a standalone solution or a part of a larger platform. Each PBC comes with a separate service that can communicate with other components. This communication between components is done through APIs. PBCs follow api first approach and major communication between software components is done through APIs.

Each PBC in a composable commerce platform is a feature of the application and can be a third-party component. So, in an application, a shopping cart or a promotion is a PBC.

Benefits of Composable Commerce Platforms

Composable commerce platforms as mentioned earlier are beneficial in different ways, as they are generally seamless and easy to use or navigate. In this section, we’ll further discuss the benefits of composable commerce platforms.

Customization

Using composable ecommerce platforms, you can personalize and build your own applications instead of just using what’s created for you. The composable ecommerce applications are tailored to your needs.

For instance, if you want only basic features for your application like ordering, cart management and payment process, you can very well build this basic application by composing the required features.

Similarly, if you want an advanced application, you can build an advanced application. So you can build your own applications as per your business requirements.

Scalability

Composable commerce applications are scalable; you can easily add more features to your existing application. They grow with your growing needs. For example, you can add AR (Augmented Reality) feature to your application for customers to actually feel the products.

Independent Development

Using composable commerce architecture, development processes are less complicated. Changes in one component will not lead to the failure of other components. The upgrade is no longer a nightmare for developers. The programming process is much faster and safer. Each development team can work independently without any interference from other teams.

Agility and Flexibility

Nowadays, applications are sold across various channels like the web, mobile, social media, etc. This requires that the applications should be flexible and easily extensible.

The composable commerce approach provides this flexibility and extensibility to applications. You can use your application on various platforms like web, mobile etc. There is a minimal chance of your application not working on different platforms.

Future-Proof Approach

A business using a composable commerce approach is always ready for the future. You can migrate your applications to a composable commerce platform with only high-priority features migrated first. For example, with the advancement in technology, more and more powerful technology, platforms become available every day.

A composable commerce approach allows you to easily switch to more advanced solutions/components without much of a hassle. You don’t need to upgrade your entire system just to include one feature.

Composable Commerce vs Headless Commerce

By now, you have got a basic idea of what composable commerce is. How does composable commerce differ from headless commerce?

A headless commerce solution, a component of composable commerce, is the decoupling of the frontend layer from the backend layer. Composable commerce leverages all aspects of MACH architecture and also uses a modular approach, open ecosystem, and business-centric solutions.

Composable commerce is a step ahead of headless commerce. For many applications, headless commerce is the first step towards a flexible architecture that is composable commerce. Composable commerce adapts the flexibility of headless commerce solutions to the next level.

Composable commerce and headless commerce are two different architectures, but headless commerce is the first step you can take towards a more reliable, modular composable commerce platform.

Going forward let’s evaluate two of the popular ecommerce platforms that use a composable commerce approach, Commercetools, and Medusa. First, let’s discuss Commercetools and then Medusa.

Commercetools: A Leading Proprietary Ecommerce Platform

Commercetools is a leading proprietary ecommerce platform. Using Commercetools, you can create a visually appealing, highly-functional customer experience.

Commercetools is a modern language-neutral platform with powerful commerce functionality and features. The platform is extensible, future-ready, and improves productivity.

Commercetools platform uses a multi-cloud infrastructure. It supports three main cloud vendors namely, AWS, GCP, and Azure. Commercetools is a modern commerce platform that runs multi-tenant architecture, bringing multiple benefits to you, including time and cost savings.

Features of Commercetools

• Extensible Platform API: Commercetools offers well-documented APIs that are easily extensible. These APIs help you to develop powerful applications and good customer experience.
• Efficient Product Catalog and Order Management: Using Commercetools, you can create and organize the product catalog to simplify your customer experience as well as your business. You are also able to define the cart with the collected information.
• Central Data Management Centre: Commercetool has a central data management location called Merchant Center to manage data, product information, catalogs, etc. It acts as a command base for Commercetools APIs and Microservices.

Medusa: The Most Popular JavaScript Open Source Ecommerce Platform

Medusa is an open source headless commerce engine built with Node.js. With Medusa, developers can build scalable, sophisticated commerce setups with minimal effort and great developer experience.

Medusa provides you with a full commerce engine with APIs to manage products, carts, customers, orders, payments, etc... The backend and frontend in Medusa are decoupled and as such, they are free from restrictions imposed by one another. They are both lighter and faster.

The Medusa backend is built on Node.js and Express. For easier development, Medusa allows using SQLite for the database, but it is highly recommended to use PostgreSQL for production or advanced development.

Medusa also uses Redis as an event management queue. Certain actions trigger events in Medusa. Developers can use Subscribers to listen to these events and perform a subsequent action when the events are triggered.

For example, when an order is placed, the order.placed event is dispatched. Subscribers listening to that event then are executed. You can listen to the order.placed event to sent a confirmation email, for example.

Medusa Architecture Overview

Medusa is split into three core components:

1. Medusa Server: It holds all the logic and data processing of your ecommerce platform. It connects to the database and the event queue system. The Medusa server is a headless server, meaning that frontend interfaces such as the storefront and admin are not directly coupled with it. The server exposes REST APIs that can be used to implement the storefront and admin, as well as other integrations.
2. Storefront: This is the frontend for your store that customers use to browse products and make purchases. Medusa offers two storefront starters: one built using Next.js and another using Gatsby. You can also build your own storefront using the REST APIs. You can build the storefront with the framework of your choice, such as Vue.js or React Native.
3. Medusa Admin: The admin is used by merchants to manage their store’s data such as manage their products or orders. Medusa provides an intuitive admin with advanced functionality and seamless experience. You can also build your own admin dashboard using the REST APIs.

Unique Features of Medusa

Some of the unique features of Medusa are discussed below.

• Open Source & Composable: Medusa is an open source composable commerce platform. Aside from the customizability and extensibility that comes with composable platforms, its open source nature gives developers full freedom to re-shape the platform as needed or use it as-is.
• Customizable core: Developers can create their own endpoints, services, subscribers, entities, and more in Medusa’s core. Medusa ensures to load both defined functionalities in its core, as well as customization developers add. Developers can also create plugins and distribute their customization as reusable packages.
• Orders, Exchanges, and Returns: Medusa provides you with an easy and automated way to manage returns, claims, and swaps. This is in addition to the standard order management process offered by ecommerce platforms.
• Product and Customer Management: Medusa allows you to add products with extensive customization and sort them into collections. Similarly, you can manage customers and assigns them to customer groups.
• Integration with third-party services: Medusa can be integrated to the best-in-breed solutions such as payment providers, search engines, or notification providers. For example, you can integrate Medusa with CMS platforms like Strapi to build an ecommerce store with a fast, content-rich frontend and a highly extensible backend.
• Pricelist, Discounts and Tax Management: With Medusa, you can add discounts or perform price overrides based on different conditions such as the total amount of the cart or availability of specific items in the cart. Tax-related configurations are also available per region and you can specify different rates for specific products.
• Sales Channels Management: Sales channels are used to define the availability of products in different channels. For example, you can specify products available for B2C customers and others for B2B customers. In Medusa you can add unlimited amount of sales channels. Orders can also be associated with a specific sales channel.

Conclusion

This article discussed composable commerce platforms. As the name suggests you can "Compose" the components and create our own applications as per your needs. Composable commerce platform is the future of ecommerce applications.

Medusa is a platform that uses Composable Commerce architecture. It provides advanced ecommerce features, and offers developers and businesses flexibility in choosing and building their tech stack. This guarantees that when using Medusa you’re in full control of your platform, providing high scalability and flexibility.

You can get started with Medusa by following the quickstart guide.

For any issues or questions related to this article, feel free to reach out to the Medusa team via Discord.