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  • 3 Key Concerns When Evaluating a New Composable Commerce Approach - A little over a year has gone by since Composable Commerce was pioneered and subsequently caught fire in the eCommerce world. How are players embracing the movement? Is it all that it was cracked up to be? Does a Composable Commerce approach overcome the 3 main concerns practitioners have when evaluating an eCommerce solution? Namely, concerns around Total Cost Ownership, rapidly adapting to market & consumer needs, integration with other tools. Partnering with Ignite research, we extensively surveyed professionals in the sector to get a feel for their understanding and journeys so far. Spoiler: most practitioners are well on their way to adopting a Composable Commerce approach if they haven’t already implemented one. The benefits, in some cases, surpassed expectations, with the overriding opinion that this is only the beginning. Before we dive into the nuances, let us briefly recap what Composable Commerce is. A far cry from the ‘traditional monolith’ platforms that started the eCommerce wave, Composable Commerce allows a company to leverage the “best-of-breed” solutions that power facets of their eCommerce engine, allowing them to create bespoke experiences to delight their customers. In a nutshell, it is an approach that leverages modern technology like microservices, APIs, Cloud, Headless, and JAMstack (JavascriptJavaScript, APIs, markup), in an open ecosystem that truly enables a practitioner to build an eCommerce experience that enables achieving and surpassing your business-centric goals. Composable Commerce: Key Concerns With Existing eCommerce Platforms Of the respondents, a whopping 95% believed that Composable Commerce is the future of their business. Why? While priorities may differ, respondents across industries agree on the key concerns of their current eCommerce solution. The top 3 areas are: Quickly adjusting to market and consumer needs (37%) Integrating with other tools (36%) The high total cost of ownership (35%) Practitioners recognize these issues and more importantly, how Composable Commerce can help them tackle those concerns now and in the future. While 58% of respondents already employ a Composable Commerce approach, of those who do not currently use a Composable Commerce approach, 62% are researching, and a further 29% are evaluating options.   Let’s Talk Total Cost Ownership A crucial concern in the evaluation of an eCommerce platform, the total cost of ownership(TCO), there are pleasant surprises in store with a Composable Commerce approach. Of those that have implemented a Composable Commerce solution, over 80% expected to see Total Cost of Ownership savings over the next 3 years. Breaking down these savings, 62% expect a 25% reduction in costs over the next 3 years, and 19% of respondents expecting savings of 50% over the same time. By design, Composable Commerce is built for change. Need to implement a self-check-out option to keep up with the market? It is an easy and quick addition with a Composable Commerce approach, in contrast to a traditional monolith platform’s implementation. On a monolith, the implementation would usually incur higher developer costs, more lengthy and painstaking testing, and in some cases relying on an implementation partner’s availability. For a more detailed breakdown of what to expect on the cost front, check out our guide to total cost ownership here. While the benefits from a TCO perspective will continue to roll in well into the future, what about getting started with a Composable Commerce approach? A significant change in methodology can be daunting with the perceived complexity of this approach. Unsurprisingly, however, 81% of practitioners using a composable approach were able to implement it within 6 months! In addition, those who have implemented a Composable Commerce approach say that it took only one month to implement additions from third parties to their commerce solution.   Looking to implement a headless approach? Our comprehensive guide to getting started with headless commerce will teach you more about the architecture, how to work with the front-end of your choice, and how to choose a platform that fits your needs. Read the Guide   Is Composable Commerce Right for Your Business?   Catch yourself thinking “but is this really a fit for my unique business?” We get it, differentiating your brand and products is tough to do in today's saturated marketplace. The true power of a Composable Commerce approach is the ability to control and deliver a unique and unparalleled experience for your customers across touchpoints both old and emerging. Another key concern of practitioners is the ability to manage and add to their commerce solution themselves. Once again, the proof is in the pudding. Of those that implemented a Composable Commerce solution, 50% of respondents were making changes on their own to keep up with the evolving needs of their customers. You guessed it, that also means further savings. Additionally, they also reported that integrating with other tools (53%) and providing a consistent user experience (52%) was now easier than before. The benefits are spread across the business and technology teams, which makes a Composable Commerce approach a no-brainer in our eyes. What does that mean for your business? Implementing third-party tools, following the “best-of-breed” approach allows you to quickly optimize existing or add new channels. Let’s take another example if you notice there may be an upside in switching search capability on your eCommerce offering. Composable Commerce allows you to make the swap significantly faster than if it were to be changed (if at all possible) in a traditional monolith platform. This freedom and speed allow you to optimize your experience to delight your customers, delivering and surpassing your business goals.   Next Steps See what else the other respondents had to say, check out the full report here. Ready to take the plunge? We'd love to connect and see how we can make Composable Commerce work for you, sign up for a demo here.
    Topics: solution, evaluating, concerns, respondents, ecommerce, approach, business, cost, total, commerce, composable.
  • B2B industry expert, Brian Beck on why flexibility in an ecommerce platform is crucial to future-proofing business [video] - In the video, Beck advises organizations to carefully think about their customers' use case when they're first evaluating a B2B ecommerce platform or thinking about replatforming. It's critical to center that on the customers' needs.
    Topics: ecommerce, platform, business, evaluating, brian, b2b, video, thinking, crucial, flexibility, customers, organizations, commerce, expert, industry, think, futureproofing.
  • Next Level RFP for Evaluating an eCommerce Provider - We’ve all been through the RFP process from vendor to customer. The hours of research and preparation, template creation, and ultimately a fair amount of cutting and pasting. Is a one size fits all approach effective to an RFP when selecting an eCommerce partner? Here’s our take… Less static, more speed and agility Traditional RFPs look more like a series of boxes to check; from the must haves to the nice to haves, peppered with timelines, the players involved for approval, pricing, and demos/free trial availability. When choosing an eCommerce partner, this static approach may not be as effective or accurate in evaluating your business needs. A prolonged process without context around the future needs of your business is antithetical to choosing a good partner (or partners) who play well in the digital commerce sandbox, and who meet your needs, today and as you scale. When we talk about future proofing your eCommerce platform, it’s essential to talk about where you are and where you’re going. While it’s impossible to have a finite level of certainty from an environment so heavily rooted in change, the conversations are vital towards solutions versus outcomes. Speed is of the essence. You’re looking for implementation in weeks versus months. You need Proof of Concept (POC), and you need it sooner rather than later. For your consideration: an alternate approach to the RFP Step 1: Assemble Your Team Gather the key players from the business and tech side of your team and ask yourselves some key questions: How are you growing the business?   Who is involved (business teams, tech teams) and what’s in it for them?   What are your revenue goals?   What is your business model or models?   What is your digital maturity?   Need help evaluating eCommerce Providers? Connect with an Elastic Path expert to answer all of your questions, set up a demo, access a free trial, or discuss pricing options. Get in Touch Low – You’re new to digital commerce with little to no tech support in house with no intention of bringing in a team currently. You see the benefit of an eCommerce solution but don’t see it as integral to the here and now of your business. Your ideal fit from a provider is a more out-of-the-box platform like Shopify. Medium – If you have marketers, merchandizers, and a tech team in house, or hired through an SI, to execute and manage your platform you most likely fall into this category. You’re looking for low risk, simplified solutions, and you understand the importance of digital commerce to your business. Elastic Path offers customizable options to fit where you currently are on the eCommerce journey and where you’re going. High – If you have a dedicated team in house where you’ve already adopted or are looking to adopt a development operations methodology, you’re in the high maturity category. You aspire to be an innovator and leverage the newest technology to gain a competitive advantage in the market. Elastic Path offers a headless, API-first, multi-vendor commerce platform ideal for your needs now and as you grow. Step 2: Initial Research When evaluating providers, look at some key factors as you comparison shop: How does the provider stack up against others?   What are their values and mission as a company?   What are their business capabilities?   Who are their partner vendors?   Who are their customers? What pain points has this provider solved for them? Step 3: Initiate the Conversation When evaluating providers, look at some key factors as you comparison shop: Once you’ve identified where you are and what you’re looking for, request a discovery call from the provider(s) who meet those requirements and best fit your needs. Come to that initial conversation with use cases and your desired outcomes. You may have specific needs around promotions, catalog management, or cart/checkout in six months or under to market. Bring these key goals to the table so a provider gets a clear understanding of your needs and possible solutions. The benefit is two-fold; you may also discover a particular provider isn’t a proper fit. A big timesaver for both of you! Wondering what else to ask? We’ve put together a list of great questions to evaluate providers. What you need to know about Elastic Path For both medium and high digital maturity companies, we offer differentiated experiences with an API-first, headless approach to commerce. Here are a few resources to help you evaluate us: eCommerce Platform Buyers Guide Elastic Path Pricing Demo Library Additionally, while we believe there are better ways to make the right selection, we understand that some organizations are committed to RFPs. If you’re in that situation, here’s how we can support your RFP process.
    Topics: tech, needs, key, providers, provider, platform, level, rfp, business, digital, solution, youre, ecommerce, team, evaluating.
  • What to Ask When Evaluating Ecommerce Providers - We all know what it's like when you find yourself endlessly scrolling through Netflix to find your next show. The analysis paralysis is real! Choosing an eCommerce provider that best fits your brand can be a similar experience. With an ever-expanding plethora of options, deciding if you need headless for the future, want an all-in-one solution, for now, can be a dizzying task. It's easy to be swayed by flashy marketing, industry group certifications, and a litany of technical buzzwords. The truth is that most providers may not be the right partner based on your goals despite their capabilities and offerings. We often hear stories about that moment of realization well into the evaluation cycle, where a pricing surprise or lack of flexibility hinders your brand's ability to launch and operate an eCommerce setting that works for your customers. This article will equip you with the questions necessary to judge which provider would work best for your brand. Preparation Is Everything: Going into the evaluation process, we have all seen the hundreds of requirements long RFP lists. At Elastic Path, we are focused on delivering a solution that fits the unique needs of our customers. In that time, a key difference has been the customers that come in with a deep understanding of their customers and their brand's goals. Below is a breakdown of some of the critical points across those two groups essential to deciding on eCommerce providers that best suits you: Your Brand: Current solution: Do you have an existing presence already? If you do, what about your current provider is holding you back? This list should not be limited to the technical specifications needed for migration. For example, we've frequently heard that the day-to-day of managing the solution can be very complicated and time-consuming for your eCommerce team. Taking a "this is how it is" mindset of working an eCommerce solution so much so that they often do not realize there is a faster, easier, and more flexible way!   In-house resources: Does your brand have a fully fledge development team that would be able to devote the time to implement and extend a new system? If not, a System Integrator (SI) partner could help when thinking about adopting a headless microservices platform. To speed along the process, our Pre-Composed Solutions™ pre-integrate Elastic Path capabilities and third-party technology, so you spend less time stitching together granular components and start driving revenue faster. Check out a complete list of Pre-Composed Solutions™ here   Do you need an all-in-one solution? The eCommerce space has shifted, with the limits of a legacy all-in-one monolith approach starting to show, with many brands realizing a composable approach better serves them. An all-in-one offering is compelling theoretically; however, it usually means higher costs, more complicated integrations, and frustrating day-to-day working with the solution, not to mention the complex hacks necessary to add on functionality. To learn more about the benefits of a headless microservices approach, check out our blog post here. Your Customers: Where are they? Your customer's buying habits are probably unique to your business. What is irrefutable across all industries, though, is that these habits change. These changes can be drastic shifts like during the pandemic with the proliferation of curbside pick-up or more gradual shifts to mobile checkouts. Either way, ensuring your eCommerce solution can quickly adapt to meet your customers' preferences is crucial to any brand's success.   Who are they? Whether you are strictly online, B2B, B2C, has multiple brands, or somewhere in between, your brand's unique needs likely require the flexibility of an eCommerce solution that can cater to all of your brand's complex requirements. Customizing some eCommerce solutions can prove more troubling and costly than expected. The composable approach, in general, offers tremendous benefits to address those, though there is still nuance in how different solutions enable and charge for these customizations.   What do they want? Every brand strives to delight its customers. Unfortunately, most monolithic eCommerce solutions flat out cannot be modified to realize the experience you want to put forward to your customers. Rather than looking like every other online store, taking back control over your customer experience can be crucial to your brand's success.   Need help evaluating eCommerce solutions? Connect with an Elastic Path expert to answer all of your questions, set up a demo, access a free trial, or discuss pricing options. Get in Touch Finding a Needle in a Haystack: Now that you have considered what is essential to your brand and your customers, the difficulty in choosing a best fit eCommerce solution begins. In a few cases, we've heard of customers being promised the world only to be delivered a POC(Proof of Concept) that sends both complexities to set-up and costs through the roof. To avoid this pitfall, we have put together a list of questions that could help save you time and bring you peace of mind when it comes to ensuring you are picking the right solution for you. How much do you cost & how are costs calculated? Most providers, including Elastic Path, will have a costing based on your particular solution. While it is frustrating to go through the entire evaluation process only to be presented with an astronomical cost estimate at the end, there are a few critical differences in headless microservices solutions that you can identify earlier in the evaluation process. In many cases, a brand may need to run multiple platform instances to handle separate brands or to cater to B2B & B2C clients with individualized catalogs. The cost to change can also vary significantly between solutions. An SI implementation or an in-house developer team costs add up quickly when building a solution that caters to your brand's needs. How much do you customize a solution that fits my needs? Who is going to do it? Even in a situation where your brand has an in-house development team that can launch and support the solution, we've often heard from our customers about the limitations on the platform being problematic once implemented. A few examples could be limits on the number of SKUs, how many catalogs you can run in the same instance, how you can set up time-bound sales, edit your catalog to change how your store is presented to customers, set up multiple catalogs, etc. Being sure to ask early on is an excellent way to get ahead of this future pain or financial surprises. What is a timeline you should expect? For implementation timelines, a good approach when transferring off an older monolithic platform onto a headless microservices solution is a staggered approach, where functionality is built up step-by-step. Both a phased approach or a full re-platform can still take months. For some brands that need a headless solution "yesterday," Elastic Path offers Pre-Composed Solutions™ that enable you to get up and running in a matter of weeks! Check out a complete list here. How do you set up all of your products in the platform catalog? Can you make changes later down the road? Setting up product catalogs in current headless microservices solutions is relatively straightforward. Where the rubber meets the road is in managing the day-to-day and making changes to fit the evolution of your brand. Elastic Path offers the industry's only decoupled catalog architecture. Why does that matter? A decoupled catalog architecture allows you to set up unlimited catalogs, with pricebooks separated from the product listings to offer unparalleled flexibility in how you want to cater to your customers. A few examples include a scenario where a customer only needs a particular set of products (B2B) or offers different prices for the same product (Sales, loyalty customers, etc.). Other solutions may require additional set-up of the same products to cover the needs of multiple catalogs and often numerous instances of the platform that send the costs of running the solution up. The decoupled architecture also means that you are free to change things like product attributes, while other solutions are prescriptive in the "best way" to set up catalogs on their solutions that are then locked in. With irks like the inability to remove a product attribute, if your eCommerce team has experience with other headless microservices platforms or even any of the older monolithic solutions, it's a guarantee that they feel this pain. Catalog Composer gives you the flexibility to change to fit with your evolving needs, so you can focus on delivering an unrivaled experience for your customers. Learn more about Catalog Composer here. What happens when you run into an issue? A composable approach can seem complicated just down to the sheer number of vendors a brand may need for their solution. A significant number of 'build with us' platforms will leave the onus on your eCommerceor developer team to diagnose and address an issue. Elastic Path has a 99.9% SLA uptime; regardless, we still believe in providing a solution that works for you rather than dropping tools in your lap and sending you on your way. Composable Commerce XA™. How can you control your customer experience? The benefit of headless platforms is that you are free to choose a CMS (Content Management System) or DXP (Digital Experience Platform) that best enables you to build a solution that will wow your customers. Making sure your eCommerce solution can allow your team to build and control the experiences you want is a crucial benefit of switching to a headless approach. Check out a complete list of accelerators to leverage when composing a solution to delight your customer here. How can you support my current business model? What about expansion in the future and experimentation? The beauty of a composable solution is that it can be tailor-made to fit your brand's unique needs. Ensuring that your proposed eCommerce solution has those capabilities natively or with a pre-existing integration that only needs to be turned on will go a long way towards your brand's digital success in the future. Building in unique requirements like an extra step at checkout can range from impossible to costly financially and time-wise for older monolithic solutions. Similarly, some solutions will require separate accounts (& contracts!) for a B2B offering vs. a B2C offering. Being aware of your brand's unique needs now and in the future is key to future-proofing your solution. Take, for example, the need to use different payment vendors when adding new geography for your brand. With a composable approach, you can turn payment provider integrations on and off with a simple click of a button. This flexibility also extends to when experimenting with a new customer experience like mobile self-checkout. A composable architecture will free your brand to innovate around what works for your customers rather than what the developers can implement in a short time frame. Still, have questions on what a good fit for your needs is? Please chat with us now, we're always happy to help guide you to ensure your brand has the solution it needs to deliver results for your business and your customers.
    Topics: providers, approach, evaluating, brands, solutions, solution, customers, ecommerce, needs, team, brand, headless, ask.