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.