On the Road to Composable – The Monolith

There's a movement happening in eCommerce. Something we at Product League call "the road to composable". As you run, build and scale your digital business, you might not even realise you're already on this road. You might think that every problem that comes up with each new eCommerce opportunity is yours alone. Rest assured, we're all on this road together.

This will be the first of three blogs in which we explore the different stages of composable commerce. Let's explore the background of the eCommerce landscape and its direction, to see what this road consists of and how we can navigate its stops, pitfalls and vistas.

Today's topic: the monolith.

Read the next article in the series: "On the Road to Composable – Going Headless"

Your customers are digital entities

Next time you're at the supermarket (or really, any store), take a look at the other shoppers. Unless they're already dragging three crying toddlers through the aisles, you'll notice most customers have one hand on a shopping cart and the other on their phone. They're checking the latest deals, receiving the newest discount coupons, comparing competitor prices... and looking up just in time to dodge you, if you're lucky! They have digital shopping experiences. And those experiences continue at home, on the couch, on the subway, at the gym. E-commerce is now the norm, not the exception. Which is probably why eCommerce revenue keeps growing year after year at twice the rate of traditional store revenue, even after Covid. Your customers are now digital entities, and you can bet their perception of your brand is digital too.

Your eCommerce channel is struggling to keep up

Digital experience is the road to your customer's heart and wallet. Research from Baymard shows that 75% of customers reward a good digital experience by ordering more, while 50% of customers punish a poor experience by switching to a competitor! Not surprising, since switching to a competitor is as easy as opening a new browser tab, or simply switching apps.

Demand for seamless, tailored digital experiences keeps growing. So what does this look like behind the scenes? You're probably spending more on content to showcase all the products your brand offers and to draw customers to your site and app. Maybe your product data is struggling to keep up, with specific price- and time-bound promotion rules your customers are waiting for, but that wreck your load times with their calculations. Or is customer loyalty lacking? Either way, this should have been solved by that digital savings app that was too expensive to release, or the membership programme that's been trailing the competition since launch.

Requirements? Your backlog is probably full of requests. Your current systems are probably strained to their limits, piling up technical debt with every new business feature you add. The total cost of ownership (TCO) of all these complex processes and the people managing them is eating into your margin, if not more. This causes you to delay innovation and fall further and further behind, in a downward spiral. I really hope this isn't starting to sound too familiar!

Stage 1: The Monolith

Traditionally, eCommerce was solved with all-in-one applications, so-called monoliths. The business needed a digital channel, so they bought or built a platform that promised most of the necessary functionality. The custom functionality specific to your business added a bit extra, and you were ready to go. This approach works relatively well for small businesses: since spending is limited, customisation and performance often aren't the highest priority. For example, if you're a small bakery and want to start a digital channel, a relatively cheap off-the-shelf option like Shopify is still the best choice.

Even large companies like Amazon (Cadabra), Adidas and Nike (Demandware / Salesforce) started with large monolithic systems. In fact, most companies start with such a platform (the Magento, SAP Hybris, Intershop customers of this world). It's only when eCommerce channels start growing and scaling that the first growing pains begin to show.

What often happens is that the custom layers added to the system turn into spaghetti code, platform upgrades become incompatible with your own code, release cycles slow down, time-to-market for new features decreases and performance deteriorates. Good news! Your eCommerce business is growing. Bad news! Your system isn't growing with your business.

If you're running your business at scale, you need the best performance and the flexibility to respond quickly to customer needs. Fortunately, moving to headless also makes it possible to further scale your business towards composability.

Scaling up

This is where everything revolves around scaling up. How do you offer the same performance to user 10 million as you did for user 1,000? How do you keep offering relevant content to draw customers to your deals? And how do you reliably offer the experiences that make your business unique, to all your customers, equally? The place to look would be the road to composable. In the next blogs of this series, we'll dive deeper into the following stops on the road: from monolith to headless, and from headless to composable. These stops offer solutions to scale out and up, delivering higher scalability, better performance and a faster time-to-market. But be warned, they come with their own pitfalls and downsides.

Product League helps you assess your current situation, your future, and the road to get there, using the power of our multidisciplinary teams, state-of-the-art technology and our extensive knowledge of the eCommerce world. Once you've set the vision, we can realise it together. We're an OutSystems low-code powerhouse, strengthened by partnerships with commercetools and Contentful. Together with your business, we can achieve anything: from custom solutions to full SaaS implementations. We help you reach your customers and achieve your goals.