The pursuit of flexibility might result in an expensive, uncontrolled, and complex solution without delivering the agility we wanted to have in the first place.
And if headless is not the best strategy? And if after the go-live, future changes might not be as easy as you expect? These are some of the concerns raised by Gartner in its report called Composable Commerce Must Be Adopted for the Future of the Applications, June ’20.
According to the report, the hype around “headless” approaches can cause organizations to lose focus when the actual requirement is for “many heads” and that’s crucial to the strategy of each business.
Therefore, organizations wishing to embark on the journey towards the future of applications should have a high level of digital maturity in place, warns Gartner’s consultant.
The rise of Composable Commerce: one possible solution
Monolithic applications have lost their traction during the last few years mainly due to the lack of flexibility and agility to evolve at the speed required by digital businesses. Retailers are no longer accepting long projects of 18 months and millions of dollars invested on a slow-wagon from 1920. Today’s customers demand faster answers.
The adoption of loosely decoupled architecture platforms based on packaged business capabilities (PBC), where back-end and front-end evolve independently seems to be the only solution.
The decoupled nature of a modern front-end has become an enabler for the acceleration of a composable application approach.
This approach is so powerful that companies who have adopted the composable strategy will outpace their competitors by 80% in terms of the implementation of new features.
Although the solution seems to be more clear, the final answer is not there yet. Are we moving towards a long-term race? Are we providing the best architecture solution in the mid and long-term or will it be another “hype” that might incur future problems similar to the headless?
The challenge: what applications should I use to compose my solution?
With the rise of composable and the maturity of the marketplace, there are endless options to build your solution. Therefore, what has emerged to be easier and faster to build is becoming complex again. As vendors, we are failing to provide sustainable solutions.
Instead of keeping it simple and following Gartner’s recommendation to start a “modular, composable commerce journey with low-hanging fruit, providing achievable goals that have clear business benefits”, I’ve seen projects with dozens of third-party integrations and even new “heads” where there is no customer or profits.
Therefore, finding a comprehensive solution that can cover most of the requirements can help you:
What to expect from VTEX: the sweet spot of a composable-headless solution
VTEX is a disruptive technology because it combines the scalability and security of a SaaS solution with the flexibility of a low-end development framework, which can be used to create from basic online stores to complex IoT and augmented reality tools.
How?
Although the hype around headless is quite new, VTEX adopted it back in 2011. In the past couple of years, we have been building the most comprehensive tool in the market that encompasses PIM, pricing, promotions & merchandising, subscriptions, DOM, CMS, AI-powered recommendations and search, marketplace, in-store suites and much more.
Business areas don’t need to rely on SIs or IT teams to build their strategies. Throughout the VTEX back-end, it is possible to input all business requirements: attributes, multi price tables, currencies, languages, shipping policies. Besides that, VTEX has a drag-&-drop native CMS that helps the marketing team to build landing pages and customize the content.
Ready-to-use front-end extensible React and Gatsby components to build from the home page to the checkout page. To enhance user experience, VTEX also has multiple native features, such as PWA, pre-fetching, CSS compression, and others.
VTEX IO is a cloud-native low code development platform that helps you deliver business solutions faster. From smooth, PWA-ready web stores, to custom admin interfaces and back-end integrations, VTEX IO offers an opinionated set of frameworks that allow you to evolve fast and safely.
The CCX Company, in collaboration with VTEX Commerce Cloud, expresses gratitude for having had the opportunity to enhance its understanding of the advantages, trends, and other elements addressed in the current topic. This article was jointly developed and is brought to you by the VTEX Commerce Cloud team.
