Commerce innovation is composable modules

Organizations are moving away from difficult, customized solutions to using a composable, best-in-breed stack that can scale and meet their exact needs. They are looking at composability for the flexibility and scalability that architecture provides. On top of that, both B2B and B2C businesses struggle to add new features in a timely fashion.

Looking back, the commerce market has evolved from the monolithic architecture where you had the “all-in-one” code base. That sufficed years ago as organizations were entering into the digital world.

Since then, the market shifted to the concept of “DIY Composable” where all the different elements of a solution could be selected independently. This offered the flexibility that monolithic structures could not but created laundry lists of technical work for small teams to integrate complex solutions, increasing total cost of ownership from development overhead.

Now, a more moderate approach is an option in the deployment of commerce modules — a Composable Platform — the best of both worlds for organizations looking for out-of-the-box, integrated solutions and the ability to easily connect 3rd party solutions. This is where Optimizely sits—a modern solution on composability that removes complex integration work.

Moving past a history lesson on architectures, Optimizely’s commerce strategy is focused on delivering innovation to both of our commerce solutions using composable modules. Our composable modules, which provide out-of-the-box functionality that can be added or removed at your convenience, are a way to deliver new features more simply by removing integration work, leading to faster time-to-market and revenue.

The power of choice

Optimizely will continue to support our SaaS (Configured Commerce) and our PaaS (Customized Commerce) solutions as we move forward. The composable modules include functionality that can be leveraged by both solutions. Or, customers can choose to leverage other tools in their tech stack if they have a preferred choice in another tool. For example, if a customer already has a DAM in place, they can choose to use it versus the one provided by Optimizely.

Customers will still be able to leverage functionality if it exists in the current platform today; they can select when they are ready to leverage the new composable module. Payments is a good example—customers may have a live site that has a payments solution in place. They do not need to replace existing solutions until they are ready to leverage the new payments composable module.

The value of the composable architecture is the out-of-the-box functionality that can be configured/decoupled as needed. The commerce strategy aligns with the fully composable stack, including the SaaS and PaaS CMS options, across the Optimizely solutions.

Initial composable modules include:

• Payments 
• Promotions 
• Search 
• DAM 
• CSR Portal
• Stored Value
• Segmentation
• Catalog Manager 

Upcoming composable module releases 

Our first focus is Payments and Customer Service Representative (CSR) Portal.

Payments are based on a partnership with Spreedly, a third-party payment platform. This integration will allow customers to take advantage of one API to access a global payments ecosystem and the ability to leverage multiple payment service providers to ensure better service for your customers. The payments composable module will be iterated over the coming year with an initial v1 release in Q4.  

CSR Portal will be based on the function from Customized Commerce but created as a composable module to allow both SaaS Core and PaaS Core to take advantage of the features and functionality. A key feature will be the ability for CSRs to create an order without the ERP or front-end website. It will also provide updates on orders and carts that will allow you to better serve customers and continue to gain loyal followers.

Additional composable modules will be rolled out over time and, as with any roadmap, are subject to change. Check out our Q4 commerce roadmap for the latest updates.

If you’d like to hear more about our Composable Commerce discussion, we’ve got a highlight reel below from Opticon that includes myself and Josh Schoonmaker, VP of Product – Monetize.