Shopify Composable Component: What Does it Mean for Your Store

Having an online store is increasingly becoming a necessity for retailers. An online store gives customers the convenience of being able to shop and purchase products from anywhere, providing retailers with access to a larger market and customer base. Digital storefronts also present retailers with the opportunity to reach more modern customers who prefer electronic transactions and browsing.

Moreover, an online store allows for streamlined inventory management through tracking orders, stock levels, and more information that can be accessed in one location. All these factors help retailers stay competitive in the ever-changing digital market and capitalize on available resources.

By having an online store, retailers can adapt to customer needs while taking advantage of the technological advancements that are quickly growing in popularity today.

But as customer expectations from online stores are rising, retailers look for more efficient methods to build their online stores. Composable commerce is one such effort.

What is Composable Commerce?

Composable commerce refers to a system or architecture for eCommerce that allows for the flexible and modular integration of different services and technologies to create a customized and seamless shopping experience for customers. It typically involves breaking down the traditional monolithic eCommerce platform into smaller, independent microservices that can be easily integrated and composed to meet the specific needs of a business or organization. This approach allows for greater scalability, flexibility, and innovation in eCommerce.

One example of composable eCommerce could be a fashion retail website that utilizes various microservices to create a seamless shopping experience for customers.

• The website’s product catalog is powered by a microservice that integrates with the company’s inventory management system to ensure that products are always up-to-date and accurately reflected in stock levels.
• Another microservice handles the checkout process, which integrates with a payment gateway to process transactions securely.
• A third microservice handles customer account management and integrates with a CRM system to ensure that customer data is up-to-date.
• A fourth microservice is for handling the customer’s delivery & shipping, which integrates with the logistics provider for real-time tracking and delivery updates.

All these microservices can be easily integrated and composed together to create a customized and seamless shopping experience for customers.

Furthermore, if the company wants to make a change in any of these areas, it can simply update the relevant microservice without affecting the rest of the system. This allows for greater scalability, flexibility, and innovation in eCommerce.

Introduction to Shopify Composable Component

Shopify has recently launched composable components that allow merchants to create and manage their own online stores. Shopify composable component is a feature that enables merchants to use pre-built, reusable components to create custom pages for their store, such as product listings, blog posts, or custom landing pages. In addition, these components can be easily arranged and composed to create a unique layout and design for the store without the need for extensive coding or development.

Shopify composable components are built using Shopify’s new section framework, which enables merchants to easily customize the layout and design of their store using a drag-and-drop interface. The section framework also allows merchants to preview changes in real-time and gives them full control over their store’s HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Benefits of Shopify Composable Component for Online Stores

There are several benefits of using Shopify composable components for online stores:

• Low Cost of Ownership: Composed eCommerce provide unique capabilities by combining multiple products (components) available in the marketplace at a cheaper rate. Not only does it enable you to start more quickly, but you can also add or switch tools as your business grows without the expensive costs that are usually linked to a single digital experience provider.
• Flexible and Customizable: Since online retailers are not attached to one specific technology foundation, so they have a broad range of choices and multiple approaches to address any issue they face. They can adjust their technical framework to meet the objectives of their business rather than being confined by what the technology permits. Furthermore, they are free to alter their opinion whenever they want – if they are not content with a particular tool combination, they can just pick another.
• Faster Deliveries: A tailored solution that fits in with business requirements leads to fewer unnecessary elements and fewer requirements for instruction. With composable commerce, the time that was before spent customizing the platform and instructing personnel can now be spent on activities that create more business value. Companies can now be more nimble, allowing marketers to construct, assess, and adjust their content conveyance and digital initiatives with ease.
• Better customer experience: The design of Shopify composable components is mobile-friendly and responsive, which means that they will automatically adjust to the size of the screen that they are being viewed on.
• Higher conversion: With the help of Shopify composable components, merchants can create custom pages with a specific layout and design, which can increase the conversion rate.

How to Get Started with Shopify Composable Component

If you want to experience the perks of composable commerce, here is how you can get started with Shopify composable components:

Identify Your Goals

Choosing the perfect software for each business need is the essence of composable commerce. However, replacing all of your existing infrastructure simultaneously can be pretty difficult. Thus, you should begin with the essential elements of your architecture.

First, generate a list of the characteristics and capabilities you would like your eCommerce site to possess, and distinguish the ones that would have the highest positive effect on your business. Then, search for API-driven solutions that meet those requirements.

Prepare Your Team

As opposed to more traditional eCommerce formats, composable commerce has its own set of perks, though there is a hitch: it necessitates a background in technology and eCommerce development. Hence, prior to embarking on composable commerce, confirm that you have personnel on your staff who are able to:

• Integrate components using APIs
• Use backend development technologies like JamStack, Next.js, React, etc.
• Create uniform design and UX for all the services even if the components come from different vendors

Pick the Right Components from Shopify

Shopify offers dozens of composable components to help online retailers work their way best. You can pick among the following Shopify components:

• Storefront
• Cart and Checkout
• Core Commerce
• Data and Compliance
• Shipping and Logistics
• Omnichannel

Shopify Composable Component Alternatives

A composable commerce application is not just one system but a combination of many software elements. There are numerous advantages to this type of structure; nevertheless, it can get complicated to manage dozens of APIs.

Here, a composable commerce platform like Shopify can help you assemble and deploy your composable eCommerce application with ease. Even though the platform will not be the only source of your software services, it could offer some basic eCommerce capabilities that you can enhance through third-party components. The following are some of the best composable commerce platforms available.

Elastic Path

Elastic Path is a Composable Commerce component platform designed to give developers flexible options for customizing and building commerce applications. The platform combines a best-in-class commerce engine with an application framework that can be tailored to customers’ specific needs, enabling them to create their own customized experience. It offers a powerful set of front-end components, microservices, and APIs that can be easily combined and integrated into any project.

Elastic Path usages REST Level 3 hypermedia APIs and provides full customization capabilities with APIs and microservices development opportunities to build custom applications. Additionally, Elastic Path makes it easier for developers and teams to use the same codebase across multiple projects. This saves time, reduces cost, and allows teams to implement changes that drive business results quickly.

Commercetools

Commercetools is a cloud-based, composable commerce component platform that delivers the building blocks and services needed to create personalized eCommerce experiences across devices. It provides digital commerce components that enable users to construct modular commerce solutions with support for microservices infrastructure. It allows retailers to manage their product catalog, content flows, ordering and payment processes, customer service experience, and more.

Commercetools is built on MACH, ensuring flexible architecture so businesses can quickly add new services or customize existing ones on their own terms. Core features of Commercetools include:

• A fully-customizable API
• Real-time integration capabilities
• Live dashboard analytics for tracking performance in real-time

Additionally, Commercetools has a library of developer tools and APIs designed to help businesses create customized solutions that are integrated with legacy systems and third-party apps and services.

Spryker

Spryker is an end-to-end commerce technology platform that helps merchants rapidly create and deploy unique customer-centric eCommerce experiences. Its modules, known as “composable commerce components,” are self-contained pieces of code that put merchants in the driver’s seat to tailor their stores in a safe and supported way. The platform’s open-source architecture has a set of core components, including a shopfront, business logic, and back office systems, with extensions to provide additional flexibility.

Every module comes with its own customization options so that merchants can tailor their stores to match their needs perfectly. Spryker also provides access to additional third-party services such as payment gateways, customer service tools, analytics solutions, marketing automation tools, and more – all without having to invest heavily in coding expertise or rewriting existing code.

VTEX

VTEX Composable Commerce is a stack of pre-built, open-source components that make it easy for developers to build custom commerce experiences quickly. The stack includes various components for building and managing the checkout, payment, security, inventory, analytics, content management, and more. These components are highly composable, so developers can choose and assemble them to fit any specific commerce requirement.

The goal of VTEX Composable Commerce is to make it faster and simpler for eCommerce companies to create custom solutions for their customers without needing to go through a long development process.

Fabric

Fabric is an open-source composable commerce component stack that provides developers and designers with a modular set of components, APIs, and services to build all kinds of digital commerce experiences from the ground up.

Fabric consists of several core components:

• Payments: A suite of APIs to help merchants process payments from customers via a range of payment services;
• Inventory: An API for managing product inventories;
• Fulfillment: APIs for handling fulfillment processes such as order management, tracking, and returns;
• Pricing: APIs for building pricing models that help merchants offer dynamic pricing schemes;
• Catalogs: APIS that allow merchants to manage product catalogs and collections;
• Platforms: Connectors to popular eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce, and Bigcommerce;
• UI Components: Pre-built React components designed to help merchants build fast interfaces that look great;
• Commerce Services: Set of services related to eCommerce operations, such as tax calculation.

Wrapping Up

Composable commerce is poised to revolutionize eCommerce as we know it. By enabling online retailers to customize and configure products online effortlessly, composable commerce will create a highly personalized and engaging shopping experience emphasizing personalization and speed.

You can leverage the power of Shopify composable components to create a sophisticated, personalized shopping experience for your customers by allowing them to customize product configurations and add features. Additionally, it can also help streamline your operations by automating complicated processes like inventory management and order fulfillment while optimizing performance on both desktop and mobile platforms through responsive design principles.

We at Techtic can ensure that your online business thrives in this competitive landscape by taking advantage of all the advanced features offered by Shopify composable components. Contact us if you’re looking forward to integrating microservices into your Shopify store.