Getting started with Composable Commerce? The five most important lessons and advice

More and more companies are seeing that the current systems they work with are not flexible and scalable enough to anticipate current and future consumer desires. In a survey by DJS Research, 81 percent of IT executives worldwide say they plan to add microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, and headless (MACH) elements in the next 12 months. These are the top five pieces of advice and lessons the speakers gave during the event.

1. No more fear

Starting a new promotion, stocking up for the holidays, or discovering that your product is suddenly in high demand should never be panic.

Hence, this is the main reason why companies are switching to MACH. Greg Fancher, chief technology officer at Express apparel brand, saw an ad go viral, tripling website traffic during the busiest hour on Black Friday. “In this scenario, a monolith system would have crashed, resulting in valuable time and lost sales. However, we had prepared ourselves and switched to MACH elements that automatically scaled with the peak load. This allowed us to monitor everything extremely well and customers have the same user experience. “

Gary Schorer, Director of Technology at Vistaprint, said they saw no point in a monolith in 2019. “This was not an easy decision and a risk for us. We have done a lot of work and are far from finished, but looking back we have seen very good results after just one year. “

2. Think of local agility with a central core

Another important development is that MACH technology offers companies the possibility of each component developing solutions at their own pace.

This gave Danone the opportunity to introduce its D2C strategy. The grocery store has a decentralized organizational structure in which each Consumer Business Unit (CBU) can freely choose its technologies.

Russell Lincoln, Global Head of Direct to Consumer at Danone Life Nutrition, said the MACH architecture gives Danone and its CBUs the freedom to develop components at their own pace. “At the beginning we were responsible for the platform, but now CBUs are so digitally mature that they have formed their own community and work together on a roadmap for which functionalities they want to develop.”

Simon Young, Senior Engineering Director – Unified Commerce at Lego Group, points out the importance of setting up your teams accordingly. “By creating full-stack teams based on specific Lego.com domains, such as shopping carts and loyalty, you can give them the autonomy to innovate themselves.”

3. Personalization made easy

By 2021, 320 billion emails are to be sent every day. Research from SmarterHQ shows that 72 percent of consumers only reply to personalized messages. It is therefore important that you learn as much as possible about your (potential) customers. MACH makes it easier for companies to use data for personalization.

Christoph Gerber, CEO of Talon.One, said that you can score the i’s with MACH. Thanks to data, his company can make tailored campaign decisions. “We are now looking at the entire data landscape in order to decide who should be addressed with which campaigns. For example, as a grocery supplier, you don’t want to target your hamburger ad to people who want sushi. MACH makes it possible to present a personalized campaign to each individual. ”

4. Agile Tech – Agile Business

In recent years, more and more companies have been using agile technologies. A report from the Harvard Business Review shows that eight out of ten companies are agile in their software development. However, it is all the more important that all teams within an organization actually implement agility in their processes and working methods.

Tinay Lykke Kristensen, Senior Digital Manager at Salling Group, emphasized that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. “To make things happen, we have to coordinate our different goals by talking to each other and developing new ideas together.”

Andreas Lederwascher, Business Solution Architect at Audi, also added that it was also important that everyone was heard. “Give everyone a voice and the opportunity to improve your organization and your product. You will be surprised how many good ideas and improvements emerge. “

5. Lower total cost of ownership, more options

Many companies see the total cost of ownership (TCO) as the main obstacle to digital transformation, so Research from Gartner. This often leads companies to believe that MACH systems result in higher costs, but that is wrong.

For example, Jo Graham, CIO at Boohoo.com, said they have a platform that is based on a linear cost model. “This meant that the cost increased with the number of brands placed on the platform.”

Boohoo.com decided to change course and the project for the new MACH platform was completed in 35 days. Graham pointed out that it is particularly important to take away the fear of the transformation process of the leaders. “You have to be brave to take the step, but it doesn’t feel like a huge risk when you have the support of the company and their team to make this happen.”

diploma

Nobody can predict what the future will bring, but technological developments over the past decade are a good indication that the pace will not slow down anytime soon. Only five to ten percent of the brands are currently exploiting the full potential of MACH, but this is set to change in the coming years and MACH will become part of their digital transformation for many companies. As Socrates said: “There is only one good: knowledge and one evil: ignorance”.

If you want to set trends and learn from the best, learn why Gartner commercetools is rated as A leader in the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce.

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