Composable Commerce: Necessity or Technical Pitfall?

Composable Commerce: Necessity or Technical Pitfall?

The promise of composable commerce sounds like music to every digital leader's ears: never again locked into a rigid monolithic vendor, complete freedom at the frontend, and an ecosystem that seamlessly moves with the market. Brands like commercetools, Contentful, and Algolia have set the standard for what we call 'best-of-breed' and MACH.

Unfortunately, the reality of the past five years has been more stubborn. For many organizations, the dream of flexibility has turned into a nightmare of integration complexity, high management costs, and a constant struggle for scarce technical expertise.

At breakfast, we see that the discussion is often conducted incorrectly. Composable commerce is not a goal in itself; it’s a means to unlock business value. Success only emerges when strategy, architecture, and organization are aligned across the board.

The Hard Truth About the Status Quo

The established order—think Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Shopify, SAP, or complex custom builds—offers security, but often at a high price: slow or even stagnant innovation. You recognize this through the following symptoms:

• The Platform Brake: You want to move faster than your platform allows. Every small change feels like a risky open-heart surgery.
• Maintenance Over Innovation: 80% of your budget goes to ‘keeping the lights on’ instead of features that add value for the customer.
• The Recruitment Trap: It’s becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to find developers willing to work with outdated, closed systems.

However, the pushback against composable is justified: it’s complex and requires a mature dev team. If your GMV doesn’t justify the overhead, you’re building a cathedral for a village. The way out of the status quo is therefore not necessarily “throw everything out,” but choosing the right path.

Three Paths to a Future-Proof Landscape

The biggest mistake we see organizations make is choosing an architecture based on a technical ideal, without looking at operational reality. A switch to composable commerce is not a binary choice between ‘old’ and ‘new’. It’s a sliding scale of autonomy versus managed services.

Breaking through the status quo doesn’t mean blindly following trends. It means designing an ecosystem that fits your Digital Maturity. Ask yourself the critical questions:

• Do we have the people to manage a complex web of APIs?
• Are we willing to take charge of orchestration ourselves, or do we prefer to lean on the ‘one-stop-shop principle’ of a monolith?
• And most importantly: does the extra flexibility really outweigh the operational overhead?

To determine the way out of the status quo, we distinguish three strategic routes:

The breakfast Capability Scan: Control Over the Transition

We don’t believe in ‘wishful thinking’ or dogmatic choices for “build” or “buy”. Our approach combines sharpness on architecture with a modern product lifecycle. We guide you through five phases to transform with confidence:

1. Context Over Concept

Before we talk about APIs, we talk about the market and your business. What is the competition doing? What are the real pain points in your current platform? Which stakeholders need to be involved? We base the architecture on the reality of your business, not on a software vendor’s brochure.

2. The Explicit “Why”

Replatforming often fails due to vague goals. We define the ‘North Star’: which business outcomes and user value must this transition deliver? This is your framework for every euro you spend afterwards.

3. The Baseline Assessment (Business, IT, Operations)

We look beyond the code. Is your organization ready for a modular world? What technical debt is blocking the way? By naming the friction now, we prevent you from rebuilding old problems in a new stack.

4. The Future State

We design the target architecture: what do we buy, what do we build, and what do we reuse? The goal is a system that grows with you, not a system you need to replace again in three years.

5. The Pragmatic Roadmap

No ‘big bang’, but a phased implementation. We focus on what makes impact in the first 90 days, while laying the foundation for the next 5 years.

Conclusion: Control Over Your Own Foundation

A future-proof commerce landscape isn’t about the latest tools, but about control. Control over your data, your customer experience, and your costs. Whether you choose a hybrid model or a complete switch to composable: ensure that the architecture accelerates your business instead of holding it back.

Want to discover which path is most profitable for your organization? Let’s challenge the status quo with our capability scan.