Composable commerce customer journeys

The journey your customer takes, starting with discovering your brand and culminating in post-purchase engagement, can make or break their relationship with your business. 

In this article, we’ll explore the transformative power of composable commerce and its role in enhancing every stage of the customer journey – from awareness and consideration to conversion and loyalty. We’ll dive into: 

• why customer journeys are paramount for ecommerce success;

• the key elements of composable commerce;

• how to create a seamless customer journey with composable commerce;

• step-by-step tips for successful implementation of composable architecture.

Let’s get started! 

The importance of ecommerce customer journeys

Customer journeys define how users interact with a brand at every stage — from the moment they discover the brand to long after they complete a purchase. As ecommerce growth slows but competition intensifies with 28k stores globally as of 2024, ensuring every touchpoint a customer has with your brand is stellar becomes paramount. As such, creating smooth, customer-focused experiences is more critical than ever.

That's because people want more than just good products; they expect smooth experiences that feel designed just for them. Over 80% of customers prefer companies that personalize experiences .

Benefits of customer journey optimization

Businesses that prioritize identifying key touchpoints across the customer journey and optimizing interactions gain strong advantages:

• Increased loyalty: A smooth and personalized experience builds trust and encourages repeat purchases, strengthening customer retention – 78% of consumers are more likely to repurchase from brands that personalize their communications, according to McKinsey.

• Higher conversion rates: Streamlined journeys reduce friction, increasing the likelihood of turning more browsers into buyers and boosting your bottom line. Deloitte found that brands that prioritize customer journeys are 48% more likely to surpass revenue goals. 

• Competitive edge in crowded markets: Optimized customer experiences help companies stand out in the saturated ecommerce industry, driving long-term growth for better business outcomes. 

Differences between B2C and B2B customer journeys

While the core principles of building great customer journeys apply to both B2C and B2B contexts, the specifics differ significantly.

B2C journeys are typically shorter and driven by emotional decision-making. Customer expectations revolve around convenience: intuitive navigation, personalized recommendations, and a fast checkout process.

In comparison, B2B ecommerce journeys are often more complex, involving multiple decision-makers and a longer sales cycle. Businesses in the B2B space need to focus on building trust through detailed product information, custom pricing options, and flawless integrations with enterprise systems. 

Take MKM , a leading retailer navigating both B2B and B2C markets, as an example. Facing the challenge of serving diverse client segments – from traditional corporate buyers to younger, mobile-savvy audiences – they turned to a composable commerce stack. This approach gave them the flexibility to create tailored customer journeys that effectively address the needs of each segment, resulting in an impressive 71% increase in orders. 

MKM’s success shows how composable commerce can empower businesses to enhance customer experiences. But what exactly is composable commerce, and how can you use it to improve your store? Let’s break it down.

Understanding composable commerce solutions

Composable architecture allows for building flexible, scalable ecommerce solutions by decoupling the frontend from the backend, using modular, best-of-breed components.

Unlike traditional monolithic ecommerce systems where all components are tightly integrated, composable commerce allows you to pick and choose the best tools for what you need, enabling businesses to build custom, flexible solutions.

By using a modular approach, you can integrate different microservices and components into your platform, creating a customized and adaptable ecommerce solution. Each one serves a purpose, and you can rearrange or swap them as needed without impacting the entire system.

This modularity empowers businesses to:

• Adapt quickly: Add or replace features in response to market trends or customer feedback.

• Integrate smoothly: Connect with existing systems or third-party services to create a unified platform.

• Personalize experiences: Tailor every aspect of the shopping journey to meet individual customer needs.

For example, you might integrate an AI-driven recommendation engine to improve personalization or adopt a headless CMS to deliver consistent content across multiple channels, while staying on your faithful backend.

Multibrand considerations

For companies operating multiple brands or serving customers across diverse regions, composable commerce offers unparalleled flexibility. 

A modular approach allows businesses to maintain shared core components, like payment gateways or inventory systems, while customizing the user experience for specific audiences, implementing cross-brand URLs, personalizing offers based on location, etc.

For example, Tally Weijl successfully leveraged composable commerce to address these complexities. Their platform retained a consistent brand identity while offering localized content, currency options, and promotions. The result? A streamlined yet personalized experience that resonated with customers worldwide.

So, how do you get started with the composable approach?

What are the building blocks of composable commerce?

To deliver flexible and responsive experiences, composable commerce usually relies on these common elements:

Headless frontend

Headless commerce platforms are key to enabling flexibility. In a headless architecture, the frontend presentation layer is decoupled from the backend, making it easy to deliver content across various channels.

This separation allows businesses to create unique and consistent customer experiences through different channels. 

Content management systems (CMS)

Content is king in digital commerce. A headless CMS allows businesses to manage content creation and distribution separately from its presentation; this means you can create content once and deliver it across multiple channels, ensuring consistency throughout the entire ecommerce customer journey while saving time.

Microservices 

Composable commerce focuses on building tailored solutions, and microservices are essential to the approach.

Microservices allow businesses to develop and deploy individual components independently, facilitating scalability and flexibility. Whether it's integrating a new payment method or rolling out a new service, microservices ensure that each part of the platform is flexible and scalable, supporting continuous improvement and innovation to address evolving customer pain points and needs.

Creating a seamless customer journey with composable commerce

Composable commerce isn’t just about the technology – it’s about how that technology transforms the customer experience. 

Let’s break down how this approach elevates each stage of the customer journey.

 1. Awareness: Making the right first impression

The customer journey begins with how people first discover your brand. Whether through organic search, social media ads, or word of mouth, the initial touchpoint sets the stage.

Composable commerce empowers businesses to easily integrate tools that allow tailoring content to specific customer segments, ensuring that the right message is delivered at the right time. 

Not only that, the approach is perfect for omnichannel commerce , helping to reach potential customers across different touchpoints; and with multi-geo and multi-brand capabilities , you can manage several stores or brands from a single dashboard. 

2. Consideration: Building trust and interest

At this stage, it’s essential to provide detailed product information, customer reviews, and personalized recommendations to boost customer engagement. Composable commerce makes enabling tools like AI-powered search easy, helping streamline this process.

Imagine a customer searching for “organic skincare products” on your site. With AI-driven search, they’ll see results tailored to their preferences, such as vegan options or products for sensitive skin, making their decision-making process easier and more enjoyable.

3. Conversion: Simplifying the purchase process 

The checkout process can often be where businesses lose customers due to friction, but composable commerce helps fix this.

It allows merchants to easily offer multiple payment options, so customers can choose their preferred method, whether that's a credit card or a digital wallet. With a headless setup, sites load faster, reducing the chance of customers dropping off. 

Ecommerce businesses can also effortlessly customize the checkout experience, such as showing prices in local currencies and offering region-specific payment options, making the process smoother for customers everywhere.

4. Retention: Encouraging customer loyalty

The journey doesn’t end at checkout. Post-purchase experiences are key for retaining customers and turning them into loyal advocates for your brand; this includes everything from personalized follow-up emails and loyalty programs to easy returns and proactive customer support. 

Composable commerce makes it easier to enable features such as real-time notifications, so customers stay updated on their order status, shipping, and delivery times. You can also use modular components for implementing loyalty programs, allowing you to manage rewards that encourage repeat purchases.

Additionally, you can easily add personalized follow-ups, such as tailored emails thanking customers and recommending related products that help keep customers engaged. 

Implementing composable commerce

With composable commerce and modular components, you can tailor every interaction to your customers’ needs – whether it's offering personalized content, speeding up checkout, or building loyalty after the sale.

While it offers tangible business benefits, the transition to composable requires careful planning. The good news is that you don’t have to go composable all at once. Instead, you can adopt your own pace and gradually introduce composable elements to your existing architecture. 

Here’s how to get started: 

Assessing your existing infrastructure

Before diving into composable commerce, it’s essential to take a step back and evaluate your current setup. This means looking at your existing systems, identifying areas where you’re facing bottlenecks, and figuring out where composable solutions can fit in. 

By assessing how your current tools and processes interact, you can determine how to best leverage composable commerce to streamline operations, boost flexibility, and future-proof your ecommerce setup.

Selecting modular components

Once you’ve got a clear picture of your infrastructure, the next step is picking the right modular components for your business. You want to choose individual tools that align with your goals and help meet your customers' needs. 

With modular components, you’re essentially building your own perfect ecommerce stack, with pieces that work seamlessly together. Whether it’s a flexible CMS, personalized search, or a smoother checkout experience, this step lets you tailor your ecommerce platform to exactly what your business needs – without all the unnecessary clutter.

Consider starting with the frontend

One of the easiest ways to begin is by implementing a Frontend as a Service (FEaaS) solution. FEaaS provides pre-built, customizable frontends optimized for speed, responsiveness, and user experience. This means you can improve your storefront’s performance without needing to overhaul your backend. 

And since FEaaS solutions are modular and ready to integrate, you can implement upgrades faster, helping you stay competitive and scale faster. 

Summary: Enhancing experiences with composable commerce

Composable commerce is revolutionizing the way businesses approach ecommerce, empowering them to deliver customer experiences that are tailored, engaging, and downright enjoyable.

By adopting this modular approach, you can craft a journey that meets customer expectations and feels unique to the buyers.

• Start with understanding the modular approach and the flexibility it offers.

• Focus on your customers and their needs. Design every stage of their journey to be smooth, personalized, and memorable.

• Take it one step at a time: assess your current setup, pick components that help you stand out, and remember this doesn’t need to be a complete overhaul of your entire system – you can implement a composable architecture gradually, starting from the frontend. 

At the end of the day, composable commerce is about creating a CX strategy that sets your brand apart in a crowded market. By embracing it thoughtfully, you’ll be ready to deliver the kind of shopping experience your customers will love.