Composable Commerce Accelerators: Reduce Your Time-to-Market
Launch your digital commerce experiences faster and with less risk, while still being able to customize to your business needs.
Brands need to be able to launch digital commerce solutions quickly to meet customer expectations and deliver experiences that support brand loyalty and drive sales. The pace of the market all but demands it. That’s why commerce accelerators—a vast category of solutions—can be a key tool for helping retail and commerce brands reach their goals.
Commerce accelerators are designed to help retailers launch features faster and decrease the costs of standing up online stores or mobile apps. Their benefits extend beyond a speedier time-to-market, too, making them a highly desirable solution for retailers. But before you can determine if an accelerator is right for your brand (and if yes, which one), it’s important to understand what they are.
What is an accelerator?
The first question we’re often asked by clients and partners is “What is an accelerator?” Even though software accelerators have been a staple of professional services delivery for a long time, they are still poorly understood with a reputation for being hard to define. Part of the reason for that is that accelerators can take a number of forms, and determining the list of components and features that defines them can be hard.
To give us common ground to work from, let’s start with this high-level definition:
An accelerator is a combination of code and documentation that has a number of features, processes, and designs already developed and integrated with technology providers in order to decrease the time to delivery of a larger project.
Of course, accelerators can come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so let’s narrow the field a little further to headless and composable commerce accelerators, which are specifically engineered to integrate with commerce providers. Headless and composable commerce are not one in the same, however, and the definition of their accelerators isn’t either:
A headless commerce accelerator integrates with a headless commerce provider. It should be noted, however, that it may be tightly coupled with a single provider (e.g., Salesforce or Shopify), so while it gives you the advantage of an accelerator, it’s often limited to a single solution option. Even where a headless accelerator may enable the use of multiple technologies, such as headless CMS, they tend to be built around a core commerce platform that was not purpose built for composability.
A composable commerce accelerator also integrates with headless commerce providers, but by contrast to its headless counterparts, it is purpose-built to work within the modular flexibility of a MACH framework, giving you the flexibility to select the back-end solutions that would serve your brand’s needs best.
These are great shorthand descriptions, but if we dig in a little deeper, we’ll get a more concrete definition of what makes an accelerator— essential for having aligned stakeholder discussions and figuring out what the right accelerator might be for your needs.
A true composable commerce accelerator needs to have four specific elements: a front end, a back end, pre-set configurations, and documentation. Where it gets tricky is that each of these elements can have slightly different components that make them up. For example:
- The front end could consist of several different elements, possibly including (but not limited to) a design system, a coded component library, page templates, pre-determined experiences or themes, a theming system, a javascript framework or library, and more.
- The back end should feature integrations into the data sources and technologies that make up the platform, and then will typically have some combination of integrations between technology providers (i.e., other back-end technologies) and integrations to extend tech provider capabilities for relevant use cases
- Pre-set configurations for the tech providers would be made up of things like defined content or data models and command line interfaces to be able to spin up, set up, configure, and deploy the technology
- Documentation, likely the most consistently presented element across accelerators, should offer clear information on how to use, customize, and extend the technologies— in other words, how to get the most mileage out of the accelerator
The ways in which those four features can be flexed, extended, and expanded upon are myriad, but at the core level, an accelerator will include each of those four elements. Understanding their core components is important, because their benefits and uses are so vast that without a common understanding to work from, it’s impossible to discuss their direct application to a specific business case.
They’re so much more than just a tool to enable your DTC, B2C, or B2B business to get up and running faster and easier. They offer a wide variety of benefits on top of the time-to-market advantages inherent to them, but aren’t designed to be a one-size-fits all complete solution. They should be viewed as a solution that shortens development time and can be extended and customized to fit specific business needs, integrating into processes and flows to make implementation and deployment more efficient.
What will an accelerator do for me?
First and foremost, as the name suggests, accelerators deliver speed. They help organizations lay the technical foundations that would ordinarily take many months to implement, in a matter of weeks. But they offer more than just a faster launch. There are five key benefits you get when employing an accelerator:
- SPEED: We’ve covered this already, but a faster time to delivery is really the #1 benefit. Accelerators take the work—and therefore time—out of figuring out how to do the base-level integrations and implementations, and they provide a shortcut by doing some of the basic work for you. Less work on the first-level components means you have more time for customization and enhancement.
- RISK: Decreased risk—especially for projects in highly-complex and/or scaling environments—is a huge benefit to using an accelerator. Because accelerators have been tested and implemented before, you have a predefined route for solving a challenge and the risks to your business are significantly diminished.
- EDUCATION: This might not be as self-evident as some of the other benefits, but with a core framework to build from, accelerators offer an excellent opportunity for learning and development for the team. They provide something for them to learn from, to use as a base for understanding, to question, and to extend their skills out from. Especially when an organization is introducing new technologies or architectures, this can be an enormous benefit for both the short and long term.
- EXTERNAL SUPPORT: Accelerators are, by their nature, created outside of a vacuum. By default, they come with a vendor or community to help troubleshoot, assist, and support if/when questions arise.
- A START POINT: Every accelerator is based on an opinion of how it ought to be done. Instead of spinning cycles trying to determine an approach and methodology, accelerators offer an opinion to kick-off from.
On top of those core benefits, composable commerce accelerators still allow you to make incremental changes and customize as needed to deliver the experiences you want. With faster, easier deployments and automated business processes, you can take a strategic approach to decision-making and free up more time for unique implementations that help your brand stand out from the crowd.
Accelerators allow you to do more, without compromise.
Accelerators come in many forms, each designed with ready-to-use components. When put together the components act as a foundation for your software. Key platform capabilities are enabled by accelerators, like product recommendations, loyalty programs, OMS, and CMS. In a mobile commerce application the components speed up your ability to address contextual commerce experiences so you don’t have to start from scratch, including digital wallet, contactless payment, order ahead, and shop the store.
Composable commerce accelerators offer a long-term solution to creating a commerce platform that can eclipse the capabilities of off-the-shelf, legacy solutions. They reduce development risks by using trusted components to help ensure reliability, scalability, and responsiveness of apps. The end result is your business needs aren’t constrained now or in the future by hardcoded functionality, allowing for innovation to flourish.
Accelerators aren’t a new concept in the software industry, but they have become a fundamental part of projects for brands that need quick turnarounds. Component libraries and component-driven development both offer a flexible and robust approach to building modern commerce apps. In our opinion, accelerators will be an industry-standard moving forward.
Accelerators are just a part of a composable commerce architecture. To learn more about modern platforms, read our article about the building blocks of composable commerce.
Vicky Hubel
Senior Product Marketer, Orium
With a background in marketing and sales spanning telecom, SaaS, and most recently, retail, Vicky brings a customer-first mentality to the composable commerce space. With a focus on the opportunities retail brands can realize by migrating to a modular architecture, she helps educate and inform brands who are considering the move to composable commerce as part of the Composable.com™ team