Pragmatic Composability: Finding Balance in Your Commerce Stack
Combining complete platforms with specialty tools to unlock tailored growth
Ecommerce brands designing their digital commerce ecosystems face a spectrum of choices. On one end, all-in-one platforms promise cohesive, built-in capabilities that accelerate time to market and simplify operations. Yet these platforms often fail to address all business needs. On the other end lies the allure of fully modular stacks, offering unmatched flexibility by combining best-of-breed tools for every function. While compelling, if not planned and executed correctly this approach can introduce unforeseen costs, complexity, and extended timelines.
For many ecommerce brands, the optimal path lies between these extremes: a hybrid approach. The hybrid option offers a pragmatic approach to composability that combines the stability of a foundational platform with the strategic integration of specialty tools to address unique business challenges. By leveraging platforms like Shopify Plus as the backbone, brands can layer in powerful solutions—like headless CMS for content management, advanced search for discovery, or OMS for inventory visibility, order routing, and fulfillment—to deliver tailored, scalable experiences.
The Rise of Composability in Commerce
Composable commerce has gained momentum as brands seek to meet evolving customer expectations and stay ahead of competitors. The rise of headless architecture and API-first technologies allows businesses to customize experiences, innovate faster, and future-proof their operations across any channel.
Fully modular architectures represent the pinnacle of composability: brands select best-of-breed tools for every business function, from CMS, search, personalization, and product recommendations, to payment processing, order management, and returns handling. While appealing, this approach may come with challenges, including higher costs, integration complexity, and possible operational strain.
A pragmatic approach to composability offers an alternative for brands who may not yet have developed the operational or technical maturity for a fully modular architecture. Instead of assembling an entire suite, brands can use a relatively complete commerce platform as the foundation, layering in tools to address high-priority needs. This hybrid approach provides stability, simplicity, and flexibility—delivering tailored growth without overwhelming resources.
The Challenges of Fully Modular Commerce
For many brands, a fully modular stack is easier in theory than in execution. Four of the most common challenges include:
- Integration overload – Managing APIs, workflows, and data synchronization across a large number of tools and technologies can create technical debt and operational headaches.
- High costs – Development, integration, and maintenance expenses can quickly add up, often exceeding initial planned investment amounts.
- Extended timelines – Assembling a fully modular suite from scratch can extend launch timelines, making it difficult to respond to immediate market demands.
- Operational complexity – Success requires significant in-house technical and operational maturity, which many teams have not yet developed.
Some brands overestimate their readiness for fully modular commerce solutions. Without the resources to maintain such ecosystems, projects can stall, costs can inflate, and tools may remain under-utilized. But that doesn’t mean they can’t or shouldn’t take advantage of the best-of-breed solutions available to them— it simply means they need to take a different tack to how they approach composability.
Advantages of a Hybrid Composable Solution
A hybrid composable solution provides a middle ground, combining a foundational platform with key strategic integrations and offering a balance of benefits: speed, simplicity, flexibility and cost-effectiveness.
Keeping a centralized platform reduces operational complexity, and by layering in best-of-breed tools brands can still enhance specific areas, like content management or product discovery, while avoiding the financial and technical burden of managing an entirely modular stack. Brands can leverage core functionalities that come ready out of the box, enabling faster deployment and time to value.
By prioritizing incremental enhancements over wholesale transformation, this approach allows brands to align investments with measurable outcomes tied to their specific customer needs and business goals.
Hybrid Composability in Action: 7mesh and Shopify Plus
7mesh has been celebrated by cyclists around the world for their uncompromising pursuit of technical perfection in apparel. With a global customer base and a commitment to delivering an ecommerce experience to equal the technical excellence of their performance apparel, 7mesh selected a hybrid composable solution to push them ahead of the chasing pack with an enhanced ecommerce shopping experience and a streamlined international operation to allow them to efficiently address their global market.
Performance is crucial for ecommerce, and that’s why 7mesh decided on a headless frontend experience based on Next.js and deployed with Vercel. To tell the full story, product detail pages (PDPs) pull from multiple sources. Primary product and variant data comes from Shopify, meeting the enhanced content from Prismic to construct a content-rich PDP for every product in the catalog. Updates and edits are easy for the 7mesh team to handle, with Shopify and Prismic each responsible for the data types they handle best.
For product discovery 7mesh selected Algolia. With blazing fast search capabilities, Algolia was the perfect match for 7mesh’s expansive product catalog and commitment to performance. To create the most engaging omnichannel experience for its customers, 7mesh also leverages additional specialty tools, with Yotpo for reviews, Gorgias and Klaviyo for customer engagement, and Loop Returns to handle customer order refunds and exchanges.
Is a Hybrid Composable Solution Right for You?
To determine whether hybrid composability fits your business, there are some questions you can ask. First, assess the challenges your team is facing. In what ways are you struggling to engage customers, experiment across digital and in-store channels, and offer a differentiated experience from competitors? Related to those questions, what are your most critical customer and business needs (e.g., personalization, omnichannel content, real-time inventory updates)?
You should also look at your engineering team — do they have the capacity to manage a full modular suite? What about the skills and experience? What could your business support for upskilling and cross-training?
Finally, and perhaps one of the most important questions to ask, what are your goals? Are you seeking shorter-term wins or a long-term transformation? Getting clear on what you’re aiming for can be the single biggest determining factor in what approach you take to modernizing your commerce operations.
If you’ve landed on hybrid as the right approach for your business there are a few tips to keep in mind for getting started successfully:
- Identify a stable foundational commerce platform that meets your core requirements, where there is also a track record of R&D and investment.
- Prioritize additional specialty tools that address high-impact business functions.
- Test integrations incrementally, starting with one or two tools.
- Build technology specific business cases and measure outcomes to guide future investments.
By aligning technology choices with customer needs and business goals, brands can build ecosystems that grow as their needs and the market continues to evolve.
Balance, Not Extremes
For ecommerce brands, success lies in balance—blending structure and adaptability to meet today’s demands while building for tomorrow’s opportunities. A pragmatic approach to composability offers a balanced path for brands navigating the complexities of modern commerce. By starting with a stable foundation like Shopify Plus, and layering in specialized tools, brands can deliver tailored growth without overloading their teams or budgets.
Rather than chasing the extremes of all-in-one simplicity or modular flexibility, this approach empowers brands to innovate where it counts, unlocking value while maintaining operational efficiency.
Everett Zufelt
VP, Strategic Partnerships & Emerging Technology, Orium
As VP Strategic Partnerships & Emerging Technology at Orium, Everett leverages his extensive technical background and over a decade of experience in headless and composable commerce to lead the development of Orium’s offerings. He guides the go-to-market strategy and supports his teams in crafting solutions that enhance the digital capabilities and operational efficiency of scaling commerce brands.
Steve Krueger
Founder and CEO, JIBE
Steve is the Founder and CEO of ecommerce Shopify agency JIBE. He is based in Vancouver and has over 15+ years of ecommerce expertise, having helped better-life brands such as Arc'teryx, SEGA, Grouse Mountain, 7mesh and Organika. His career has been built exploring all aspects of ecommerce, including industry trends, AI, startups, technology, platforms, and marketing.