Your retail customers expect the best experience in your stores – so why would you risk delivering a mediocre visit at any customer touchpoint? To respond to ever-changing customer behaviors and expectations, retailers must trust the experts. Solution providers are equipped to handle the parts of the customer experience that rely on complex technology.
However, most solution providers specialize in a niche set of technologies, making them a subject matter expert in only one area of omnichannel or e-commerce retailing (like ordering, POS, or personalization). The provider with the "best-in-breed" omnichannel ordering system for retail might not sell anything related to online POS. Or that provider might not be the best choice for the diverse payment offerings retailers seek today.
Managing a different technology provider for each of these critical components can be complicated. But with composable commerce, retailers can reap the benefits of a world of choices.
So, what is composable commerce?
Composable commerce is the ability to select the best-in-breed solution for each aspect of online retailing to optimize both the back- and front-end user experience. With this strategy, all the solutions involved in running a particular task work parallel to one another as microservices and communicate via APIs. Composable commerce uses a headless infrastructure--headless systems decouple the front- and back-end microservices to create maximum flexibility, allowing retailers to seamlessly integrate all solutions.
Composable commerce is not a new concept, but it's importance for retailers is growing exponentially as the speed of retail intensifies. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2023, businesses using composable commerce will outpace their competition by 80% in terms of new feature implementations.
What are the benefits?
Working with one solution provider for all your retailing needs is no longer practical. This approach greatly restricts growth for retailers, because it restricts them to only advance at the speed of that solution provider. Plus, it limits flexibility because interwoven solutions are more difficult to alter.
On the contrary, composable commerce maximizes agility and differentiation. With this approach, retailers can pivot quickly to ensure they are always offering a superior customer experience than their competitors.
The most important customer touchpoints for an online retailer are specific to each subindustry, but now, retailers don't have to choose which elements to perfect. Ranging from the most efficient checkout solution to the most personalized newsletter campaign, retailers using this strategy can greatly improve customer engagement, long-term shopper loyalty and overall profitability.
Ok I get it now. But where does GK fit in?
When building your best-in-breed composable commerce strategy, consider reaching out to GK. We provide a variety of world-renowned solutions to fit your composable commerce approach, including omnichannel POS solutions like TransAction+, inventory management tools, in-store fraud detection capabilities with GK AIR and more, all offered on GK's CLOUD4RETAIL platform.
GK is also partnered with SAP, opening more opportunities for retailers looking to pick and choose solutions that were designed to work well together.
You can contact GK here or visit our solution pages to learn more!
