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Licensed for Distribution

Composable Commerce Must Be Adopted for the

Future of Applications
FOUNDATIONAL Refreshed 25 August 2021, Published 18 June 2020 - ID G00721518 - 20 min read

By Mike Lowndes, Sandy Shen

Digital commerce platforms are experiencing ongoing modularization in a cloud-native,

multiexperience world. Application leaders responsible for digital commerce should prepare
for a “composable” approach using packaged business capabilities to move toward future-
proof digital commerce experiences.

Overview
Key Challenges
■ Monolithic applications and the technical debt they impose often prevent organizations from
moving quickly and achieving their desired business outcomes.

■ Delivering platform flexibility can be at odds with speed to market, and achieving an optimal
balance of both is needed to succeed.

■ Hype around “headless” approaches can cause organizations to lose focus when the actual
requirement is for “many heads” when it comes to customer expectations for seamless
multiexperiences.

Recommendations
To prepare for the future of digital commerce, application leaders responsible for digital
commerce technologies should:

■ Create a roadmap to strangle (or replace) your digital commerce monolith by adopting an
incremental, modular approach using packaged business capabilities.

■ Secure the future of your digital commerce strategy by developing a composable commerce
platform.

■ Maintain business agility and control by selecting delivery options that retain business user
control of presentation.

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Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2023, 50% of new commerce capabilities will be incorporated as API-centric SaaS services.

By 2023, organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace competition by
80% in the speed of new feature implementation.

By 2023, 30% of commerce organizations will require an API product manager role to modernize
digital commerce applications and architecture.

By 2024, 10% of digital commerce organizations will use packaged business capabilities (PBCs)
to construct their application experiences.

Introduction
In this research we review a shift in thinking from an inward-looking “platform-centric” view to an
outward-looking customer-experience-centric view. To achieve agility and flexibility in delivering
experiences, modular packaged business capabilities (PBCs) are brought together to form
composable digital commerce platforms that align to the future of applications.

When considering digital commerce and other associated digital experiences, it can be useful to
think along three dimensions:

1. The customer journey

2. The capabilities required

3. The technology stack

Capabilities are built on technology “stacks” and customer journeys are supported by several
different capabilities. At the top of the stack (see Figure 1) is an experience layer, via which the
capabilities are exposed to customers. In a monolithic platform this is all tightly coupled, usually
with extensions that can be native or integrated, external applications. In a composable
application, this coupling becomes looser, and the integration of capabilities often occurs at or
near the experience layer, and not within a monolithic application.

Figure 1: Three Dimensions to Consider When Creating Digital

Commerce Experiences

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Analysis
Create Your Roadmap to Strangle (or Replace) the Monolith
The Technology Stack
The technology stack comprises the layers of technology in an application: from a data layer,
through business logic, to presentation orchestration, represented by the three vertically aligned
boxes per capability in Figure 1. For presentation, digital commerce has, and to a great extent
remains, a browser-based experience via HTML, CSS and JavaScript. However, the way
enterprises build browser-based digital experiences has undergone rapid evolution. It has moved
away from tightly coupled “server side” presentation to API-driven, client-side JavaScript web
applications that enable flexible experiences via single-page applications (SPAs) and progressive
web applications (PWAs) and beyond to native mobile app delivery (see “How Progressive Web
Apps Improve Digital Commerce”). A loosely-coupled presentation tier has become the norm for
digitally mature organizations. We have seen the rise of API-first digital commerce platform
vendors in reaction to this development. More recently, the leading “full stack” digital commerce
platforms have enabled support for the front-end frameworks. These remain nascent but include
developer-facing environments such as Magneto’s PWA Studio and VTEX’s vtex.io, to code
libraries such as SAP’s Spartacus. We are now seeing the utilization of “backends for frontends’
(BFF) supporting technologies (such as GraphQL in vendor’s platforms) to ease the job of
decoupled front-end development and increase development efficiency against APIs.

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Packaged Business Capabilities

We are already seeing a shift away from monolithic digital commerce application solutions toward
modular platforms built from several discrete capabilities. This shift was fundamentally hindered
by the full-stack approach. The decoupled nature of modern front ends has become an enabler for
the acceleration of a composable application approach — as back-end capabilities can be
developed and even launched independently of the front end.

Organizations are embracing this approach to increase agility and flexibility, and so are vendors.
Cloud-native modular architectures are available from several vendors, with some mature
platforms releasing new capabilities as multitenant SaaS capabilities only, resulting in hybrid
cloud platforms. Thus begins the “strangling” of the monolith as first described by Martin Fowler. 1
This is an incremental approach to replacing a legacy platform by slowly reducing reliance on the
core monolith.

Today, these modular capabilities are often called “microservices,” but while this usage is
common in the market, it does not align to the technical definition of microservices 2 (see
“Innovation Insight for Microservices”). The market usage is more closely aligned to the idea of
packaged business capabilities (PBCs) that has arisen out of Gartner’s future of applications
research (see below, and  “Apply the Principles Behind the Future of Applications to Digital
Commerce”).

Customer Journeys
A growing reality for digitally mature organizations is that digital commerce does not stand alone
and should no longer be a monolithic silo of engagement. This goes beyond consistency across
channels to mean a unified end-to-end customer journey, including engagement and postsales
relationships and support. The simplicity of the “e-commerce” go-to-market is being challenged
via requirements that go beyond the traditional core buying journey. Monolithic platforms may not
easily integrate with these wider journeys, and productized connectors to ecosystem vendors are
usually required.

Consider the following requirements:

■ The integration of content and social narratives to drive engagement and conversion.

■ For most retailers, the need to have a unified approach with store integration and returns
management.

■ The need to support customer inquiry, customer and product postpurchase service in the same
experience.

■ The need to support emerging hybrid digital-physical goods such as smart sneakers/trainers,
that require both retail and subscription models and ongoing data services.

■ The need to have a unified brand experience throughout the customer life cycle.

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For B2B and digital business:

■ Manage ongoing relationships with customers (usually via a “customer portal”) with supply
chain transparency.

■ Enable flexible integration with partners to generate new revenue channels (see  “Scaling Digital
Commerce Into a Digital Platform Business”).

To orchestrate and unify these wider customer journeys, organizations are taking control of the
presentation layer making it the point of integration of capabilities, instead of the commerce
platform. Figure 2 shows a simplified example of how a set of applications can support integrated
customer journeys. In addition, because multiple touchpoints exist, applications must support
“multiexperiences.” These may be delivered via a mixture of front-end/device-type-specific code
shared — or not shared — between touchpoints.

Figure 2: A Single Platform for Experience Orchestration Is Optimal

for Supporting a Seamless Cycle of Customer Journeys Beyond E-
Commerce

Develop a Composable Commerce Platform to Future-Proof Your Digital

Commerce Strategy

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A warning! Organizations wishing to embark on the journey toward the

future of applications should have a high level of digital maturity in place.
Attempting to jump directly into creating composable enterprise
applications without experience of the path to get there is fraught with
danger.

To understand your platform’s digital maturity see  “Maturity Model for Digital Commerce
Applications,” and to learn about what Gartner means by organizational digital maturity in digital
commerce read the Evaluation Factors section of  “Innovation Insight for API-Based Digital
Commerce.” PBCs are the building blocks for future business applications such as composable
commerce applications. PBCs are independently deployable capabilities that include self-
contained business data, logic and processes to perform a business function. These interact with
other applications via APIs and event channels. The appropriate granularity of these modules
(they are not always “micro”) is defined by business needs, and must balance development
flexibility/agility with governance complexity and costs. For an introduction to this idea see
 “Innovation Insight for Packaged Business Capabilities and Their Role in the Future Composable
Enterprise.”

Monolithic digital commerce applications cannot support the agility and flexibility needed to
support fast moving digital business. Organizations will need to move toward composable
commerce to keep up with the pace of change in customer demand. Some organizations may
choose to build their own solutions in this fashion, and may for example, already have established
a “microservices” architecture. Others will rely on vendors to provide best-practice capabilities.
Few commerce vendors have yet split their products into smaller modules (incipient PBCs) such
as product catalog, shopping cart, promotion engine and product recommendation. To embrace
this new paradigm, organizations need to select vendors who can show that they are embracing
this future, even if their current product does not fully align.

In the future, Gartner sees the composable approach becoming the norm across enterprise
applications. It just happens that, in the digital domain, especially around digital commerce, that
future is already partially here.

It is already possible to buy or rent capabilities from a single larger vendor, or separate best-of-
breed vendors to cover wide range of functions.

For example:

■ Core commerce (shopping cart, promotions, check-out)

■ Content

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■ Search and search merchandising

■ Reviews and ratings

■ Customer identity management (access and identification)

■ Customer data platform (data/personalization analytics)

■ Service (help desk, knowledgebase)

■ Chatbot

The composition of these into an end-to-end digital commerce experience is the subject of the
next section.

PBCs may be vendor-managed SaaS, in public or private clouds, or on-premises.

The approach described in Figure 2 can now be rearticulated using Gartner’s new visual paradigm
for the composable enterprise (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: PBCs Allow Organizations to Compose Modular, Hybrid

Experience Applications

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Using the composable application approach, digital experiences are assembled as required,
depending on the customer and touchpoint requirements, and delivery of an “e-commerce site”
may be just one of these experience types. The focus shifts to a truly customer-centric view,
supporting customer journeys as required, and a single PBC may support more than one.

Composition does not just look “outward” to the digital experience, but also “inward,” between
each PBC and the back office. Integration itself remains one of the most complex parts of any
commerce platform implementation.

In the future of applications, integration among PBCs will need to include low-code or no-code
integration and pervasive API mediation to provide agility. For now, we often must rely on point-to-
point, productized connectors or custom API integrations.

For more on integration in the future composable enterprise, see  “The Applications of the Future
Will Be Founded on Democratized, Self-Service Integration.” For more on using PBCs and how to
prepare for this future, see “2020 Strategic Roadmap for the Future of Applications.”

Evolving Toward Using PBCs in Digital Commerce: An Example of Personalized Product

Recommendations

The core commerce platform may include basic functions such as rule configuration to enable
product recommendations — with differing degrees of sophistication. If a more sophisticated
product recommendation capability is needed (such as a personalized recommendation based on
the customer profile and clickstream behavior), it may require a dedicated personalization
capability or additional module. The functionality of personalization engines is broad. Search
results ordering, product recommendation and content layout, on-site content display, shopping
cart abandonment, email marketing, and social media content may all be personalized. To
compose a personalized product recommendation service from PBCs, organizations can take an
incremental approach as they start, optimize and transform their digital commerce. For more on
this stepwise approach, see  “Scaling your Digital Commerce Into a Digital Business”. The steps
align to Gartner’s maturity model for digital commerce (see “Maturity Model for Digital Commerce
Applications”) and are outlined in Table 1.

Table 1: Incremental Steps Toward Implementing PBCs and a Composable Architecture for
Personalization

Starting Optimizing Transforming

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Implement modules for
collaborative/content-
based filtering, along with
the recommendation rules
in the core commerce
platform.
Update tag management
for products.
Add customer demographics Inject external data to the
and behavioral data from a CDP personalization engine to
or CRM to the personalization enrich customer data.
engine to increase the
Incorporate customer
granularity of product attribute
journey analytics and a
matching.
purchase propensity model
to assess the likelihood a
customer will purchase a
product.

Source: Gartner

Existing functional modules in the enterprise application portfolio can also be repurposed as
PBCs within a composable commerce approach. This reuses existing features relevant to the
business needs, alongside new ones (see Figure 4). To enable this, these modules would need to
conform to the basic characteristics of a PBC, including an API or other interface for integration.
The composable approach reduces duplicate investment in applications and gives greater agility
in new service development. It would enable an organization to develop a personalization service
differentiated from the default offering in off-the-shelf solutions.

Figure 4 Using the Composable Application Model to Compose a

Personalization Application From PBCs

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The ability to compose digital commerce applications from PBCs is the direction that digital
commerce application architecture will move toward. These individual components could be
provided by multiple vendors to formulate unique experiences. The granularity of each capability
will depend on the structure and scope of the resulting composed digital commerce application.
Organizations should not assume “the more granular the better,” because finer granularity (for
example, hundreds of microservices) can increase development and operational complexity,
inflate costs, and create governance challenges.

In the digital commerce and wider digital experience market we are seeing the emergence of
initiatives and movements of groups of vendors and/or open-source communities with a
particular approach to developing digital experiences. These include JAMstack 3 (where “JAM” is
JavaScript, APIs and Markup) and in digital commerce specifically, MACH 4 (where MACH is
Microservices, APIs, Cloud and Headless). In this approach, a single vendor is not necessarily at

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the heart of the digital platform, which is instead composed from an ecosystem of modular, best-
of-breed applications from different vendors; the precursors of PBCs.

Gartner recommends starting the modular, composable commerce journey with low-hanging fruit,
providing achievable goals that have clear business benefits. These are likely to be capabilities
that already map to the PBC paradigm, requiring low effort to decompose or integrate. They can
deliver business benefits by quickly supporting updates, improvement and innovation. Focus on
capabilities impacting customer experience such as search, personalization, new touchpoint
support, emerging ML technologies or UX/UI design.

The ability to compose new applications in this fashion today only exists within the most digitally
advanced organizations. These early-adopting organizations tend to have bold digital business
ambitions, advanced technical skills and governance practices, as well as higher maturity level
with digital technologies. For most organizations using monolithic applications today, greater
maturity of compositional tooling is required to compose experiences from PBCs. This should not
stop them from beginning the journey. Indeed they will find that going some of the way begins to
provide some of the advantages of the composable application. For advice on finding your
organization’s “tequilibrium” between the composable approach and other options, see  “Apply the
Principles Behind the Future of Applications to Digital Commerce.”

In the future of applications, Gartner predicts that developments around integration, for example
via low-code application development platforms (LCAPs), will simplify composition. The lack of
interoperability standards between incipient PBCs makes “inner” integration between parts of a
composed application harder now. Initiatives such as CloudEvents 5 are beginning to tackle this
“standards” challenge.

Maintain Agility and Control by Selecting Delivery Options That Retain Business
User Control of Presentation
Headless has become a buzzword in digital commerce and other customer-facing application
segments. Headless is not a great name for this new approach, because of course there must be
a head, or UI. In fact the challenge today is that there are many heads that can be seen as both
channels and customer touchpoints. These heads must provide seamless digital experiences,
which Gartner defines as multiexperiences (see “Transcend Omnichannel Thinking and Embrace
Multiexperience for Improved CX”). Multiexperience commerce is becoming the practical reality
for leading digital organizations and is the primary expression of the ongoing enablement of
commerce in the customer’s context and at the customer’s convenience (see  “Industry Vision:
Commerce to You”).

To support these many heads, presentation is decoupled from the application logic via APIs.
Hence, Gartner’s use of the terms “API-based commerce,” “API-oriented architectures,” and “API
mediation.” To support the broad array of newer touchpoints such as chatbots, voice, smart TVs
and AR/VR, the same presentation code that runs a website or native app is not always valid, but
the same underlying commerce capabilities are required.

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In Gartner’s research on the future of applications we specifically identify low-code application

development platforms (LCAPs) as that potential experience-building and orchestration layer, and
predict that vertical-specific platforms will emerge. Digital commerce appears to be a prime early
adopter of a modular approach but no “LCAPs” currently exist, though it could be argued that
some DXPs approach this capability. Fundamentally, PBC orchestration should enable a seamless
customer journey across multiple touchpoints by enabling no-code integration at or near the
presentation layer.

Currently, there are four main, nonexclusive ways to integrate and present digital commerce and
related experiences. All of them require PBCs to be integrated via APIs, and ideally, mediated APIs
(API mediation includes dealing with API orchestration, transformation, security and
performance):

1. Direct integration to a JavaScript web application: JavaScript web application frameworks

such as Angular, React and Vue are used to create SPAs, PWAs or generate sites via static
generation tools such as Gatsby (see Figure 5). APIs support the creation of a BFF approach to
supporting browser applications, for instance using a node.js server and GraphQL. These
techniques provide major customer benefits such as enabling mobile native app-like
experiences. Faster mobile performance is achieved by reducing the need for server-rendered
pages, limiting application server calls to only the dynamic data needed. PWAs take this further
by not only using the client device’s native capabilities, but by caching more content and code
on the client side, further reducing internet traffic and making for faster app-like experiences.

Figure 5. No More Monolithic Platform, Shared Experience Delivery

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We have previously characterized this approach to delivering the presentation layer as “custom
front ends” (see “The Three Approaches to Digital Commerce Platform Architecture”). They are
generally handcrafted in a front-end framework and not built using a commerce platform or DXP.
As described above, several digital commerce platform vendors provide SDKs, samples or
reference applications, or development environments. These are used as the starting point for the
development of storefronts. There are also stand-alone code libraries such as Vue Storefront,
which are platform-agnostic. When taking this approach, be wary of losing business user
management of presentation (see point 4).

2. Use front end as a service (FEaaS): Front-end skills are in high demand and building an internal
competence, or even outsourcing a development team, may be prohibitively expensive. We are
seeing the emergence of “front end as a service” vendors, including Moovweb, Mobify and
Frontastic. These provide FEaaS by bundling light serverside runtimes (often in node.js) and
sophisticated content delivery networks (CDN) with storefront themes and coding services.
Thus presentation design and code is provided as a service via best-practice themes and
widgets. This is a standardized engine that is agnostic to the commerce capabilities underlying
it. Commerce platforms and other capabilities integrate via their APIs.

3. Integrate to a DXP: DXPs provide out-of-the-box capabilities for many aspects of managing
digital experiences, beyond their CMS/WCM or portal heritage. They have become mainstream
for “experience driven” commerce, commonly used by established brands and lifestyle and
luxury retailers. In this case, the commerce platform is integrated via its API and the DXP
provides the front-end elements or “widgets” to support the UI. DXPs can provide integration
points for other API-based applications (future PBCs) and can act as the integration and
orchestration layer (see Figure 5). DXPs themselves often are “hybrid headless” today, enabling
either the use of built in server-side templates, or APIs to drive JavaScript front ends (see
“Hybrid Headless Content as a Service Is the Future of Digital Experiences”). Some DXPs
include digital commerce capability natively. If taking this approach, be wary of platforms that
might constrain you to a single method of experience management (for instance, they may lack
a robust API for nonweb digital channels). Such a platform will not provide optimal
multiexperience delivery.

Figure 6. DXPs Can Provide Experience Orchestration and

Management Using a Mix of Native and Third-Party Components

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However, DXPs can be another monolith, with few having cloud-native architectures. This brings
more restrictions on agility, and potentially can increase complexity. Some vendors in this space
are moving toward providing a “lean DXP” that focuses on a core set of experience orchestration
capabilities without forcing the use of heavyweight embedded content management or similar
capabilities, that in future will be defined as PBCs (see “Defining the Digital Experience Platform”).

4. Integrate into a custom app: This could be a built-in multiexperience development platform
(MXDP) or a low-code application development platform (LCAP): DXPs and MXDPs differ in
both their heritage and focus:

■ DXPs focus on the web experience with a heritage in WCM or Portal, and are usually packaged
application platforms that can be configured and extended. Experiences are managed via
prebuilt admin GUIs.

■ MXDPs have a broader focus of touchpoint support, with a heritage in mobile app development,
and are usually software development platforms with differing levels of coding requirements.
Experiences, plus any business tooling to manage them, must be built in or integrated to the
MXDP.

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Digital commerce experiences can be built using MXDPs, though the limitations of these
environments for sophisticated experience orchestration may prove too restrictive. LCAPs are
emerging as a new way to compose experience applications, but uptake and maturity remains low
in digital commerce. Vtex.io is an early example of a digital commerce vendor providing such a
tool.

The Challenge of Presentation in a Decoupled World

Modularity and loose coupling provide the ultimate flexibility and agility, but there can be a cost. In
moving away from a mature space full-stack commerce platform or DXP, early uptakers of
“headless commerce” or content quite often found that the business was no longer able to
manage aspects of the digital experience.

Examples that were previously considered differentiators of tightly coupled applications include:

■ Page layout management via WYSIWYG/drag and drop.

■ In-context content preview

■ Customer journey management

Too often, early adopters of headless approaches put these capabilities back in control of the
developers. While this vastly speeds up initial development, future change once in production
becomes an IT issue, and not self-service for the business user. Whatever the ambition of the
digital team, developers end up with priority lists and queues of tickets, and business users get
frustrated. To tackle this, business tooling must retain control of the digital experience wherever
possible. Vendors in the headless content and experience space are tackling this challenge,
providing layout metadata (that can be changed by the business via a GUI) to the front end, and/or
providing JavaScript editing overlays for business users viewing production sites or preview apps.
They are also extending their reach to navigation and third-party application integration. However,
headless presentation orchestration functionality remains less mature in the digital commerce
space. If you are looking to go headless but retain business agility, investigate product capability
in this area.

A number of companies known to Gartner are already taking this approach, including:

■ DFDS: The ferry and logistics company decided to compose its own digital commerce platform
and is moving forward with a head-optional platform. Vendors included Contentful (CMS), Okta
(identity), Algolia (search), Conductrics (personalization), and an API-first commerce platform
(source: Client inquiry).

■ Lego Group: The toy manufacturer is building out its next-generation B2C and B2B digital
experiences using a (wait for it …) Lego bricks approach to the architecture, including
Contentstack (CMS) and Commercetools (digital commerce) (source: Personal
communication).

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■ The Spectator: The digital media company is building a new digital publishing platform using a
“serverless” approach and integrating the following vendors: Contentstack (CMS), Swiftype
(search), Disqus (reviews, UGC), Piano (publishing DXP), Braintree (payment) (source:
 LinkedIn).

Evidence
1
 Martin Fowler Strangler Application

2
 Martin Fowler Microservices

3
 JAMStack

4
 MACH

5
 CloudEvents

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