Retailers are maturing away from the approach of building and maintaining an entire team around a monolithic, legacy platform — an indicator of the accelerating shift from platform-first to customer-first. Composable technology provides the adaptability and agility needed to quickly implement solutions that streamline the customer experience and drive conversion.
The 10 signs that you might need to consider composable
Here are 10 signs that composable tech could be the best path forward for your business:
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You’re having trouble breaking away from a templated retail experience. We don’t live in a one-size-fits-all world. To compete at an elevated level, it’s essential to have access to composable technology that enables your teams to tailor each experience to meet the needs of the audience consistently across a multitude of touchpoints.
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Your teams spend too much time reinventing the wheel. Unless your content is unified in a single source of truth, your devs, creators and designers are limited. When they create something great they can’t reuse it wherever and whenever they need or want to. A composable content platform can solve this, allowing teams across the organization to plug and play content for maximum efficiency, increased brand consistency and unmatched speed to market.
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You have a solid traditional web channel experience but struggle to replicate it across apps, social media, in-store displays and other digital channels. By leveraging a single, highly adaptable, composable platform you can easily generate content for all of these pertinent retail journeys. The clear benefit of folding these into one omnichannel experience is that customer experience can be streamlined and simplified, helping you drive maximum revenue.
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Blending in-store and digital inventory management can be painful, especially for product availability, in-store fulfillment or endless aisle scenarios. Synchronization between multiple inventory tools, especially in real-time, isn’t always in the cards. Having a unified view of all inventory, regardless of physical location, by way of a single trusted source, permits real-time feedback to customers and decreases purchase abandonment.
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Engineering teams are focused on platform maintenance and software updates over and above improving the customer experience. Engineering teams that are stuck on legacy platforms spend most of their time on maintenance and support activities, working through accumulated tech debt and unwinding years of code before they can build incremental functionalities. Moving to a SaaS-based composable platform shifts maintenance responsibilities to the software vendor, freeing internal teams to refocus their time and resources where they can truly add value.
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New marketing concepts or microsites intended to engage with your target audience are difficult to pilot or launch. Monolithic platforms aren’t designed to assist the easy lift-off of one-off or tight-turnaround projects, whereas composable platforms are designed with speed to market in mind, shifting deployment from months to minutes.
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Marketing and IT are often at odds about what to prioritize when budgeting for maintenance or new features. Shifting maintenance costs to SaaS vendors means that there is more budget for new features. These platforms are much easier to maintain and require less operating expense.
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It’s getting hard to find and retain talent in the proprietary technology stack your organization relies on for your website. Legacy platforms require routine attention from specialized back-end developers to function. These individuals are usually less portable, difficult to find, and employing them is often costly. Composable tools decrease this reliance substantially, leaving the day-to-day platform maintenance to front-end developers with more of a generalist skill set that is easier to hire for and retain.
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You’re at the mercy of an all-in-one or suite vendor that has raised licensing costs trapping you with their aging technology. No one wants to be restrained by their technology or handcuffed by their investments. Leveraging a platform that your business controls, rather than one that controls your business, means more freedom to deploy crucial solutions in a timely and cost-effective manner.
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You cannot experiment, innovate or fine-tune the retail experience using reliable data. An experience layer designed with experimentation in mind means that you can react to insights coming from your customer data, test theories and quickly adjust your strategy based on outcomes. A modern architecture means that data is a first-class citizen in the digital ecosystem.
Don’t let restrictive technology hold you back from growing your brand — whether it be singular or multiple — across channels and geographies to meet your customers where they are. Instead, empower your teams across marketing and engineering to build independently without sacrificing speed and consistency.
Learn more at Contentful.com. Or, to keep up with the latest industry insights, use cases and more, visit the Contentful blog.
To find out if going composable is the answer to elevating your business goals, visit us at Valtech.com, or, learn more about the latest retail trends, insights and events by checking out the Valtech blog.