Commerce Strategy Business before technology. Profits before buzzwords Posted on 7th February, 2023 You have an ecommerce business. Your business exists to sell products to customers. Your success depends on being able to identify a segment of customers and design a product range that those customers need, whilst offering a good value proposition. The customer experience you offer these customers when they shop for, buy, receive and return your products is part of this value proposition. Probably the most important element of it (outside product and price). Sounds obvious? Then why, when we speak to merchants, agencies and vendors we hear them putting technology choices before business strategy. “Our strategy is to become headless” “Our number one requirement is to be composable” The tail wagging the dog. Don’t fall prey of buzzwords Remember – as an ecommerce merchant, to agencies, technology suppliers and platforms you are the customer. The walking wallet. Magento agencies (like us), and especially technology vendors are trying to sell you something. But in a sea of technology vendors and consultants…how do they stand out? Enter the buzzword. Vendors repackage old and new concepts in technology with words designed to seem interesting, smart and effective. Take composable. Ecommerce platforms such as commercetools claim that only they do composable right, that composable architectures are the only way to think and that composable solves all your ecommerce problems. But did you know the concept of modular architecture (same thing as composable architecture) has been around for 50 years in software development? Check Wikipedia. Composable commerce simply means that every element of your ecommerce stack (eg, ERP, CMS, Email, Fulfilment) is broken down into components that can be bolted on. The obvious advantage is avoiding a single point of failure, enabling you to work with the best partner for every element in the operation and, overall, move faster. Besides the freedom to build the ideal ecosystem to match your needs, you will achieve improved development speed, scalability and easier maintenance. Composable commerce is great (hey, we take it pretty much for granted), and this is why we work with Adobe Commerce, a platform committed to the most extensive ecosystem of extensions in the industry. (extensions = components). The problem? Buzzwords kill thinking. Buzzwords have the allure of a silver bullet, so they stop people from using their brains. It creates the illusion that if “you are headless”, then your site will be fast and your developers will be happy, or “you go composable”, then all your problems are magically solved. It ushers an utopian world where all your systems effortlessly link together safe in the knowledge that as soon as one exceeds its usefulness you simply unplug and slot in the new shiny tool without any fuss. What a load of codswallop. These companies stop thinking about what customers want and what they’re missing from them to find at competitors instead. They also became the unaware lab rats for agencies that want to try new technologies, so that they can claim experience in buzzword-technology. The graveyard is full of slow, ill-executed PWAs from clients that were promised fast responsive sites and dropped the guard at the sound of a new three letter acronym. Full of half-baked Metaverse ideas that looked pathetic. The Metaverse in all its glory. I think we wait it out. Except to the emperors wearing the clothes, shopping with VR headsets and communicating with Google Wave about trends in ecommerce. Do you want to be one of those? Put business strategy before technology choices. Choosing the right technology for your business is a crucial decision. But it must be considered in relation to a more important question: what is your business objective and how will you achieve that? What are the needs of your target customers and for which ones can you achieve a point of difference? Once you’ve worked out that question, you can bring the technologists to solve your specific problems.
