"Composable Commerce" is a term used to refer to a particular approach of e-commerce development. An approach utilizing Composable Commerce involves selecting and leveraging the strengths of a variety of tools and applications to develop a best-in-class e-commerce solution.

Contrary to a traditional approach, Composable Commerce involves the use of various platforms, service providers, and integrations in order to create an overall solution that better meets the applications' goals while keeping development costs affordable.

With a traditional process, all functionality of an e-commerce store would be built into a single application: whereas the practice of composable commerce promotes the use of multiple resources combined together, which creates a more powerful overall application. This leads to a host of benefits, such as reduced development costs, faster time-to-market, a significant reduction in maintenance requirements, and stronger integrations with greater reliance on APIs.

As a result, e-commerce stores built with a composable approach are able to respond to industry changes faster, and can prove to be significantly more cost-effective whilst boasting an arguably more powerful feature-set when compared to a store built with a more traditional approach.

Headless Commerce refers to the process of decoupling an ecommerce storefront from a backend CMS or commerce platform. Composable Commerce, on the other hand, relates to the use of a combination of best-fit tools and platforms in order to create a unified solution that performs well at each required task. Although the two terms mean very different things, Headless Commerce is often utilized within a Composable Commerce approach, as headless architecture is generally more adept at delivering peak frontend performance and experiences.

With Composable Commerce, significant emphasis is placed on selecting the most appropriate tools to execute each component of the e-commerce build/architecture. Typically, headless storefronts are able to outperform traditional e-commerce frontends which are hosted on the same server as the backend, delivering a superior user experience to consumers.

With a composable approach, a headless implementation would therefore typically be chosen to power the storefront, as this would garner better results than a "one-and-done" solution that powers both the backend and frontend within the same application.

Traditionally, e-commerce stores were built using "one-and-done" applications hosted on a server. The application would be responsible for powering both the frontend and backend (open source Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, etc) — and would typically be built on PHP if self-hosted (such as Magento or WooCommerce).

A composable approach would involve identifying a best-fit implementation for the frontend, backend, and everything in-between. As a result, composable commerce setups will often host the frontend and backend differently, and quite often in completely different programming languages or sever environments, in order to meet the specific needs of the frontend and backend independently.

With Composable Commerce, particular functionalities of the frontend and backend would then also utilize best-in-class third-party platforms and APIs in order to deliver an overall solution that performs brilliantly in every individual aspect.

Composable Commerce is the result of several decades of evolution in the ecommerce sphere. We believe that composable architectures are here to stay, largely due to the fact that they do not involve vendor lock-in, and the approach affords businesses and developers the ability to evolve to changes in ecommerce over time. Whilst trends in development methodology come and go, we are strong proponents of best-fit solutions. As an agency that heavily utilizes a composable approach to ecommerce development, we see the greatest success when a technology stack is matched to a project's unique set of specifications and business requirements.