Composable capabilities: When being a “niche” vendor is a good thing

What the market is demanding for commerce technology looks fundamentally different from many of the “leading vendors” you see in analyst reports. What’s wrong with this picture?

The buyers we speak to every day are exhausted with feature-bloated commerce platforms and vendor lock-in (ahem, SAP and Salesforce). They want to make (what should be simple) changes that require extensive, costly, and time-consuming custom development work. All of these struggles point to a clear demand for composable commerce solutions, yet analyst firms repeatedly take a “more is more” approach to dictating market leadership.

But here are the facts. More features do not equal more control. A “more is more” approach isn’t working for the majority of retailers, especially mid-market manufacturers and B2B retailers with very specific problems to be solved. Instead of trying to be all things to all merchants, Elastic Path has chosen to home in on manufacturers and distributors and their unique requirements. We believe the best possible solution for these companies is flexible, composable, and complete.

Our team has been relentless about guiding these customers toward their best path to market. We’ve delivered a complete solution with both a high-performance frontend and modern APIs on the backend — all while giving customers the flexibility to meet their unique business requirements and differentiate their commerce experience.

And this focus is captured effectively in a portion of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities for Digital Commerce, 2024. Elastic Path scores very well in composable commerce (as we would hope), because that is the problem set we are maniacally focused on solving. So, we know the proverbial music critic listened to the record, at a minimum.

Even still, keeping our focus narrow has exempted us from climbing the analyst leadership ladder. From an “optics” perspective this is less than ideal. However, ideologically, we refuse to chase the monolith chimera and pack more and more features into a platform that’s intentionally designed to fit the individual needs of each merchant. Here’s our view: If narrowing our lens to our ideal customers’ needs is “niche,” that’s a good thing for our business (and our customers, too).

Building for customers instead of the status quo

I’ve long argued that listening to customers is far more valuable than following trends the market dictates for you. Commerce is one of those markets where customers so desperately crave innovation, yet are locked into the same decades-old vendors that prevent them from innovating. These vendors are the same ones on the “top right” of a leadership quadrant year after year.

We refuse to accept the status quo — that retailers must conform to what their platform says they can do (or pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a custom workaround). The way modern software is built means merchants don’t have to accept this reality, either. That’s why we are one of the only vendors in the market that acknowledges the decision paralysis that comes along with a commerce replatform.

We actively encourage retailers who may be victims of commerce Stockholm Syndrome to consider what they cannot accomplish today with their commerce platform. Start with the most acute pain point first, and gradually replace the components of a monolithic commerce platform with composable alternatives.

This approach to breaking up with a commerce monolith is much easier and less risky than many retailers think. However, the status quo (read: analyst reports) would have retailers believe that the path to composability is riddled with obstacles and risks. That the better alternative is to stick with what you know. If we look at how modern software is architected in many other industries, all trends point toward composable, cloud-native software that bolsters time to market and supports iterative change. The bigger risk is remaining locked into a monolithic platform while competitors out-innovate you.

To us, the right way to do business doesn’t involve holding customers hostage with decades-long contracts. Being niche by design affords us the luxury of building for the needs of real companies, and giving customers who are locked into monolithic platforms an option to innovate when the market says they can’t.

Ask yourself, what is the riskier option: Choosing flexible, composable, and complete…or choosing to be stuck with standards you never set in the first place, defined by a committee of analysts?