How to Build a Composable Commerce Solution in Public Cloud

Usage of public cloud has continuously increased over recent years, building on the promise of flexibility, scalability, and cost optimization. At the same time, brands across industries face growing pressure to differentiate against the competition with inspiring digital commerce experiences. Composable Commerce emerged as a new approach designed to give brands the ability to rapidly build, deploy, and optimize unique digital commerce experiences that unlock new revenue across B2B and B2C business models.

There are 5 steps to create a Composable Commerce solution in the cloud. Each with its distinctive challenges:

1. Select. The first step in the Composable Commerce journey is to select the right applications for your best of breed solution. The challenge here is to identify which applications can be easily deployed in the public cloud.
2. Contract. Next, you need to contract all the independent vendors selected. This involves commercial negotiations and legal reviews, which can take a significant amount of time and delay initiatives.
3. Deploy. You need to configure and deploy applications to the public cloud of you choose. This often requires specific skills and knowledge, depending on the cloud.
4. Integrate. Now all of the applications need to be integrated into a single best of suite solution. This involves network configuration and integration of any additional tools and applications provided by the cloud infrastructure provider.
5. Manage. After the solution is set up, you need to manage vendors, including billing and support. In the case of multiple applications composing a best of breed solution, this can be somewhat cumbersome.

As a result, the whole process of composing a best of breed solution is perceived as risky and because of this, often branded manufacturers decide to stick to full-stack commerce platforms served as SaaS. The drawback of this approach is that all in one platforms limit brands’ ability to create differentiated experiences.

To take the risk out of the Composable Commerce implementation on public cloud infrastructure, you need to streamline each stage of the process:

1. Select. Have an ecosystem of applications compatible with your selected cloud at your fingertips to choose from. This way, you will be confident that all the applications they select can be composed in a best of breed solution.
2. Contract. Contract all the independent vendors through a single entity. It will cut down the purchasing process time and accelerate the overall commerce initiative. 
3. Deploy. Have all of the applications to be pre-configured for deployment in the public cloud of your choice to reduce the time required for this step.
4. Integrate. Have ready access to a pool of experts who can help integrate the application into a single best of breed solution.
5. Manage. Have a single point of contact for administering the best of breed solution, which includes billing and support.

Having all these elements allows branded manufacturers to quickly select the right applications, deploy them into a public cloud, compose them into a single commerce solution, and efficiently manage it. While at first glance, this sounds like wishful thinking, the recent partnership between AWS and Elastic Path makes this a reality.

The partnership reduces the risk associated with building best of breed commerce solutions and makes Composable Commerce more accessible for any branded manufacturer:

• Minimize the time required to procure Elastic Path for your business by kicking off the buying process with a click of a button from the AWS marketplace.
• Eliminate the complexity of managing a best of breed solution consisting of multiple software applications by having AWS serving as your single point of contact for billing and support.
• Pick and choose from over 10,000+ cloud applications pre-configured for AWS to build your best of breed commerce solution.
• Leverage the expertise of Elastic Path and AWS resources experienced in commerce and cloud infrastructure to build your composable commerce solution with confidence.
• Enjoy discounts, credits, and other benefits by expanding your cloud footprint and strengthening your AWS Partnership.

Check out Elastic Path on the AWS Marketplace.