Kelly Goetsch, Chief Product Officer at commercetools discusses how microservices can help brands and retailers unlock omnichannelOpens a new window growth, boost margins and drive profitability
“Omnichannel†has become a buzzword, but as the walls between digital and physical worlds have crumbled, its core mandate remains critical: provide consumers with the most unified and rich personal experiences across every channel and device.
While shifting consumer demands have forced retailers to alter their commerce strategy, outdated legacy applications are an obstacle to real innovation. Let’s examine the cause and how retailers can best approach omnichannel commerce to unlock growth.
The Changing Software Landscape
Marc Andreessen famously said “software is eating the world,†and this is more relevant today than ever. Software (increasingly SaaS) is providing solutions for all business functions, including commerce, and to differentiate, retailers must think and act like software companies. The demand for software to power omnichannel experiences has caused a shift from traditional IT to agile DevOps and has promoted a cloud native mentality where the cloud is essential to every IT strategy.
For many retailers, a barrier to innovation is outdated commerce platforms. Retailers used to bolt commerce onto traditional systems serving just the web channel. Now with multiple channels, commerce is the business, not an add on. Applications characterized by long release cycles and manual deployment are too slow for today’s developers pushing out custom experiences in real time.
Microservices: Modern Commerce Solution
Today, major retailers are building in-house applications or using some type of SaaS solution to solve this. However, microservices have emerged as credible alternatives for those who desire a single back-end solution for all of their front-end applications to consume. While not a new concept, microservices are well aligned to how modern applications are developed and deployed.
Microservices are individual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed, and managed by a small team of people from different disciplines. In conventional commerce solutions, developers often need to be familiar with a high number of fundamentally different functionalities, thereby preventing a specialization on individual services. Therefore, this all-round approach is not suitable for true omnichannel commerce.
**A clear advantage of a microservices architecture is the reduced software complexity**. A microservices architecture supports retailers by enabling a faster and more agile development of their commerce platform. This revolutionizing IT architecture trend features a variety of small applications, each running in its own process and communicating with the others via application program interfaces (APIs).
APIs: Currency for Modern Commerce
APIs are just as valuable as physical currency for commerce and are fundamental to an omnichannel approach (i.e. one API consumed by multiple channels). API architectures have enabled solutions that have changed how retailers use single back-end solutions to power multiple front-end applications layered over the top. If every channel hits the same API, it is omnichannel with no syncing required between different back ends.
APIs allow retailers to practice agile commerce based on their own unique needs without the inflexibility of a legacy solution. A luxury brand for example may want to focus more on authoring long-lead marketing content, whereas retailers selling lower-consideration products might care more about improving conversion functionality. The unifying point is that all retailers can use APIs to monetize marketing-driven experiences, increase sales, and decrease tech inefficiencies on the back-end web store, mobile app, inventory, order/fulfillment system, etc.
Benefits Beyond Retailers?
In addition to retailers as the prime example, here are a couple of others that can benefit by adopting an API-driven microservices approach to commerce.
Digital Agencies
Digital agencies are under pressure to provide added value for their clients. This is especially true for retail brands where many different agencies may compete for a piece of the digital business across all channels.
API-driven microservices provide enterprise-level “plumbing†where the agency can simply pull the levers on the back end to enable unlimited creativity for any existing front-end solution and leverage the same API across all commerce channels to monetize customer experiences.
For agencies working with multiple brand clients, efficiencies of scale are critical to success, and **microservices enable agencies to focus less on technology and more on doing what they do best** – developing front-end creativity that drives engagement and revenues for all of their clients.
Systems Integrators
With an ever-growing tsunami of commerce-enabled channels and devices (mobile, wearables, IoT), systems integrators must ensure data is shareable across all front and back-end applications. Agility and speed are critical for retailers to stay ahead of competitors.
The marketing clouds have moved quickly to provide solutions for all of these new channels, but in many instances created stitched-together solutions that don’t integrate or work together. Brands often opt for best-of-breed software – and if they are full API-integration enabled, even better.
An **API-driven microservices approach is the answer to easy integrations within complex enterprise architectures**. APIs enable true omnichannel capabilities and the ability to inject new applications anywhere without disrupting the architecture.
Efficiency and cost savings are also top of mind for systems integrators. The slow integration cycles of legacy commerce applications no longer cut it. Businesses don’t want to adopt new software only to have to replace it again in 2 – 3 years. APIs future-proof and create efficiencies in reduced training costs.
Summary
Speed is critical in today’s fast-paced market. The number of hours it takes a retailer to deploy a new commerce feature or user interface can make a significant difference – especially when customer engagement and sales are at stake. Microservices powered by APIs are the absolute best architecture for getting new features and user interfaces to market quickly and monetizing omnichannel experiences.
With all of the upside of microservices and APIs, they do have their challenges. For example, data security is a top issue and concern when sharing data across different applications. Retailers do need to take this into consideration and ensure that any solution they consider using with APIs has strong embedded security layers and complies with all standard application security standards.
When used smartly though, microservices provide great opportunities to drive growth and margins. The technology exists today to create a single back-end solution for all of the front-end applications to work from. Going forward, the most successful retailers, digital agencies, and systems integrators will leverage microservices to unlock omnichannel growth, boost margins and drive profitability.