There was a time when ecommerce was really really expensive. So expensive that only large retailers typically set up shop online. For many smaller retailers, taking their business online was merely an aspiration.
Since this early period of digital shopping, ecommerce has become commoditized. What do we mean by commoditized? In short: almost anyone can set up a webshop in 2023 for relatively little money. For a significant portion of the world, online shopping has become ubiquitous for the average consumer. This is because the cost of setting up an ecommerce store is cheaper than ever. If you’re happy to be limited on features you can set up a shop with Wix for £14/$16* [1]. Alternatively, Shopify will let you get started for a little more and you gain access to the Canadian trail blazers platform used by 15% of ecommerce sites worldwide [2]. At this point, using an ecommerce platform is no longer an aspiration or something which is a second thought, it is now the default.
So how has this happened? How have we gone from a situation where a platform would typically cost upward of $50,000 to one where your grandmother can sell cooking classes online [3]? There are a number of factors which have helped get us here, but the major contributors are Cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS). In essence this is economies of scale. Cloud computing has dramatically reduced the cost of computation utility over the last 12 years. SaaS allows software providers to create multi-tenanted, shared platforms that can leverage cloud resources to their maximum potential. This in turn has resulted in significant savings for the smallest ecommerce entrepreneurs.
Enterprise Commerce
The commoditization has also benefited the enterprise. Anyone can set up a free trial over at commercetools [4] and start to play with an enterprise grade solution. It might not cost $16 a month, but the barrier to entry has significantly dropped when compared to the days of custom servers deployments, databases and “Big IP”.
While this is wonderful news for all of us, we at Yoke believe that this evolution is far from over.
Once a retailer has made the sensible decision to build a composable commerce platform, they need to plug their chosen providers together. At this point, there is often a complexity and a knowledge gap which needs to be resourced. Teams need to be experienced or skilled-up. This is an area where the team at Yoke have excellent insight and experience. Integrations and orchestration are key to maximising the benefits of composable commerce.
But, what if the integration space also jumped on the commoditization bandwagon? What if it was possible to both reduce the cost and make the process accessible to all, developers and business owners alike? In part, Shopify and others have done this already with single click integrations via their own ecosystem. This is great for the business owner, because much like the SaaS ecommerce platform itself, it lowers the barrier to entry. However, for a composable ecosystem this somewhat defeats the purpose, allowing one of the providers to own the integration reduces flexability.
Composable commerce provides retailers with the best choice on offer, the ability to select not necessarily the top solution on the market, but the most appropriate solution for a business' needs. But composable commerce also presents challenges. How do you coordinate the separate solutions chosen? This is a key challenge we are addressing at Yoke.
The world of software is becoming more composable and interoperable. The tools we use to piece the jigsaw together need to be flexible to change so businesses can control where their data should go and when things should happen. Integration tools also need to be as usable as the search engine or CMS providers we trust and rely upon.
The commoditization of composable commerce isn’t finished, yet.
Yoke is building the next generation of composable commerce integrations. Contact us if you'd like to hear more.
* At the time of writing
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