Composable concepts for your omnichannel future

Omnichannel commerce breeds complexity. Adopting a headless, cloud-based technology approach based on APIs and microservices delivers the agility you need to succeed.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard the terms composable and omnichannel in the past year. Many organizations are embracing the concepts in the wake of the pandemic as a way to help future-proof operations. But what does it actually mean to be composable? And how can using composable principles help organizations gracefully handle the complexities of omnichannel commerce?

What is composable commerce?

Composable commerce is a development approach that lets businesses select and assemble best-of-breed commerce solutions tailored to their needs. Instead of relying on rigid, monolithic platforms, organizations can integrate independent services—like product information management (PIM), checkout, or promotions engines—that are modular, scalable, and loosely coupled.

This enables:

• Faster innovation and experimentation
• Greater resilience and uptime
• Streamlined scaling across markets, languages, and digital channels

Composable commerce is particularly useful for omnichannel strategies, where consistency and adaptability are crucial to maintaining customer trust and driving revenue.

The composable business revolution

In this video, Gartner uses the term “Intelligent Composable Businesses” to describe organizations that can “assemble and reassemble their component parts at will”. This kind of flexibility enables businesses to respond rapidly and effectively to change or disruption, whenever and wherever it arises. We’ve been through enough of that in the last two years to recognize the need for agility like this.

According to Gartner, organizations adopting composable modularity can significantly enhance their agility and innovation capabilities, allowing them to reconfigure components without overhauling entire systems. This flexibility enables businesses to respond nimbly to technological and market shifts, positioning them to outpace competitors in delivering new product features. ​

It translates into revenue. That level of flexibility is essential if you want to be ready to embrace new digital channels and distribution partners as quickly as they arise in an omnichannel sales environment. As your distribution becomes more complex, you need flexible tools to help streamline that complexity and enable scale across the entire organization.

Composable commerce is more than a trend—it’s a shift in how digital-first organizations think about architecture. It allows you to replace rigid, monolithic systems with modular components that can evolve independently. This approach enables faster innovation, improves scalability, and ensures your tech stack adapts as your business grows.

Get your technology working at MACH speed

From a technology perspective, companies who want to be more composable need to ensure their infrastructure meets four key criteria which are summed up in the acronym “MACH”: 

• M is for Micro-services – Look for solutions that allow you to deploy individual features or pieces of functionality separately so they can be changed at-will without disruption to other features.
• A is for API – Only deploy technology where the functionality is exposed through an API
• C is for Cloud – Choose SaaS solutions with elastic scaling and automatic updates to ensure you’re ready for any changes in demand.
• H is for Headless – Select solutions where the front-end layer that’s presented to users is de-coupled from the backend technology. This allows you to switch out either the front-end or backend for one that better suits your evolving needs, without having to scrap everything.

The MACH Alliance says taking this approach will mean every part of an enterprise is “pluggable, scalable, replaceable and can be continuously improved through agile development to meet evolving business requirements”. 

It’s an attractive vision of the future for companies who are used to monolithic technology stacks. It frees them from the tyranny of a single vendor’s product roadmap when they’re looking to implement new features and functions to upgrade their customer experience. The MACH Alliance’s 2025 Global Annual Research indicates that 86% of organizations agree that leadership prioritizes MACH investment, ensuring the alignment of strategy and resources.

To truly operate at MACH speed, organizations must think beyond technical architecture. Composability requires operational readiness—teams must be aligned on ownership, governance, and integration practices across their technology ecosystem.

Why packaged business capabilities matter

A key enabler of composable architecture is the use of Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs). These are modular units of software aligned to specific business functions—such as payments, inventory management, or product information—each of which can be deployed independently and connected via APIs.

Unlike monolithic applications that are difficult to decouple, PBCs are self-contained and purpose-built, making them easier to manage, maintain, and innovate upon. Each PBC owns its own data and logic, reducing dependencies across teams and enabling faster iteration.

PBCs allow teams to innovate at the speed of change, making it easier to respond to new customer demands, experiment with new markets, and scale without rigid dependencies. For example, a company could upgrade its recommendation engine or swap out a legacy checkout service without impacting the rest of the customer journey. This level of granularity in optimization is essential for businesses seeking to differentiate through digital experience.

Customer experience and value at the heart of decision-making

Main drivers for this transition aren’t about the traditional desire to cut costs. Of those who are leaning towards a more MACH future, 59% said they were driven by the need for increased speed and 56% by privacy concerns. A full 60% said they were moving towards a composable approach to their technology choices because of the resulting improvements in the customer experience. 

Emphasizing customer needs remains central to composable thinking. Recent insights highlight that organizations adopting composable modularity can significantly enhance their agility and innovation capabilities, allowing them to reconfigure components without overhauling entire systems. This flexibility enables businesses to respond nimbly to technological and market shifts, positioning them to outpace competitors in delivering new product features. ​

Furthermore, the 2025 CIO Agenda underscores the importance of aligning technology strategies with business outcomes. It suggests that CIOs should mold IT operating models to foster agility and responsiveness, ensuring that digital investments are closely tied to delivering value to customers. ​

In this context, composable architectures facilitate the creation of modular, customer-centric solutions that can be rapidly assembled and reassembled to meet evolving demands. By prioritizing client outcomes and leveraging packaged business capabilities, organizations can differentiate themselves through superior customer experiences rather than solely competing on price or basic functionality.​

When it comes to omnichannel commerce, the PIM’s role as source-of-truth for all product information makes it an ideal starting place for your business to become more composable. 

While moving away from old-fashioned, monolithic architectures and siloed customer functions, composable businesses need to look for technology providers who can become collaborative partners in innovation, not just another vendor. 

Real-time orchestration and operational agility

Composable systems are not just built to scale—they’re built to adapt. With real-time orchestration capabilities, data can flow fluidly between tools, powering personalized recommendations, updated availability, and seamless checkout experiences across platforms.

This orchestration allows businesses to respond immediately to external and internal triggers—such as inventory changes, pricing updates, or user behavior. For example, if a product goes out of stock, your search engine, CMS, and ads platform can all respond instantly, ensuring messaging and experiences remain accurate and relevant.

This agility also benefits internal teams. Marketers can launch campaigns faster. Developers can update individual services without downtime. Business leaders can test and learn more quickly, making data-informed decisions that drive revenue.

In traditional systems, data silos and latency hinder responsiveness. Composable platforms eliminate those barriers, ensuring that insights and actions are connected in real-time across the customer journey.

Applying composability to PIM

These concepts of composability aren’t new to Inriver. Our Digital-first PIM solution is composable by design. Our SaaS platform is a cloud-based PIM, and Inriver’s interactions are all governed via API and available as a headless solution today. We’ve been talking about the benefits of headless commerce for quite some time. However, as we’ve seen, commerce is continuously evolving, and it’s not slowing down. So, now is the perfect moment for organizations across industries and geographies to embrace this new approach to their technology choices.

We are proud to partner with companies such as commercetools and Big Commerce that embrace the MACH principles. Together we have several customers who wholeheartedly embrace the concept of composability and use Inriver to help them achieve those goals. As the MACH Alliance puts it, this is the best way to “future proof enterprise technology and propel current and future digital experiences.”Ready to build a composable commerce future? Start with a PIM platform that supports your omnichannel goals. Contact Inriver today to learn how our digital-first platform helps leading brands deliver consistent, flexible, and scalable product experiences.