Composable Commerce, Picking the Best Tool for Every Job
Most ecommerce businesses eventually hit the same wall: the all-in-one platform that got them off the ground is now the thing slowing them down.
What is Composable Commerce?
Composable commerce is an approach to building your online store where you pick the best tool for each job and connect them together, rather than being locked into whatever one platform decides to bundle in. Think of it less like buying a fully furnished house and more like designing your own from a kit of really good parts. If one part stops working for you, you can swap it out without renovating the whole thing.
Why would your business implement it?
If your business has ever been unable to add a payment method a customer actually wanted, or found that scaling up meant a full re-platform rather than a simple upgrade, you've already felt the pain composable commerce exists to solve. It's not about chasing the latest architecture trend for its own sake. It's about making sure the commerce side of your business like checkouts, payments, inventory, and pricing can evolve at the pace your business needs, instead of the pace your platform allows.
Playing well in the sandbox: How composable commerce fits with your tech stack
Composable commerce isn't a single product you buy, it's an approach to connecting the tools you likely already use, or want to use. None of these pieces need to come from the same vendor, or even talk to each other directly, that's the point. They connect through well-defined APIs, so each one can be upgraded, replaced or scaled on its own schedule, without a domino effect through the rest of your stack.
Your CMS
A natively headless CMS like Sanity or Payload handles your content and product storytelling, decoupled entirely from how and where it's sold. The Sanity and Shopify partnership is a good real-world example of this pairing in action, with Sanity managing rich content and Shopify handling transactions, synced automatically via API.
Your Commerce Engine
Whether that's Shopify, commercetools, or another platform, this layer owns catalog, cart and checkout and in a composable setup, it doesn't need to also be your content management system, your CRM, or your search engine.
Your CRM
Sitting alongside your commerce engine, your CRM gives your team one view of a customer regardless of which channel or touchpoint they came through, feeding data back into personalisation and marketing without needing to be baked into the storefront itself.
Your PSP
Providers like Stripe or Adyen plug into checkout through a standard interface, which means you can run different providers for different markets without rebuilding checkout logic every time you expand.
Benefits of a Composable Commerce System
A more flexible stack means less time waiting on developers, less money spent on features you don't use, and more room to grow into new markets and channels without a full rebuild.
No more waiting for Dev time to update features
In a monolithic setup, adding a new checkout flow, a subscription model, or a loyalty program usually means waiting on your core platform's roadmap, because that capability is baked into the same system as everything else, composable commerce treats each of these as its own independent service, so you can plug one in without touching the rest of your storefront.
Your platform no longer holds you back
Monolithic platforms are built to do everything reasonably well, which usually means nothing exceptionally well, and outgrowing even one part has traditionally meant re-platforming the whole business to fix it. Composable architecture lets that one component get replaced or upgraded on its own, while everything else keeps running exactly as it was.
You're not locked into one vendor's roadmap, pricing or priorities
When your CMS, commerce engine, CRM and payments all live inside one platform, you inherit that vendor's pricing changes and feature priorities whether or not they suit your business. Spread across composable, best-of-breed services, a pricing hike or a stalled roadmap from one provider becomes a swap-out, not a crisis.
How has Hatchd used it?
Galvins
As a trade-first business, Galvins needed a commerce platform that could handle the realities of trade ordering, account-based pricing, bulk quantities, and workflows built around tradies rather than typical retail shoppers. Rather than force that complexity into an off-the-shelf checkout, we built a custom commerce architecture around Galvins' specific needs, giving them a trade experience that works the way their customers actually buy, with the flexibility to expand into retail without starting again from scratch.
Take a look at the commerce journey we built for Galvins →