If you’re in the commerce space, whether you’re evaluating vendors or just staying up to date on the latest and greatest trends, then you’ve probably heard about Headless Commerce, Composable Commerce and MACH. So what are they and how do they differ?
If you’re in the commerce space, whether you’re evaluating vendors or just staying up to date on the latest and greatest trends, then you’ve probably heard about Headless Commerce, Composable Commerce and MACH. So what are they and how do they differ?
Headless Commerce
Well, firstly, headless commerce is more widely known, since it was established in 2011 by Elastic Path. Its strategy of decoupling the front end of presentation layer from the back end commerce engine enables businesses to deliver continuous customer journeys across multiple touch points without that dependency on the back end slowing you down.
Since then, technology has developed more to create more flexibility across these commerce journeys. And here in lies, MACH.
MACH
Now MACH simply a collection of technologies wrapped up in an acronym, which stands for:
- Microservices
- APIs Cloud
- Native
- Headless Commerce
So what does MACH do? Well to understand that you will need to understand each component separately.
Microservices are independently deployed packaged business capabilities that enable flexible development to be deployed quickly.
APIs, are software intermediaries that allow two or more applications to talk to each other. So this is going to be crucial for accelerated development of new channels and time to market for different commerce experiences.
Cloud Native simply means it’s just a SaaS model commerce service that allows for elastic scalability and robust security. This means that you’ll only have to deploy the capabilities that you need on demand and not your entire full suite at once.
So in conclusion, MACH is simply a marketing term that brings all of these flexible technologies together.
Composable Commerce
Now Composable Commerce is the approach that brings it all together. This approach equips brands with the core commerce technology, like MACH, assets like partner integrations and expert written guides, as well as full support to compose and optimize your unique commerce solution. Now, Composable Commerce is characterized by three key tenets.
Business centric solutions, which include quick starts for building your solution. and business tools that grant marketing teams the control to make changes and remain competitive.
Modular architecture, which leverages flexible technology such as JAMStack for your frontend, MACH for your backend and extensive developer tools.
An open ecosystem, which consists of a library of assets, integration frameworks as well as full support and guidance for building your entire solution.
So as you can see, it’s not a direct comparison, because headless is just a small part of MACH and MACH is only a small part of what Composable Commerce enables you to do. To learn more about how you can leverage these MACH based technologies to deploy Composable Commerce, feel free to reach out to us. We’d be happy to help.