Composable commerce built for growth: Fast stacks for all

Composable commerce for everyone. A stack built for growth.
A fully functional composable e-commerce stack

Inspiration

In today’s digital landscape, data-driven experimentation has become the lynchpin of growth strategies. “Build, test, tear down and repeat” has become a mantra for businesses focused on product-led growth and customer acquisition loops. With a composable architecture based on MACH principles, businesses have the essential pieces in place to apply growth principles to the very brands they put in front of customers.

By both removing the technical barriers that slow down the launch of a consistent, repeatable stack and adopting an architecture that allows for an ultra-flexible approach to front-end component design, forward-thinking companies can hyper-target sub-brands, audience segments, global regions, verticals, or product categories - without starting from scratch every time a new site needs to be built. While much of the content may be the same as the master brand site, companies can build a site to support a specific play, test its performance with the target audience, tear it down and repeat.

Scaffolding composable stacks need to be more accessible to all stakeholders and not just a tech team.

What it does

For our MACHathon Accelerate entry, team "Rage against the MACHine" has collaborated to deliver a next-gen MVP for a “composable commerce stack accelerator” based on Uniform experience orchestration, a BigCommerce headless commerce, and Contentstack headless CMS. This software offers the ability to scaffold new stacks easily as a business user, test performance, tear them down, then repeat.

How we built it

The accelerator is hosted on Heroku and it guides the user through the scaffolding of BigCommerce instances, Contentstack stacks, and Uniform projects. It uses administration API services to create new instances and import data. Finally, it clones and applies theme data to a custom front-end from Github that was specially made for this MACHathon project.

The front-end pages are composed through Uniform Canvas and Uniform Mesh while connected to BigCommerce, Cloudinary, and BigCommerce. The architecture also boasts quality-of-life features such as Contentstack workflows and webhooks that enable instant preview while content editing. It is automatically compiled by and hosted at Vercel.

Challenges we ran into

Not all needed features were available through administration APIs and we've had to be creative problem solvers to get certain parts of the experience to work.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We effectively created two complete experiences in 10 days (due to time constraints we finished the MACHathon on May 27th): the accelerator back-end which scaffolds the composable stacks and a complete feature-rich front-end that works from content editing to checkout. It even scores 100% on Google lighthouse for performance, SEO, and accessibility.

What we learned

Set a blue sky vision and go for it. It seems that with the right attitude and a healthy amount of pragmatism a lot can be achieved in a short timeframe.