Composable Content and Commerce Out-of-the-Box Now Possible in a Seamless Interface

Composable commerce content and commerce out-of-the-box: it sounds like a dream come true for businesses looking to streamline their online operations and the management of their ecommerce platform. However, as much as it may seem like a match made in heaven, the truth is that composable content for your ecommerce business and commerce out-of-the-box are fundamentally incompatible.

At its core, composable content or the composable commerce approach is about creating flexible and reusable pieces of content that can be combined and recombined in different ways with other software components to create a variety of experiences for users.

On the other hand, commerce out-of-the-box is about providing businesses with pre-built e-commerce functionality and content management system that can be easily integrated into their existing systems.

The problem arises when you try to combine these two approaches. Composable content and any composable commerce platform require a high degree of flexibility and customization, while commerce out-of-the-box tends to be inflexible and rigid, which can be a huge downside for any ecommerce site that wants to thrive within rapidly changing market dynamics.

This means that attempting to use a pre-built commerce solution or commerce platform with composable content can lead to a range of problems, including:

• Limited flexibility: Pre-built commerce platform solutions and traditional commerce options often have a fixed set of features and functionalities that cannot be easily customized or extended. This can limit your ability to create the kind of composable commerce content experiences that users expect. Your digital commerce business can also fail to deliver innovative experiences to your website visitors and pull down customer relationship management performance.
• Inconsistent experiences: Composable content is all about creating a consistent user experience across different channels and touchpoints. A composable commerce platform takes into account your business requirements and integrates your development and marketing goals in a modular approach to your website. The modular approach offers businesses plenty of opportunities to fine-tune how customers interact with their websites and thus create an excellent customer experience. Unfortunately, pre-built commerce solutions are the opposite of all these as they can often be difficult to integrate with other systems, leading to inconsistencies in the overall customer experience.
• Poor performance: Composable commerce content often requires a lot of processing power and resources to deliver the kind of dynamic experiences that users expect. However, pre-built commerce solutions can often be resource-intensive and slow, leading to poor performance of the entire system and subpar front-end interface as well as a back-end system, which translates to poor user experience.
• Difficult new feature implementation: Pre-built commerce platform options are based on certain standards and eventually become a monolithic architecture down the road. That makes it difficult to modify or add new and better independent components later to your ecommerce platform. If you embrace composable commerce, however, not only can you enjoy best-of-breed ecommerce platform technologies (such as the latest shopping cart technology, cloud-native SAAS, macro capabilities, etc.) - it is also difficult to connect components or update those components to make your website more business-centric and in-line with modern technologies.
• Security risks: The key tenets of composable architecture for content often involve pulling content from multiple sources and combining it in real-time to create a dynamic experience. However, pre-built commerce solutions may not be designed to handle this kind of real-time website content processing, leading to potential security risks and vulnerabilities.

This is where StackShift comes in.

StackShift is a composable content and commerce solution GLUED together to a single workflow and publishing tool.

What is StackShift?

StackShift meets today's business requirements through:

1. A set of preconfigured APIs to query your data and built it into your UI. This API-first cloud-native approach enables composable commerce content to be deployed across multiple digital channels and mobile devices with ease.

2. A state-of-the art Headless CMS. This headless architecture is based on structured content and React components. To know more about headless commerce and its benefits, you might want to read these articles:

Headless Commerce CMS for Creative Web Agencies (read here)

Composable Commerce for B2B - Create Modern Commerce Experiences (read here)

Headless commerce implementation (read here)

More about headless commerce here

3. A JavaScript framework that is built on top of React.js, which is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

4. REAL-TIME COLLABORATION

You can see all content changes made to any field and instantly roll them back if needed. And when someone’s viewing a document you’ll see their avatar in the corner, so there’s no chance of edits accidentally clashing or getting locked out. Changes are also viewable via a presentation layer preview in real-time, making it easier for everyone in your team to collaborate and meet website business needs.

5. Search powered by structured content

Find content across your entire workspace using chainable filters powered by your content model. Or, reverse search for referenced content, such as locating all the documents that contain an image. All these used to be time-consuming, but with StackShift, you need not spend so much time and effort anymore.

6. Worry-free deployments and rollbacks

7. Effortless continuous deployment for sites, and digital commerce stores with all the infrastructure and automation required

StackShift enables the delivery of relevant content to your customers right when they need it through best-of-breed technologies. It also powers microsites with audience-specific content, helping you reach your digital commerce goals.

Why Did We Bring StackShift to Market?

We started building Static websites in early 2017, at that time against all trends and all odds. Were static sites not something from the nineties??

Netlify was a tiny company back then, Vercel was still Zeit and also in its very early days, frameworks like Gatsby or Next Js were non-existent. The headless CMS vendors were struggling to explain just the word headless, like you do not know what you're doing, since you have no head.

And the confusion was growing – Janstack, MACH alliance (MACH architecture), composable content, composable commerce, serverless, edge networks, edge functionality, git workflow, API’s, structured content, content lakes, and so on.

Even for an educated audience, the confusion was total and the barriers to entry were extremely high. But the ECOsystem, if I may call it so, or the philosophy behind the ECOsystem became obvious to many developers, not so to the web marketing community, content writers, bloggers, SEO companies, or the many businesses as well as web and digital marketing agencies across the country and the globe.

So companies large and small are looking for solutions, different vendors, and software products to remove the confusion and remove the risk of making the wrong digital commerce choices. With a monolith like Worpress or Drupal or Adobe, you are under vendor lock-in and if you outgrow the platform, your only choice is to move to another platform or a different technology stack. Business logic dictates that this is not a wise direction.

StackShift made the choices for you based on the best-of-breed technologies and building blocks available, glued together into one single workflow and multichannel publishing tool. This progressive web app gives you:

• A headless CMS based on structured content, i.e. StackShift UI
• A React framework that can pre-render and server-render components, i.e. Next Js
• A complete GIT workflow
• An infrastructure designed for Enterprises with 99.99% uptime
• Fully integrated with serverless forms, serverless payment forms, analytics, and GPT-3 and GPT-4

These building blocks make up a headless storefront and composable commerce architecture that definitely meet the modern business needs of many online stores out there.

What Are the Most Important Use Cases for StackShift?

Landing Pages

No more struggling with prefixed templates. Everything is based on components that can be reused at will

Landing Page Use Case 1: Resthaven properties - https://www.resthavenproperties.com/

Creating A Tailored landing Page Builder for a property management company

1. Resthaven properties family of brands required a robust solution for luxury travel and booking landing pages for various luxury properties under management.
2. Resthaven required a customized landing page and microsite builder for their members, vacation rentals, events, and Hourly rentals. They had been struggling to find a good solution in the main page builder market, finding tools like Unbounce and Instapage to be too cookie-cutter and lacking integrations with their other systems.
3. By implementing our StackShift and customizing the content components and style sheets to meet their design standards Resthaven was able to have a wide breadth of landing page publishing capabilities and wasn’t stuck with their content in a pre-built template.
4. By implementing a headless CMS they were able to treat all of their marketing content as data elements in a single hub making it much easier to build and publish pages and microsites from content they were already using elsewhere on their website.
5. This composable approach made it easier to be flexible and quick to market with new pages and campaigns all the while simplifying their content management and publishing process. They operate a large content distribution program with a smaller-than-average team by utilizing StackShift.

Landing Page Use Case 2: THE MH Companies - https://themhcompanies.com/

1. For nearly five decades, The MH Companies built their reputation on conducting business with integrity and respect. Our goal, every single day, is to provide our partners with unparalleled experiences. Like other organizations, we sell products, services, and solutions. But, that’s where the similarities end.
2. Built on React and Nextjs, this Web Application is using the API economy to its full extent. The Headless CMS used in this project is StackShift UI with a MongoDB back-end. The entire application is managed through the StackShift application.

Microsites for Niche Brands

Microsite Use Case 1: Keeler Brass company – https://www.keelerbrasscompany.com/

A MICROSITE for the Keeler Brass Company, a brand of Belwith Keeler

1. The Keeler Brass Company offers rare luxury hardware proudly and wholly designed in-house. Our solid brass and bronze products are 100% manufactured domestically in America.

2. For generations, the Keeler name was synonymous with quality and craftsmanship. It is our commitment to relaunch this brand anew with the same intrinsic values of our founding fathers for 2023, the brand’s 130th-year anniversary.

Ecommerce for Niche Brands

Niche Brand Ecommerce Use Case 1: Swampfox Optics - https://www.swampfoxoptics.com/

Creating A Composable Commerce Solution For A Manufacturing Company

1. Swampfox Optics was unhappy with the performance of its ecommerce website and needed help upgrading its pagespeed and user experience.
2. Swampfox Optics had built a strong presence on their social channels and was growing their direct-to-consumer sales channel on their website but they were completely built into a monolithic platform. They were using BigCommerce for everything. Commerce management as well as content management and hosting. The website was underperforming in page speed and the design was substandard. They lacked internal resources in both marketing and development and needed help in a multi-disciplinary sense.
3. We migrated their content over to our StackShift and rebuilt their entire front end to improve both the page speed performance of the website but also greatly improve the user experience of the website. We did not need to use a new commerce tool but instead implement BigCommerce via API as a headless commerce solution.
4. By decoupling the design and content from the commerce as well as the hosting we removed all the inflexibility they were accustomed to when they were stuck on a platform for their ecommerce. We were able to customize the checkout and layer in other tools in their marketing stack without having to deal with complex and performance-draining plugins. Instead, their CRM and other marketing tools are implemented via APIs as microservices.
5. This also allowed them to implement new checkout procedures and start to explore cryptocurrencies as payment options for their goods. Additionally, the robust nature of serverless operations made their major sales events much more scalable. They have been able to grow their page views, visitors, and sales over 9X in less than a year.
6. They’ve also been able to build up their internal marketing team and effectively grow their internal capabilities all the while leveraging a future-proof technology stack

Niche Brand Ecommerce Use Case 2: Extreme Motus – https://www.extrememotus.com/

Creating A Composable Content and Commerce Solution For A Niche Product

1. The founders of Extreme Motus believe that everyone should be able to enjoy their favorite activities, regardless of their abilities. This is the principle around which we have built our Emma X3 all-terrain wheelchairs.
2. With the Emma X3 all-terrain wheelchair folding frame, fat tires and comfy ride the Emma X3 all-terrain wheelchair is the perfect wheelchair to explore areas that were once previously perceived inaccessible.
3. Disabilities like Cerebral Palsy, late-stage ALS, Traumatic Brain Injuries, and more can leave wheelchair users spending too much time indoors. We know that spending time in nature can make everyone happier and healthier.

Conclusion

In conclusion, StackShift is an indispensable tool for any online business looking to streamline their content and commerce workflows.

With its composable content and commerce solution, businesses can quickly and easily deliver relevant content to their customers, helping to drive engagement and increase sales.

Additionally, its powerful microsite capabilities allow businesses to tailor their content to specific audiences, helping them to achieve their digital commerce goals. Whether you're just starting out or looking to optimize your existing online presence, StackShift is an excellent choice for businesses of all sizes.

Try using StackShift now - Request Sandbox Access here
You can view a PRODUCT TOUR HERE