Not a LEGO but a 3D Printer: What Is Composable Commerce?

In this case, the main difference between composable commerce vs. headless can be summed up as follows: every composable solution is headless, but not every headless solution is composable.

Interestingly, Gartner positions traditional, or so-called static SaaS platform vendors, as “legacy.” This could refer to vendors that aren’t API-first or fully composable.

For a commerce platform to be truly composable, it must combine these characteristics: 

• Cloud-native: A system is designed with modern cloud technologies at its core, allowing for horizontal and vertical scaling and containerization.
• API-first: Every piece of business data and every function in the system is available via API and communicates with each other via API.
• Component- or module-based: A system consists of PBCs (Packaged Business Capabilities) that deliver a specific commerce function (e.g., catalog browsing, order processing, customer management, and more) and can be mixed and matched to create tailored solutions.
• Tech- and cloud-agnostic: A system isn’t tied or “locked” to any specific technology stack or cloud provider. Every piece and every function of the system can be separated, deployed and hosted independently for performance optimization and scalability. 

Unlike one-size-fits-all legacy or traditional monolithic platforms, composable commerce platforms use the best-for-me approach when it comes to ecommerce architecture. It means enterprises don’t solely rely on the fixed set of out-of-the-box features or integrations a platform vendor provides. They can select, scale, and potentially repurpose any element of their solution to best meet their specific business model needs.

This unprecedented level of flexibility that composable commerce offers comes in especially handy for enterprises operating in the B2B business environment, where complex data workflows, role-based access control, contract-based catalogs, and pricing rules can make or break a business.

Most modern “composable” commerce platforms on the market follow the principles of platform composability described above. Most of them are, indeed, API-first, cloud-native, and PBC-driven, with a strong focus on platform modularity. However, when it comes to true commerce composability that empowers large enterprises, one of the crucial ingredients is usually missing: deployment composability.

Deployment composability means your business can choose how and where to run every piece of your commerce, with full control over deployment and hosting. That might be in a private cloud, the vendor’s managed cloud, a hybrid setup, or even fully on-premises, depending on your business requirements.

In a deployment-composable platform, infrastructures are fully decoupled from one another—backend, business logic, frontend—and each infrastructure can be deployed and hosted separately as well.

The ability to host frontend apps, admin services, and backend processing independently, in different regions or clouds, is crucial for regulatory compliance and performance optimization of large enterprises.

HEINEKEN is a great example of composable commerce for B2B. For instance, HEINEKEN, like many other global companies, needed to host frontend applications close to their B2B customers in the APAC region for low latency and compliance with local laws, while keeping backend services in a centralized, highly available cloud environment in Europe. Virto Commerce gave the company the much-needed independence and freedom to place workloads exactly where they make the most sense.

Such decentralized deployment with centralized governance allows the deployment of microservices per business unit, product line, or market.

Enterprises adopting a composable approach to their ecommerce solutions see the following benefits for their ecommerce business: 

• Tailored experiences for every business model: B2B with complex workflows, B2C with rich content and high traffic spikes, multi-brand or D2C hybrid models—composable commerce allows businesses to fine-tune every touchpoint to meet the unique demands of each model.
• Operational resilience by design: In traditional systems, a failure of one component might take down your entire store. In composable systems, each module operates independently, so failures are contained. This isolation significantly reduces downtime and improves recovery time.
• Efficiency and cost control: Instead of scaling your entire platform to meet seasonal traffic or regional growth on the customer side, a composable approach allows you to scale only the components under pressure, such as product catalogs on Black Fridays or payment gateways during checkout spikes, with admin tools staying intact. This targeted scaling leads to more efficient use of cloud resources and better cost-performance ratios.
• Global agility and compliance: Need to meet GDPR in the EU and CCPA in California, support local currencies in APAC, or manage data residency in Switzerland? Composable commerce enables you to run services and store data wherever you need. You’re not limited by a centralized platform or locked into a single infrastructure provider.
• Team independence and velocity: Composable commerce empowers teams to work autonomously. Your frontend developers can release UX improvements without waiting for backend updates. Your PIM or CMS managers can publish content without fearing code-level regressions.
• Better testing and iteration: A/B test new modules and roll out beta storefronts—all without impacting your core commerce engine. Composable commerce’s decoupled, modular structure creates a safer, faster environment for experimentation. 

Truly composable commerce enables you to stop treating your ecommerce solution as “rented” software to maintain and start treating it as a strategic asset you own and together evolve with.

As powerful as composable commerce is, the transition from legacy systems to composable solutions isn’t without hurdles. It demands new ways of thinking, organizing, and operating. 

• Replatforming is a serious project: Moving to composable often means migrating off legacy systems. It requires strategic planning, clear stakeholder buy-in, phased execution, and the ability to maintain business continuity during transformation. 

• Vendor sprawl and integration complexity: Composable success hinges on assembling the right tools and making them work together. You’ll be managing multiple APIs, SLAs, pricing structures, and possibly even support teams. Without a strong orchestration layer or integration strategy, the modular stack can become a tangled web. 

• Maturity and architecture skills are a must: Composable solutions don’t magically configure themselves. Businesses must invest in in-house or partner expertise across DevOps, cloud engineering, API design, security, and more. Misconfigurations or gaps in architecture can create performance bottlenecks or expose vulnerabilities.
• Governance and compliance overhead: In monolithic platforms, data and permissions are often centralized. In composable platforms, access controls, auditing, and policy enforcement must span multiple services. This decentralization can make it harder to implement consistent governance unless you adopt strong standards and observability tools.
• Tooling and monitoring require upgrades: With services running across different clouds, containers, or APIs, traditional monitoring tools may not be enough. Teams need advanced observability stacks that support tracing, metrics, and logs across distributed systems. This includes setting up alerting, dashboards, and automated recovery flows. 

These challenges do require preparation, but shouldn’t scare you away. With Virto Commerce and the Virto Guarantee approach, replatforming can be a smooth process supported by a proactive vendor.

The benefits of composable commerce are real, but they’re unlocked only through deliberate planning, the right partner ecosystem, and a willingness to evolve both technology and process.

Composable commerce isn’t the universal answer for every ecommerce business, but it’s the right answer for many large enterprises facing global scaling, complex commerce models, or market disruptions by competitors.

Here are a few questions to answer before migrating to composable commerce: 

1. Are you frustrated by the limitations of your current ecommerce platform?
2. Do you operate in multiple regions or across different business models?
3. Are your teams struggling to move fast due to interdependencies?
4. Is compliance, data privacy, or localization becoming harder to manage?
5. Do you want full control over your roadmap, not just vendor updates?

If you nodded “yes” to at least two of the above, composable commerce can be the answer. It can provide the control, speed, and flexibility you need to grow. 

However, a composable commerce solution may not be the right fit if: 

1. You operate a small-scale B2C online store. 
2. You have a very simple, single-region setup with limited customization needs. 
3. Your team lacks engineering resources or integration capabilities. 
4. Speed-to-launch is your only concern, and you’re okay with a fixed set of out-of-the-box experiences.

In these cases, an all-in-one solution might serve you better in the short term. But keep in mind—even small brands grow. Investing early in a scalable, modular foundation can save years of accumulated technical debt and significantly reduce your overall TCO.

For large enterprises, the question isn’t if you’ll need it—it’s when. The sooner you prepare, the more competitive advantage you can gain.

Many platform vendors describe composable commerce as building with LEGO bricks. But that metaphor overlooks the big picture.

LEGO sets come with predefined shapes and strict manuals. Most users build exactly what’s pictured on the box. Have you tried building the LEGO’s “Back to the Future Time Machine”? One single misstep could lead to disassembling the structure and building from the ground up again. That’s how most “composable” platforms work today. They offer modules, but only within the constraints of their ecosystem.

True composability is about building and having full ownership of something entirely your own: deployment, hosting, custom logic, and integration flows tailored to your business. A 3D printer of the ecommerce world, if you may. 

Virto’s Commerce Innovation Platform goes beyond the LEGO-style composability that most vendors offer. Our platform was built from the ground up with composability at every layer, including deployment composability.

One of the key differentiators of Virto Commerce is its PaaS delivery and deployment composability. Unlike SaaS platforms, Virto enables access to the platform’s backend.

Additionally, Virto Commerce allows businesses to break their solution into independently hosted and deployed components based on regions, expected load, or usage, for performance optimization.

Here’s an example of how this separation of components can look like: 

• Frontend applications (multiple customer-facing UI) 
• Business/admin applications (management interfaces) 
• Backend services (background logic, processing, integrations)

Each of these environments can scale independently, be maintained separately, and even be hosted in different geographic locations and clouds. This means: 

No cross-impact from traffic spikes: A promotional surge in your storefront won’t slow down admin or backend operations. 

Better compliance and performance: Store sensitive customer data in one region, if required, and run business processes in another. 

Unlimited scaling: Add or duplicate environments as needed (for testing or regional distribution). 

Seamless updates and maintenance: Update one module or component without disrupting others, making it easier to innovate without downtime. 

Cloud-agnostic flexibility: Host any part of your solution anywhere (Virto Cloud, your private cloud, or on-premises) on your terms. 

This level of granularity and control is what true composability looks like. With a leader in composable commerce, Virto Commerce, you’re getting the best of both worlds: you can quickly leverage 80+ out-of-the-box PBCs and customize a commerce infrastructure that fits your exact vision and evolves with your business.

Since 2018, Virto Commerce has powered HEINEKEN’s digital transformation, now spanning across 25+ countries. Virto’s composable architecture became the foundation of HEINEKEN’s mobile-first, region-specific B2B solution, and helped the company scale in the APAC region at an accelerated pace. Thanks to the composable nature of Virto’s platform, each new localized market can be launched as a tailored version of the standardized core at just 35% of the cost of the original implementation. 

Building on the success of its initial ecommerce rollout, this legendary brewer joined forces with Virto Commerce for a major upgrade to its Digital Order Transfer (DOT) platform in 2025.  

The upgrade delivered significant improvements:  

• 50% faster upgrade time (from 20 weeks to 10 weeks).
• 5% increase in order processing speed.
• 10% faster data exports for Contact, Loyalty, and Order data modules.
• Real-time analytics with 15-minute monitoring intervals.
• Zero service interruptions during the transition. 

Bosch and Virto Commerce’s collaboration is also a long-standing one. Together, we built and scaled a digital loyalty portal that now serves over 150,000 registered users, with more than 210,000 orders fulfilled across different European countries. The solution supports a points-based rewards model with localized conversion factors and custom order-splitting logic for multi-provider fulfillment. 

What started as a fragmented network of local loyalty programs has evolved into a unified, centrally governed, API-driven, composable commerce platform with: 

• 50+ localized storefronts.
• 22,000+ products.
• 115+ integrated fulfillment providers.

Europe’s leading distributor of American auto parts and a General Motors subsidiary launched distinct yet complementary webstores—B2B and B2C marketplaces—with Virto Commerce. Thanks to Virto’s composable ecommerce platform, the client could launch a multi-storefront solution supporting different business models, multiple languages and currencies, all managed via a single core system. 

Now, the solution handles an expansive catalog of over 4 million products, providing a smooth shopping experience to wholesale and B2C buyers across 30 countries, with each business unit adopting new features and integrations without disrupting others.

Composable commerce is a modern approach to ecommerce, and it’s only a matter of time before it becomes an industry standard for all commerce platforms. Rather than adopting a LEGO-like approach to limited composability, Virto Commerce offers true composability at every layer. With its cloud-agnostic PaaS platform, you can separate, host, and scale every infrastructure—backend, business, frontend—independently, not being tied to one composable commerce technology or cloud provider.

Ready to adopt composability for your enterprise?