Accelerating Retail Innovation Through Composable Commerce and Open-Source Agility

Introduction

Retailers today are stuck in a paradox. 

On one hand, customer expectations are soaring: Shoppers want frictionless, personalized experiences across every channel, from Instagram to the in-store aisle. On the other hand, most retail tech stacks are holding them back. Monolithic commerce platforms, once seen as safe bets, now feel more like concrete shoes: rigid, slow to evolve, and increasingly expensive to maintain.

These legacy systems can’t pivot fast enough to meet evolving buyer behavior, nor can they easily integrate the modern tools needed for data-driven personalization or cross-channel consistency. The result? Missed revenue, siloed customer insights, and a growing competitive gap.

Composable commerce architecture has emerged as the ideal solution, empowering retailers to adapt and deliver personalized omnichannel experiences quickly. At Axelerant, we've developed a composable solution specifically designed for mid-to-large retail enterprises undergoing digital transformation. It’s not just about swapping out parts, it’s about building a leaner, smarter, more adaptable digital engine.

Our approach seamlessly integrates content, commerce, and data through flexible, open-source technologies, including Alokai Storefront (previously known as VueJS Storefront), Strapi CMS, Magento Commerce, and OpenSearch. This helps deliver personalized digital experiences, accelerate time to market, and scale effortlessly to ensure your digital investments remain agile and future-ready.

Why Composable Commerce Matters

For years, retailers were forced to choose the lesser of several evils when it came to digital architecture. None of the traditional options were built for the speed, personalization, or complexity of modern commerce.

• Monolithic suites like Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Adobe Commerce promised everything in one place, but delivered at the cost of agility. With vendor lock-in, bloated feature sets, and long development cycles, innovation often took a back seat to maintenance.
• Custom-built platforms offered control, but at a steep price. High internal resource demands, brittle codebases, and sluggish integrations made them difficult to sustain, especially at scale.
• Standalone tools like Shopify or WooCommerce were accessible and fast to launch, but weren’t designed to handle enterprise-level personalization or true omnichannel consistency. These tools worked fine, until they didn’t.

The result? A patchwork of workarounds, siloed systems, and customer experiences that fall short of what today’s shoppers demand.

Our composable commerce solution directly addresses these challenges. By decoupling and integrating best-of-breed tools, tailored to fit, not forced to conform, we help retailers deliver seamless, personalized experiences across every touchpoint, without sacrificing speed or scalability.

Our Journey To The Ideal Composable Tech Stack

Our path to composable commerce wasn’t linear; it was shaped by real-world challenges retailers brought to us. At first, we turned to familiar tools. Given our extensive experience with Drupal and WordPress, we naturally considered solutions like WooCommerce and Drupal Commerce. While both offered strong capabilities for many scenarios, we realized we needed something more inherently composable to achieve the agility and scalability our customers required.

We also considered Shopify’s Hydrogen framework, intrigued by its headless approach. However, the reliance on a proprietary ecosystem felt at odds with our open-source-first philosophy and our desire to offer retailers full ownership and extensibility.

So we pivoted toward a stack that aligned with our principles and addressed our clients’ most pressing challenges.

• VueJS Storefront (Now Alokai) brought the front-end flexibility and performance needed to craft modern, reactive user experiences.
• Strapi CMS gave us an API-first, open-source content engine with exceptional developer ergonomics and editorial control.
• Magento Commerce remained our preferred choice for deep commerce logic, customizable workflows, and enterprise-grade scalability.
• OpenSearch delivered advanced, real-time search and analytics capabilities, crucial for personalization and product discovery.

This composable stack wasn’t assembled for novelty; it was engineered through necessity. Each tool solves a specific challenge, and together, they offer a future-ready foundation for building the kind of digital commerce experiences that today’s customers expect and tomorrow’s innovations demand.

Composable By Design: Leverage What You Already Have

One of the key advantages of adopting a composable architecture lies in its capacity to make the most of what organizations already have, technologically and operationally. Our solution is designed with integrations at its core, enabling seamless interaction with multiple existing platforms.

• eCommerce Integrations: If you already use platforms such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud, BigCommerce, or Commercetools, our composable architecture provides specialized integrations to connect them effortlessly with VueJS Storefront and Strapi CMS. This interoperability enables faster go-to-market strategies and avoids the overhead of duplicative systems.
• CMS Flexibility: Whether your content is managed through Strapi, Drupal, Contentful, or other CMS platforms, our modular design allows you to integrate and extend your existing content workflows smoothly. We have successfully built a custom integration specifically with Strapi CMS, showcasing our capability to tailor middleware for specific customer needs.

This highly integrative approach allows retailers to maximize their existing technology investments, reduce risk, and minimize disruption, ensuring a smooth transition towards enhanced composable commerce solutions.

Key Features And Integrations

Our composable architecture brings together the best of content management, commerce, and user experience, powered by modern integrations that ensure scalability, flexibility, and performance.

1. Flexible Layout Pages With Strapi

Strapi CMS allows content teams to manage complex, flexible layout pages efficiently. The product information and related commerce functionalities seamlessly integrate directly from Magento, ensuring consistent and accurate content across all digital touchpoints.

2. Robust Middleware Integrations

We successfully built custom middleware enabling seamless communication between VueJS Storefront and Strapi. This integration facilitates dynamic content and consistent user experiences, reinforcing our solution's modular flexibility.

3. Integrated Omnichannel Experiences

Our composable solution integrates content, commerce, and data through a middleware architecture, enabling seamless, personalized journeys:

• Personalized content delivery via Strapi to VueJS Storefront.
• Enhanced search experiences with OpenSearch, dynamically adapting results based on user behavior.
• Efficient commerce operations managed by Magento, ensuring smooth product details, transactions, and inventory management.

4. The Open-Source Advantage

Selecting open-source technologies provides strategic advantages:

• Reduced Total Cost Of Ownership (TCO): Avoid licensing costs, scaling economically as your business grows.
• Flexibility And Control: Modify or replace components freely without vendor dependencies.
• Rapid Innovation: Leverage vibrant open-source communities for continuous improvements and innovative plugins.

Why Axelerant’s Composable Commerce Solution Stands Out

Axelerant brings deep expertise in composable and open-source technologies, reinforced by robust DevOps practices and continuous delivery methodologies. Our solution uniquely solves retail challenges through scalable, modular architecture, providing:

• Unified Omnichannel Customer Experience: Seamless integration of content, commerce, and data.
• Composable & Modular Flexibility: API-first middleware enables rapid integration without vendor lock-in.
• Enhanced Performance & Scalability: Superior performance through modern frameworks, including VueJS (SSR, PWA) and Magento (high-scale commerce).

Ready-To-Demo Composable Retail Solution

Curious to see our composable commerce solution in action? Demos showcasing key functionalities and integrations are available. Reach out to our experts to arrange a demo tailored to your needs.

Retailers can take a smart, step-by-step approach to a composable architecture. Begin with a modern front-end like VueJS Storefront to quickly boost site speed and user experience. Then, gradually update backend systems using modular APIs, prioritizing impactful upgrades like advanced search and personalized content delivery. This approach delivers quick wins while laying the foundation for long-term digital agility.

Future-Proof Your Retail Business Today

Composable commerce leveraging open-source technologies is a strategic imperative for agile, personalized, and cost-efficient retail. Axelerant’s solution provides retailers with the tools and expertise needed for rapid innovation, delightful customer experiences, and effortless scalability.

Ready to accelerate your digital transformation journey? Let’s connect and schedule your personalized demo today.