Time to move from Oracle Commerce to composable commerce

Platforms like Oracle Commerce (ATG) were designed to be all-in-one solutions for early ecommerce adopters. Though many brands successfully deployed those monoliths, future maintenance was another matter. Legacy platforms were defined by a tight coupling of components, making them difficult and costly to update, manage, and scale over time.

Designed for web-first architecture, platforms like Oracle Commerce served brands at a time when the majority of online shopping was done on desktops. The emergence of omnichannel retail saw consumers interact with brands beyond the ecommerce site, opening up revenue growth potential through email, social media, and a multitude of mobile devices and digital touchpoints.

The shift to omnichannel changed the way people shopped but also elevated consumer expectations and left crucial gaps in the customer experience journey. Today’s shopper expects a seamless, unified experience across all devices and touchpoints. Retailers must pivot to meet the demands of today’s “anywhere commerce” customer, or risk losing to innovative competitors.

Joe Cicman, Senior Analyst, Forrester, believes that the approach to legacy platform replacement will change in the future:

“The future of commerce technology buying will see the end of traditional 'replatforming.' In the future, digital businesses will prioritize, select, and implement technology for individual functions, rather than entire platforms. As a result, business leaders will incrementally replace legacy solutions with new vendors over time.”

Legacy platforms were not designed to handle the required functionality and diverse business models of today’s brands. Making changes such as running a custom promotion on a frontend, integrating a subscription offering, or optimizing the checkout require costly and time consuming development work.

Oracle Commerce (ATG) has become obsolete for this generation of commerce

In order to keep up with the latest technologies and customer expectations, brands require flexibility and the ability to innovate and future-proof their business. For the many retailers still operating on platforms like Oracle ATG, the key challenges include:

Lack of Agility - Because of the multi-layered architecture of the Oracle Commerce platform, minor changes are expensive and time consuming. 

High cost of ownership - Brands must purchase Oracle Commerce licenses based on needs, making it expensive and non-feasible to add new features. 

Poor Scalability - The multi-tiered architecture of Oracle Commerce makes it difficult to meet the performance and scalability requirements of enterprise businesses. 

In addition to these business challenges, there is a growing consensus in the analysts community regarding Oracle’s inability to compete in the marketplace.

Since 2016 Oracle has shifted from Gartner’s Leaders quadrant, representing a decline in their ability to execute. And in 2022 they disappeared from the quadrant altogether.

Recent layoffs, a declining user base, and mounting business challenges, it's not a matter of if, but rather, when brands will move off of Oracle Commerce. However, migrating to a whole new platform comes with its own set of compromises. A costly and time-consuming "rip-and-replace" approach may not be feasible for brands looking to remain competitive in the marketplace.

The good news is, for brands locked up in a legacy platform there may be another way.

Time to move to composable commerce

Rather than undergoing a complete replatforming and introducing a ton of disruption, brands on legacy platform Oracle Commerce have another option. Composable commerce enables companies to replace individual pieces of their tech stack. It’s a time and cost-effective way to integrate best-in-breed technology with minimal disruption to business operations.

Composable commerce achieves this through combining or composing Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs). Each PBC is a feature or capability of the application and consists of third-party software components.

A composable approach utilizes various vendors who offer robust, comprehensive functionality for the one thing they do, rather than relying on one vendor to produce standard functionality as a one-size-fits-all offering.

Learn how Staples Canada saved time and money (http://c/) with a composable commerce solution. 

Composable solutions use APIs to integrate modular pieces of technology, such as a checkout, a tax provider, or payment gateway, to a headless backend. According to Emily Pfeiffer, Senior Analyst for Forrester (https://www.objectedge.com/blog/digital-evolution-the-case-for-leaving-legacy-platforms-behind):

“More businesses are utilizing ecommerce migration services to move toward microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native technologies. Modern architecture adds complexity and initially, only the most digitally mature organizations could take advantage of this decoupled tech.”

A composable commerce solution is cost and time effective and allows for a flexible innovation roadmap. Brands choosing composable commerce are able to remain competitive while future-proofing their business.

The obvious question is: “where do you start”? The answer: Choose the point of pain where there is the most value in making a change, and start there.

Kick-start your transformation with a composable checkout

Checkout is a great candidate for the start of your composable journey for multiple reasons.

Half of all shoppers abandon their online purchase during the checkout stage of the customer journey—when purchase intent is highest. Though there are a number of reasons for checkout abandonment, three of the major reasons are:

• Lack of payment methods offered at checkout - including absence of Digital Wallet payments, Buy Now Pay Later options, or even a shopper’s preferred credit card.
• Absence of preferred, faster or convenient delivery methods including BOPIS, Curbside pick up or same-day delivery.
• Lack of mobile optimization also remains a big culprit with more than a third of consumers abandoning their purchase because of it
• Slow page load speed is another factor that can result in customers abandoning their purchase during checkout.

Checkout optimization strategies can address these issues, reducing checkout abandonment and getting more shoppers to complete their order. may not be feasible on rigid legacy platforms like Oracle Commerce. The business risk is high, and the cost, time, and complexity involved often negates any positive ROI as a result of such optimization.

A composable checkout like the Checkout Experience Suite from Bold allows brands to integrate a fully optimized, customizable checkout experience on top of existing technology, without requiring the costly burden of replatforming.

Bold’s composable checkout solution lets you modernize your checkout while de-risking your roadmap.

With Bold you get immediate ROI, a fast and easy to implement solution, and optionality to take that checkout with you to any other platform or technology stack.. Bold Checkout is the only composable checkout that gives you full flexibility to create high-converting checkout experiences, anywhere.

Don’t let checkout limitations on Oracle Commerce continue to cost you sales and revenue potential. While a major replatforming is a daunting choice, the shift to composable commerce, starting with checkout, is worth considering as a way out.