Differentiate one-off sales and subscription architecture 

Leverage composable architecture in subscription commerce with the right approach.

When it comes to finding the right subscription commerce solution, you should not only focus on ones that can meet market and customer expectations quickly. Just as important, the solution should also allow downstream operations for billing and finance to be as seamless as possible. The magnitude of transforming a single purchase into repeat behavior cannot be overstated due to the interconnected, overlapping, and recurring processes across teams to manage long-term customer relationships.

However, composable commerce was coined for one-off sales. As with all things, while the principle of composability is sound, in practice it’s less straightforward for the subscription business model. Here we walk through the potential challenges and solutions offered to subscription businesses by composable commerce.

Composable commerce's increased ability to customize can be a risk

What does it take for two or more completely different systems to work together?

The challenge
Another benefit of composable commerce is its customizability. Allowing businesses to utilize a wide range of integrations and build a unique solution that fits their use case like a glove. However,  knowing what you want is only half the process. The other half is making sure each component selected is applicable for subscriptions and the existing billing system is modern enough to work with a composable approach. The benefit of customizability is often overthrown by another considerable amount of customizations on the billing system and success will get much harder to sustain in the long run. 

The impact

The keylight solution
The key to fulfill your business requirements is having a clear understanding that standalone composability for commerce is not enough for modern subscription businesses. An end-to-end modern architecture is essential for achieving composable commerce without the downsides of customized solutions.

Compromised functionality in monolithic and fully composable systems 

How can companies balance composability and efficiency? 

The challenge
Businesses tend to find monolithic legacy architecture attractive because they seem comparatively simple to implement as they have one vendor and one flow of work. However, this severely limits their functionality down the line with fewer integrations made possible. At the same time, moving to a completely composable architecture for subscription businesses brings levels of complexity that many businesses are not yet ready to address. If one element does not work, businesses often have to manage the diagnostic process by themselves, especially when dealing with multiple vendors. Furthermore, if an issue is being caused by two elements from two different vendors, it can create a stalemate while deciding which vendor is responsible for the fix.

The impact

The keylight solution
keylight offers a unified data model to solve complex subscription logic and uses an API-first as well as a headless approach to provide both frontend and backend applications. They are seamlessly connected with one unifying data model for streamlined subscription operations, and businesses can leverage the modern architecture to achieve commerce composability easily, for whatever the future of business brings.