Though e-commerce sales make up just 10% of total US retail sales, digital influences half.

To keep pace with customer expectations and close experience gaps across touchpoints, retailers are making serious investments to extend digital commerce beyond their .com storefronts into physical stores. 45% of digital retail executives are going phygital–expanding, upgrading or investing in technologies like “store mode” mobile app features, store associate tablets, and in-store personalization to deliver more contextual experiences to customers and drive revenue.

But technological and operational constraints still hinder retailers when it comes to connecting digital and physical experiences. Legacy, monolithic commerce platform architecture makes it difficult to extend commerce to new touchpoints without significant cost, time and risk.

The problem with monolithic legacy commerce platforms

Traditional enterprise commerce platforms, whether built in-house or licensed from a vendor, use monolithic architecture. Commerce services like catalog, search, customer accounts, pricing, PIM and checkout tightly coupled and interconnected with each other.

For IT, working with millions of lines of tightly coupled code makes new features development slow and risky. Because each piece of the commerce platform shares code with other pieces, modifying one part of the platform or extending it to a new touchpoint impacts the entire application. Changes may break code, compromise performance, and impact customer experience and revenue.

For many organizations, routine maintenance of complex and aging legacy systems consumes enough of IT’s bandwidth and budget to leave little room for innovation. And because even simple changes carry risk, experimental projects compete with everyday development and get deprioritized or tabled completely.

Monolithic commerce platforms also can’t scale individual services. Extending your platform into physical stores can tax certain components of your system more than others. For example, supporting in-aisle payment through store associate tablets can dramatically increase demand on checkout, but have a marginal impact on catalog, PIM, pricing or search. Without the ability to scale services independently, a retailer must invest in copies of the entire monolith (including more licenses and/or hardware), or slow down the entire system across touchpoints.

To work around these challenges, many retailers have built stand-alone apps and digital experiences siloed from retail and digital commerce systems. These projects are typically high cost and carry high risk of failure or low return on investment. Experiences that aren’t seamlessly integrated with POS or digital commerce catalogs, customer accounts and real-time inventory often disappoint customers, and don’t close the loop of the customer journey. They can’t share data back to core systems and require replication of content and separate maintenance.

Microservices help you take digital in-store faster and more efficiently

Imagine you could break your commerce platform down into individual components (such as catalog, search, PIM, promotions, accounts, order management, loyalty, cart and checkout) and build new in-store features using only the “pieces” you need to build each experience. These individual pieces, or microservices are decoupled, meaning IT can modify and extend code without impacting any other piece of your solution. New features can be delivered much faster, and without the extensive regression testing required with your current system. What takes your organization months to years can be delivered in days to weeks. Innovative experiences can scale without requiring copies of your entire platform. And updates can be made more frequently without interrupting operations.

To learn more about the practical applications of microservices and how your organization can take advantage of microservices architecture even without replatforming, get your free copy of Beyond the Storefront: Integrating Digital with Physical Retail.

By Linda Bustos, director of digital experience strategy, Skava