SOLUTION · COMPOSABLE COMMERCE
Best-of-breed front end, commerce engine, OMS, ERP, and PIM connected by Nexus. No single point of failure, no single vendor holding your roadmap.
Traditional commerce platforms are monoliths. Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud each bundle the storefront, the cart, the checkout, the catalog, the customer database, the order management, the discount engine, and the basic content management into a single platform you configure. For most retailers, this is exactly the right shape.
For 80% of retailers, the monolith is the right answer. For the other 20%, the monolith is the source of most of their pain. The features you need are blocked behind workarounds. The features you do not need are unavoidable. The platform’s roadmap is not your roadmap. You are paying the vendor to slow you down.
Composable commerce splits the stack into independent layers. Each layer is chosen on merit. Each layer talks to the others through APIs and events. If the front end framework you want is React-based, you use it. If your commerce engine of choice is Shopify Plus but you need a different OMS, you compose them. If your business model needs a custom checkout that no SaaS supports, you build it. The pieces are independent; the system is whole.
The trade-off is real. Composable commerce is more expensive to build than a Shopify theme. It requires architectural decisions you do not need to make on a monolith. It requires a team that can hold the whole picture, not just one platform. But for businesses with complexity that monoliths cannot accommodate, composable is the difference between operating cleanly and fighting your platform every day.
The honest moment most agencies skip: most retailers should not go composable. If Shopify Plus or Adobe Commerce covers 95% of what you need, the cost of composing your own stack vastly exceeds the cost of living with that 5%. We will tell you that directly. About one in three composable commerce discoveries we run ends with our recommendation to stay on Shopify Plus and just upgrade specific parts of the stack. The discovery cost is the audit deliverable. The MACH Alliance publishes good material on when composable is and isn’t justified; we treat that bar as the right one.
If you have run into the ceiling on a monolithic platform, call 0431 000 062. We will talk you through whether composable is the right move for your business.
Composable commerce becomes the right answer when one or more of the following are true.
DIAGNOSTIC
If three or more describe your situation, composable is probably the cleaner answer. The question shifts from whether to compose, to how to compose.
Composable commerce works because every layer is decoupled and every layer communicates through stable contracts. Nexus is the middleware that makes that work.
Typically Next.js, Nuxt, or a similar modern framework. Server-side rendered for SEO, hydrated for interactivity, deployable to Vercel, Cloudflare Pages, or your own infrastructure. The front end is independent of the commerce engine, which means you can redesign without re-platforming. Your front end and your commerce backend evolve on separate roadmaps.
Shopify Plus, Adobe Commerce, BigCommerce, or a custom engine on Symfony, depending on requirements. The commerce engine handles catalog, cart, checkout, pricing, and order capture. Beyond order capture, control passes to the OMS. We have built composable architectures with each of the major commerce engines as the core; the choice is driven by your specific operational requirements, not by any vendor preference of ours.
Order management, inventory, fulfilment, accounting, and product information each live in the system best suited to the job. Dear Systems, Cin7, NetSuite, Brightpearl, Microsoft Dynamics, or custom-built. The commerce engine does not try to do these jobs. Each layer is in the system that is genuinely good at it, not the system that pretends to be good at it.
Every order, every inventory change, every customer update, every refund, fires an event. Nexus routes the event to the systems that need it. Idempotent handlers prevent double-processing. Every event is logged for audit. Replay is supported when downstream systems have outages. When NetSuite has a scheduled maintenance window at 11pm on a Sunday, your orders queue in Nexus and drain when NetSuite returns. The customer-facing experience never knew it happened.
Product information typically lives in a dedicated PIM (Akeneo, Plytix, or custom) when the catalog has more attributes than a commerce platform was designed for. Product data flows from the PIM to the commerce engine, the storefront, the marketplaces, and the data feeds. A single source of truth for product means one team owns the data, and every downstream channel gets it correctly.
Every event, every transformation, every retry is logged. When the auditor asks what happened on 14 March at 3:47pm, you open a dashboard and show them. When the finance team asks why a specific refund posted to the wrong account, you answer in two minutes. The composable stack has more components than a monolith, but the audit story is genuinely better because every system-to-system interaction is captured at the middleware layer.
Composable commerce builds run in four named phases. Each phase is fixed scope and fixed price. You can pause between any two phases without losing progress.
DISCOVERY AND ARCHITECTURE
3 to 4 weeks. Map current state, document business model, select stack components, write the integration contracts. Fixed scope and quote at the end.
FOUNDATION
4 to 6 weeks. Stand up Nexus, integrate commerce engine and core back-office systems, prove the event flow end-to-end against production-shaped data.
FRONT END AND CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE
6 to 12 weeks. Build the storefront, the checkout, the customer portal, and any custom front-end experiences. Performance-optimised from day one.
LAUNCH AND CUTOVER
3 to 6 weeks. Migrate from the existing platform, soft launch, hard launch, monitor closely for the first weeks.
Total: 16 to 28 weeks for a single-brand composable build. Multi-brand and multi-region builds extend timelines, but the foundation work is reusable. The second brand on the same composable platform ships in roughly half the time of the first.
We structure composable commerce engagements one of three ways. All three start with discovery and architecture.
Call 0431 000 062 to talk through which fits.
Three composable commerce builds. Two named clients, one confidential at client request. Reference calls available.
Composable commerce builds are multi-quarter commitments involving operations, finance, marketing, and engineering. You should know the people doing the work, and they should know you. The two engineers below scope, build, and ship the work. The senior engineer who runs your architecture session is the same engineer who writes the Nexus code. No discovery handover. No offshore subcontract.
Nicolas Wendell
MANAGING DIRECTOR
Nicolas has been building custom software since leaving school, bringing a lifelong passion for development to every project. Before founding Paladine Systems, he ran his own video game studio and earned multiple accolades in network engineering. Known as a driving force in the custom software world, Nicolas combines deep technical expertise with visionary leadership – guiding Paladine in delivering innovative, enterprise-grade solutions.
Mark Morcom
SENIOR SYSTEMS ENGINEER
Mark is a young prodigy in software development, bringing 5 years of experience to Paladine. Equally at home on the front end and back end, he crafts clean, scalable solutions that power complex applications. Mark’s sharp problem-solving skills and passion for innovation make him a driving force behind Paladine’s most advanced projects.
Headless is one piece. A headless storefront is a separated front end on top of a monolithic commerce engine. Composable goes further, separating the OMS, the ERP, the PIM, and other layers as well. Headless solves the front end problem. Composable solves the whole stack problem. Headless is a subset of composable, not a synonym.
When a monolith covers 95% of what you need. The complexity overhead of composable architecture is real, and if Shopify Plus or Adobe Commerce can do the job out of the box, that is a better commercial decision. About one in three composable discoveries we run ends with our recommendation to stay on the monolith.
Some, yes. Configuring a Shopify theme is faster than building a composable storefront. The trade-off is flexibility and ceiling height. Once you are past the build phase, day-to-day operations on a composable stack are not slower; they are just different. The build is longer; the runway is meaningfully longer too.
Almost certainly. We integrate with NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Dear, Cin7, Xero, MYOB, and custom ERPs. The point of composable is that each layer is independent, so your existing ERP becomes the system of record for accounting and inventory. You do not need to replace the systems that are working.
Shopify Plus is a strong commerce engine. For many businesses it is also a complete answer. Composable becomes the right answer when you need pieces Shopify cannot do, or when you outgrow its ceiling. Even within a composable stack, Shopify Plus is often the commerce engine; what changes is what surrounds it.
Both. We build the entire stack, or we integrate into a front end your existing partner has built. Either model works. Click Click Media, our parent group, handles front-end and design work where you want a single team across both sides; otherwise we are happy to work alongside your existing front-end partner.
That is the point of composable. If the OMS layer no longer fits, you swap the OMS without touching the storefront, the commerce engine, or the ERP. Nexus’s event contracts are designed to make that replacement straightforward. The cost of swapping a layer in a composable stack is a fraction of the cost of re-platforming a monolith.
Call 0431 000 062 or book a discovery call through the form below. The first conversation is free and is run by an engineer. We will tell you whether composable is the right next step. Sometimes the answer is to stay on Shopify Plus and upgrade specific pieces, and we will say so.
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