How Long a Composable Storefront Project Should Take - And What It Costs with 64Labs

Monolithic commerce platforms still dominate the legacy install base. But composable architecture is quietly and quickly becoming the default for brands that want to move fast, personalize better, and scale smart. Here’s why.

Two Paths. One Direction That Matters.

At some point, every digital team hits the same wall: is your commerce platform pushing you forward, or is it quietly holding you back?

Monolithic platforms are familiar. Everything in one place. One contract, one vendor, one roadmap to follow. That made sense when stability was the goal. But the game has changed.

Composable commerce is built for movement. It splits the stack into parts - CMS, search, checkout, personalization - and connects them through APIs. So each part of your business can evolve on its own terms.

This isn’t a backend engineering preference. It’s a strategic foundation for shipping faster, experimenting more, and building digital experiences that keep up with the customer.

Why Composable is Pulling Ahead

Modern brands move on short timelines. Product drops, geo-expansion, A/B tests, loyalty programs, AI-driven content - none of that fits neatly inside the old dev cycle.

Monolithic platforms slow things down. One small update means full regression testing. Teams queue up behind each other. Deadlines slip. Innovation fades.

Composable fixes that. You want to try a new CMS? Plug it in. Want to update the frontend? Do it without touching the checkout. Want to test two search vendors? Go for it.

Decoupled systems let every team move at their own pace. No more waiting for a single system to catch up.

Tradeoffs Worth Knowing

There are still situations where a monolith makes sense. Simpler teams, tighter budgets, fewer moving parts. If your business needs one site and one language, all-in-one can be fine.

But once you scale, that simplicity becomes a constraint. You’ll find yourself spending more time working around the platform than improving your experience.

Composable takes more planning upfront. You need to pick tools, define APIs, structure your stack. But once it’s in place, you’re in control. Not locked to a vendor’s roadmap. Not bottlenecked by a bundled release schedule.

What It Looks Like Day to Day

Say your team wants to relaunch the site, overhaul search, add personalization, and expand to three new countries. And marketing still needs to push campaigns live weekly.

In a monolithic setup, that’s a six-month program with a lot of dependencies and delays.

In a composable world, content updates go through the CMS, personalization gets tested in isolation, and the frontend evolves alongside the rollout. Each stream moves independently. That means fewer collisions and more shipping.

The Wrap

Monolithic platforms had their moment. And for some teams, they’re still good enough. But if your brand is growing, diversifying, or trying to accelerate, composable is probably the better fit.

It gives your teams control. It frees you from outdated timelines. And it lets your tech stack evolve with the business, not behind it.

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The Big Question Everyone Asks

If you're leading digital at a large retailer or a multi-brand group, this has probably come up already: "How fast do we get a return on a composable build?"

Fair question. Composable projects do require upfront investment. They need time, budget, and executive attention. But the payoff isn’t just in the tech you launch. It's in the legacy systems and workflows you leave behind.

The value shows up when your teams stop waiting for dev queues, start shipping faster, and no longer rely on expensive workarounds to do basic things.

A composable storefront doesn't just pay off the build. It clears the debt that’s been building inside your stack for years.

Where the ROI Actually Comes From

Most people frame ROI too narrowly. They ask if composable saves money compared to what they’re already doing. And if it makes money if all they do is change the front-end framework. It does both. But the better question is whether it clears the friction that keeps your teams from doing their best work.

Here’s where the real value tends to land:

• Faster time to market: Marketing and merch teams push campaigns, content, and experiments without waiting for staging, QA, or a dev sprint to open up.
  
• More autonomy across teams: No more Jira tickets for basic content updates. A well-structured CMS lets non-technical teams work directly inside the experience. This autonomy stretches right through to some elements of structure like menus.
  
• Less tech debt: When you replace rigid templates and legacy CMSs with modular systems, maintenance gets lighter and upgrades stop being emergencies.
  
• Better customer experience: Faster front-ends and personalized flows drive stronger engagement (+20-40 %) and better conversion (~+20 % on mobile). That has real revenue impact.
  
• No wasted license spend: Composable means using the tools you actually need. You’re not paying for a suite full of features no one uses. This somewhat relies on your ability to negotiate good deals from new vendors and better deals from your platform. But composable opens this door and all of these guys want your business a great deal.
  

What Actually Drives ROI

Not every composable build hits its targets. The architecture helps, but the outcome depends on the process.

• Don’t start at the starting line: Many accelerators other SIs brag about are just reskinned versions of the Composable Storefront Sample from Salesforce Commerce Cloud. They are essentially worthless. The 64labs Accelerator is an integrated set of code, process, and embedded expertise where key decisions have been made based on experience, where full-feature integrations have been pre-built with the vendor overseeing, where there is a way to getting the site done quickly that we stand behind in our contracts. With 64labs you start a 100 m race 40 m from the finish.
  
• Pick the right partners: Composable tools only deliver if they play well together. That’s why we work directly with partners like Contentstack, Amplience, Algolia, Vercel, Adyen, and Dynamic Yield to build fast and smooth. But your key partner is your engineering partner. There are some other good partners out there. But no one has the experience and focus on composable of 64labs.
  
• Enable internal teams: We don’t just ship the site. We do a handover right. Your team gets documentation, training, and structured onboarding. They have helped build parts of the site. They retain access to our top people post-launch even without a contract. If they can manage the platform without us, we’ve done it right.
  

If you want us to stick around and keep the momentum of the build going, and there can be a strong case for that for some retailers upgrading in other areas of the enterprise stack (ERP, OMS, WMS) whose team cannot own the architecture right away, 64labs can hold the fort and improve the weaponry while that work gets done.

Let’s Talk. Want to see what ROI from composable could look like for your storefront? Contact us here.

Your Digital Team is Better Than Your Tech Stack

Marketers and merchandisers in enterprise retail are often stuck in a weird paradox: they have powerful ideas, agile teams, and massive goals, but a tech stack that moves like it's 2012. If launching a promo takes 3 JIRA tickets and 2 weeks of dev time, you're not just behind, you're bleeding money.

Enter composable commerce: a modular, API-first approach to building digital storefronts. While it sounds like a developer’s dream (and it is), the biggest wins actually show up for marketers and merchants.

Here’s how.‍

1. You Can Get Sh*t Done Fast

Composable means your frontend is decoupled from your backend. So when merch or marketing wants to:

• Launch a campaign,

• Update a product carousel,

• Swap out homepage banners for seasonal offers,

• Build a landing page for that influencer collab…

...they can do it without dev involvement (or with minimal support). Teams can use low-code/no-code tools integrated into the stack (like CMSs or visual merch tools) to make changes in hours, not weeks. And dev teams, before you get too upset, these guys have been using tag managers and personalization tools behind your back to do things they shouldn't for about 10 years now. This is better-safer-transparenter than that.

Result: Faster go-to-market, more A/B testing, more wins.

2. Personalization and Segmentation Actually Work

Legacy monoliths often treat personalization like a bolt-on feature, not a core capability. Composable stacks let you plug in best-in-class personalization engines (we have hard-core expertise in or Dynamic Yield) that actually talk to your content and commerce layers in real-time.

Marketers can then:

• Target based on customer behavior, not just segments

• Trigger experiences dynamically

• Swap components (not entire pages)

Now, it better be built correctly by a partner who knows what they are doing. (cough). And that partner better be in the weeds with your team on what it has to do where (double cough). And you better be willing to out some work into making it work rather than think it automagically improves conversions (whooping cough). But a composable architecture does unlock all this.

Result: Better CX, higher conversion rates, more data to refine.

3. You Own the Brand Experience, Not the Platform

Composable gives you control over your frontend experience. Sure you have, like templates with like Bootstrap n stuff that you can play with. But repeat after me - ISML is DISML. With composable you are a world of React and Typescript and kittens. You get to control how the site looks, feels, and behaves instead of being locked into the templates someone thought were state of the art back in 2014.

This means your brand team can:

• Tell a story that actually feels premium

• Maintain consistency across channels

• Create immersive content experiences

…without getting a “that’s not possible with our CMS” reply from IT.

Result: Experience-driven commerce, not catalog-driven commerce.

4. Operational Flexibility = Less Burnout

Move fast and break stuff they say. Yeah, great advice for a 20 year old building an app no one wil likely ever have to use. We don;t get that luxury. Marketers and merchandisers are constantly caught between "move fast" and "absolutely don’t break stuff."

Composable gives us a middle ground:

• You can make changes and roll something back within about 10 seconds.

• Repair or update to one part of the site does not have to impact another. And you will have built testing and QA workflows to automatically make sure that is the case. Or at least you will if you use 64labs (cough - sorry I can't quite get rid of this).

• You can schedule campaigns without syncing 5 different systems. Decide on your preferred workflow, how the various elements need to work together. And build that. Composable is made to compose.

• You can preview content as it will actually appear — not just in staging environments that look nothing like the real site.

Result: Less stress, more autonomy, more velocity, more control.

5. No More Big Bang

Worried about an old school Big Bang launch of composable? Don't be. You can put a full composable site out to a subset of users for as long as you want before you have to commit? Don’t be. Most enterprise teams go with a split launch - maybe 5% of users to start. They iron out any kinks. Then when they realize how much the ROI will be if they switch over like right now, they switch.

You can go incremental of course.

You can plug in a headless CMS (like Contenstack or Amplience), run it headlessly within your legacy stack for a while, and prove ROI before ripping anything out. Or un composable with a new CMS in one region for six months to give yourselves some experience of both before rolling out globally.

Result: Low risk, high reward — easy to minimize risk and you keep IT on your side.

In a world where campaigns move at the speed of culture and conversion windows last minutes, composable lets marketers and merchandisers do what they do best: create, launch, measure, and optimize without waiting for devs, approvals, or outdated systems to catch up.

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