Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - An update from Fluent Commerce

Retailers face a tough choice. Evolving technology and shifting customer expectations are forcing businesses to move faster than ever before—yet many remain held back by outdated systems.

This is the very dilemma that Fluent Commerce was founded to address, according to Rob Crowley, the company's chief technology officer. Speaking in an interview, Crowley explained, "Retailers were facing a challenge to step up from just being able to fulfil an order to driving customer experience, and what we see is they didn't really have the tools to do that. In a nutshell, that challenge is why Fluent Commerce exists."

Founded with the aim of accelerating commerce globally, Fluent Commerce has developed a "powerful and exciting" commerce platform, targeting the retail needs of not just now, but the future. At the heart of the offering is its distributed order management system (OMS). Crowley broke down the concept: "For those listening who may not have come across this term before, the role of an order management system at a very high level is to deliver the very best customer experience at the very lowest cost when it comes to fulfilling orders related to transactions across a range of different selling channels."

Moving well beyond its roots as a "pure transaction engine", the modern OMS is now viewed—at least by Fluent Commerce—as a "driver of customer experience". According to Crowley, the company was the first to reimagine OMS in this way. He said, "Most of our customers choose Fluent Commerce for this before the buy button functionality; in effect, our ability to make the most competitive promise both reliably and confidently."

As the landscape continues to evolve, Fluent Commerce is working on several innovations to help businesses optimise further. "Our focus is on innovating in both these areas—to minimise overselling and under selling," Crowley said. The negative impacts of these common issues are clear: "The former results in customer dissatisfaction through cancelled orders, and the latter in leaving unrealised revenue on the table."

Crowley noted that many retailers are hamstrung by their central enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. "Everything flows through their central ERP system. Every piece of data they have has a certain lag or staleness, and we don't see that as the future. Rather, we will source up-to-date transaction information directly from the point of that transaction to better fuel what we have done for a long time," he said.

By moving towards real-time sourcing of data, Fluent Commerce believes it can both improve efficiency and drive customer value. "We will have up-to-date transaction information by tapping into that source data to both improve efficiency but drive those customer value propositions," Crowley explained.

It's hard to talk about innovation these days without mentioning artificial intelligence. Crowley said, "It will be almost impossible to talk about innovation in a technical arena without mentioning AI." He also highlighted Fluent Commerce's partnership with cloud computing giant AWS, which powers its entire platform and enables automated decision-making and "data-informed optimisations".

These efforts appear to be gaining industry recognition, too. "Fluent Commerce has recently been recognised as the highest new entry in the Forester Wave for order management systems, and in fact has been identified as the global leader for strategy—something we're collectively very proud of," Crowley said.

Amidst all these technical changes, one trend gaining traction is "composable commerce". Crowley described it as the practice of "selecting and assembling best of breed solutions to satisfy a customer's distinct needs." He explained, "Their customers are more exacting than ever before, so our response to that needs to be more tailored, and this one size fits all unified platform just doesn't meet this need anymore."

Technologies such as microservices, APIs, and headless commerce—often grouped under the so-called "mac" approach—enable this flexibility, allowing businesses to assemble platforms that are both modular and open to extension. Crowley elaborated, "It's about enabling discrete pieces of business functionality to evolve at their own pace and composing these in a modular fashion, and also being open to extension so having well-defined APIs, contracts, and a rich developer experience to allow these to come together in a graceful and effective way."

Crowley sees several technical benefits to this modular approach: "The flexibility to adapt and iterate quickly. Not all parts of a solution will need to evolve at the same rate. You will not necessarily be innovating in all areas—some areas of the product might be about stability and you want to maximise for scale rather than for learning in another area. This gives us this flexibility."

He pointed to faster development and deployment as another key benefit, driving improvements in well-established "Dora metrics", which measure organisational delivery effectiveness. Add cloud-native resilience and improved cost efficiencies into the mix, and the case for composable commerce grows ever stronger—especially when considering future-proofing and the ability to avoid technical debt.

The move also enables businesses to "leverage and reuse, and again maximise the economies of scale" rather than simply building everything from scratch.

But is composable commerce the right approach for every business? According to Crowley, companies should begin by clarifying what they want to achieve. "This might sound strange coming from a CTO, but I would advise customers to really have a clear idea of what business outcomes they wish to achieve," he said. "Composable commerce is often talked about in technical terms just like I've done in this conversation, but an effective technology strategy doesn't live in a vacuum—rather, it's meant to amplify the business strategy."

He encouraged businesses to ask themselves whether their goal is a better customer experience, improved operational efficiency, or perhaps a blend of both. "Really have a clear goal: is it customer experience, is it operational efficiency, is it a bit of both? And then drive your choices from there," he said.

Integration is a crucial consideration. Crowley advised companies to examine the "API documentation, the SDKs, [and] the overall developer experience" of any composable product, as the quality of these technical elements will "be a leading indicator of how much pain or lack of you will see when the integration starts in earnest".

Skill sets also matter. Crowley said businesses should assess whether they currently have the expertise required, or whether they will need to pursue training, hiring, or partnerships. "Be warned, there is a learning curve and when you first start it will likely take longer, but the rate of change will then increase dramatically as you enable business users to react and adapt to changing customer needs without being throttled through a central technical team," he said.

Crowley wrapped up his thoughts with a note of encouragement: "The journey to composable commerce can be challenging but it is absolutely worth the investment and I wish you the best of luck on your own journey."