The MACH Alliance is an organization of technology companies and agencies dedicated to advocating for an open, best-of-breed enterprise technology ecosystem.The Alliance’s mission is to future proof enterprise technology and propel current and future digital experiences with open and connected enterprise tech.
Joining the MACH Alliance is another step forward in Bold’s commitment to building high-converting, customized checkout experiences brands need in order to effectively adapt, innovate, and scale well into the future. Along with other technology leaders joining the MACH Alliance, Bold believes MACH architecture delivers the flexibility, agility and speed to market that brands need to compete in today’s retail landscape.
From evolution to revolution in retail
Enterprise retailers have long felt the limitations of their technology infrastructure. For some time, rigid, inflexible legacy systems have stifled mainstream retailers from addressing clunky user experiences.
This challenge has been particularly true in navigating cross channel, and more recently, cross device ecommerce. All in one suites offer lower cost of ownership than traditional legacy systems, and more extensibility, but remain website-centric, resulting in disconnected user experiences, inefficiencies, and lost revenue. Until recently, those visioning and implementing best of breed composable architectures were relatively few and far between. Adoption was reserved for progressive, enterprise businesses with a clear vision, deep expertise, and resources to not only roll out, but manage and maintain.
The business impact of Covid-19 however, became an undeniable catalyst for brands to address their aging infrastructure, prompting the need to adapt and evolve quickly. At its core, the revolution of retail is one where business survival demands that shopping experiences evolve to both accommodate and anticipate the needs and expectations of the consumer.
For one, consumers aren’t just shopping through traditional ecommerce platforms. Forecasts suggest social commerce could be up by $36.09 billion in 2021, representing 4.3% of all retail ecommerce sales, while another report states 60% of those with a virtual assistant have made a voice command purchase (to the tune of $1.8 billion last year).
Further, intensifying competition from direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands has also contributed to raising the bar on user experience, as many of these new offerings are not held back by legacy platform limitations.
Suffice to say, retail has reached an inflection point. The stakes have never been higher, and enabling technologies are key to addressing the sources and forces of change. Retailers are responding with urgency to make it as seamless as possible for shoppers to buy, which means personalizing experience, reducing friction, and converting shoppable moments across all channels, into sales.
“MACH architecture is going to be a key driver in the future of commerce. We’re proud to join the MACH Alliance, and to promote the principles of MACH as a future-facing approach to building commerce experiences.” Yvan Boisjoli, Co-Founder and CEO of Bold.
The good news: It can be done. Today’s brands have the power to tailor consumer experience, open new channels, and broaden their reach—turning shoppable moments into sales, launching new revenue streams, and increasing brand loyalty.
Going full MACH
The advantages of moving to MACH in overcoming the challenges that retailers face are adding up. Individually, each MACH component has become an important software development trend. When combined, they provide a dynamic system that delivers speed, flexibility, and customization that outpaces legacy systems.
“We’ve seen first hand how retailers have benefited from the agility of a composable approach. It allows them to pick and choose the capabilities that meet their business needs, while maintaining option value so they are not locked into a rigid architecture as those needs evolve. This approach is directly aligned with Bold’s Checkout Experience Suite, built API-first, cloud based and headless, with the ability to integrate with any commerce platform, and serve checkout experiences to any touch point.” Yvan Boisjoli, Co-Founder and CEO of Bold
The first wave of composable commerce came through the adoption of modern content management systems to create, manage, and publish content across channels. . This shift proved vital to addressing the limitations of all-in-one ecommerce platforms to deliver differentiated, personalized customer experiences throughout the buyer’s journey.
Now the shift to composable commerce has reached the commerce layer, with retailers leveraging modern technologies for a best of breed approach through checkout and back end operations. Benefits are maximized with an approach that embraces all MACH principles:
Microservices-based: Individual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed, and managed.
API-First: all functionality is exposed through APIs.
Cloud-native SaaS that leverages the cloud, beyond storage and hosting, including elastic scaling and automatically updating.
Headless: front-end presentation is decoupled from back-end logic and channel, programming language, and is framework agnostic.
With MACH architecture brands are free to create a best of need solution tailored to their unique business needs. They can select the right checkout experience solutions to create differentiated experiences for their customers.
Based on MACH architecture, Bold Checkout Experience Suite enables retail brands to customize their checkout experience by easily adding new payment methods, BOPIS, integrations to tax, fraud, shipping, marketing solutions and more.
Bold Subscriptions and Bold Price Rules seamlessly extend Bold Checkout capabilities to drive recurring revenue and a single source of truth for pricing and promotions across channels.
The stakes on platform technology mistakes are growing - and the opportunity cost of procrastination is becoming all too real as well. For enterprise retailers, it will be crucial to prioritize the roll out of new capabilities in order to survive and thrive in the new retail landscape. Modernizing with MACH provides a clear path forward and offers quick wins, flexibility and built in agility for what’s now and next in retail.
