On a recent episode of the Own Your Commerce podcast, Myplanet CEO Jason Cottrell and Bold Commerce co-founder Jay Myers discussed the multi-faceted challenges facing modern brands. They spoke about what brands today need in order to create and customize multi-channel commerce experiences, and more specifically, about how MACH architectures and technologies are at the heart of those experiences.

No longer limited to the storefronts and websites of old, consumer touchpoints have grown to include social platforms, smart home devices, wearables, and more. And with digital channels becoming such an integrated part of the overall shopping experience, the line between in-person and online will continue to blur.

Commerce in five and ten years isn’t going to look like commerce as we perceive it today.

Jason Cottrell, CEO of Myplanet.

To remain competitive in a modern commerce context, brand leaders need an understanding of the emergent issues facing enterprise-scale retailers today. Many of these retailers were already outgrowing their tech stacks before the pandemic, and with the onset of COVID-19 and the acceleration of an industry-wide tech shift, even more brands are at the limits of what their current systems can handle.

Customers are also present in more channels than ever before and keen to purchase on demand, too. They’re more in control of the full shopping experience; from conducting research through to checkout, consumers are increasingly tech savvy, and they favor brands that provide stand-out experiences. Seemingly small issues, like a slow page load or missing product info, can make or break a sale.

MACH technologies: The frontier of modern commerce architecture

“It’s not one commerce endpoint, it’s ten, and that’s often why our customers are going down this path,” notes Jason. To that end, the success of many major brands in the coming years will depend on how nimble they are and how quickly their systems can pivot to where their customers are. If MACH technologies play such a crucial role in this capacity, however, what exactly are they?

The term MACH is an acronym that stands for microservices, API-first, cloud native, and headless. It describes technologies that support a modular approach to digital architecture via packaged business capabilities (PBCs), a collection of microservices that addresses a specific business function. Each technology solution forms part of an ecosystem wherein integrations are in-built to allow for greater interoperability.

Ultimately, complex issues demand complex systems. “You’re not doing this just to replace one website, you’re doing this because you have 42 brands. You’re doing this because you’re selling through business and now direct-to-consumer, and you’ve got a subscription model and a wearable coming to market. It’s all of that complexity,” Cottrell says about why MACH is becoming the gold standard for commerce brands. “[It’s] the ability to assemble and serve all of that, and do it in real time.”

The value of MACH

Given it’s modularity, an architecture using MACH technologies lets a brand pick and choose the solutions that work best for their needs, providing a method for approaching flexible experience creation that will be able to flex to the ever-growing complexity of the digital experience space.

This modularity allows brands to bypass a vendor or platform lock-in, enabling them to swap in or add any components as their unique business needs change. Leveraging this power in a commerce framework goes beyond the idea of a best-of-breed tech stack into the realm of best-for-me.

By operating within headless commerce systems—commerce systems with a decoupled front- and back-end—MACH technologies also help brands provide a unified and seamless commerce experience by orchestrating powerful connections across consumer touch points and channels. This makes it much easier to cater to the changing needs and expectations of consumers, wherever they might be.

Myers notes that the biggest strength of MACH technologies comes “when you’re dealing with touchpoints across dozens of different places where a consumer is interacting with that brand. You can align it. You can have control over it. You can keep it uniform.” That kind of granular control becomes especially important not only for brands expanding to new markets, new channels, and new audiences, but also for brands that are aiming to truly make best use of their data.

For forward-thinking brands, curating a personalized suite of PBCs is going to be the key to not just surviving the shifting tides, but riding those incoming waves of transformation and growing the brand as you do. “If you’ve got those foundations in place first, when you see the opportunity, you can seize it,” says Cottrell.

Twenty years ago an online store was seen as a potential competitive advantage; today, an online store is table stakes for brands. Standing out in the future will require robust, omnichannel commerce experiences that flex to meet customers where and when they want to shop. And the best way to equip your brand to handle those experiences is with a composable commerce solution that embraces MACH.

Learn more

MACH technology will be a key player in the future of the commerce landscape. Myplanet collaborates with enterprise retailers to future-proof their brands, and we’d love to collaborate with you, too. To learn more about our work and how we can help you enhance your digital experiences, visit us at myplanet.com.