Why personalisation in retail starts with the right architecture

The era of one-size-fits-all interactions in retail is officially over. Today, personalisation isn’t a luxury – it’s a competitive necessity that can quickly make or break a business in the fast-paced world of modern commerce.

With 71% of customers now expecting personalised experiences and 56% saying they’re more likely to return to websites offering product recommendations, businesses still relying on traditional, static approaches are already falling behind. Modern consumers expect more than just surface-level interactions – they want dynamic product recommendations, offers based on their personal purchasing history, targeted loyalty rewards and even helpful reminders when it’s time to restock on consumable items.

But creating these personalised experiences is easier said than done. Without the right technology and data infrastructure, even well-intentioned personalisation efforts can fall flat, failing to drive engagement, increase loyalty or boost revenue.

Moving beyond shallow and generic personalisation efforts

Many retailers have experimented with personalisation, only to become disillusioned when the results didn’t meet expectations. Too often, businesses end up with fragmented, shallow or outdated personalisation strategies that don’t reflect what modern customers want.

To move beyond shallow personalisation, such as basic segmentation or cookie-based recommendations, retailers must overcome several critical challenges.

• Rigid platforms limit innovation: Legacy monolithic commerce platforms weren’t designed for today’s personalisation demands. Valuable customer insights are often locked away or difficult to use in real-time decision-making, and implementing new features is slow, time-consuming and costly.
• Scattered data and disconnected systems: Customer data can be stuck in silos – such as marketing tools, e-commerce platforms or loyalty programs – making it impossible to build a complete up-to-date view of a customer. In a recent Forrester report, 37% of retailers said creating a single customer view was their biggest challenge.
• Lack of technical foundations for AI-driven personalisation: AI offers many opportunities for retailers to level up their personalisation. But the success of AI in retail hinges on having accurate, timely, and well-structured data alongside the skills and knowledge within teams to use it effectively. Many retailers lack both the data quality and AI literacy to implement AI effectively.

Personalisation is more than just recognising a customer’s name or recommending products they browsed last week. It’s about creating contextual, dynamic experiences across every touchpoint – including web, mobile and in-store. But to do that effectively retailers need an architecture that’s flexible, scalable and built for change.

Unlocking personalisation at scale with composable commerce

Composable commerce is a modular architecture approach that enables retailers to build an effective platform by harnessing best-in-breed components based on the needs of the organisation and customers. By making it easier to integrate and connect tools into a robust personalisation layer, composable commerce empowers teams to build smarter, more effective and hyper-targeted customer experiences.

Benefits include:

• A unified view of the customer: Composable architectures make it easier to connect tools such as Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), Customer Relationship Management systems, loyalty programs and analytics into one coherent system. This integration brings data together and creates a holistic view of the customer – an essential foundation for tailoring experiences based on real-time behaviour, preferences and history.
• Real-time responsiveness: With integrated components that can communicate with each other, composable platforms allow retailers to personalise experiences in the moment – adjusting homepage banners, updating contextual promotions or tailoring search results, based on live customer activity.
• Seamless omnichannel experiences: With 73% of consumers using multiple channels during their shopping journey, consistency is key. Composable systems can share customer profiles and behaviour across every touchpoint, creating seamless experiences wherever customers interact.
• Faster experimentation and innovation: With individual components able to be swapped out and changed independently, teams can test new personalisation strategies, tools or touchpoints without impacting the rest of the platform. Composable commerce provides an agile, lower-risk way to innovate and scale what works.
• Freedom to evolve: Composable commerce empowers retailers to stay future-ready. By not being locked into a single platform, retailers can add or replace components and adopt advanced AI recommendation engines or segmentation tools as soon as they become available or in line with shifting consumer expectations.

The power of personalisation: Using machine learning in e-commerce

Personalisation is an effective strategy in modern retail – 62% of business leaders say their personalisation efforts have led to improved customer retention, while 80% report increased consumer spending by an average of 38% when experiences are personalised.

At Equal Experts, we recently partnered with a global leisure organisation to unlock the value of its customer data and power personalised e-commerce strategies using AI and machine learning.

The business had a wealth of customer data, but poor data quality and accessibility limited its use.  After cleaning and standardising the data in a new data product, we supported the organisation to utilise a machine learning model to predict which visitors to its leisure sites would be most likely to buy a new membership. This enabled personalised marketing communications to be delivered to the highest propensity customers.

During the 2-week trial, nearly 50% of targeted customers responded to emails, and 4.6% of targeted guests bought a membership, compared to 2.8% of guests from the control group, demonstrating a potential £1.6m sales uplift.

Ready to embrace the benefits of personalisation?

Composable commerce gives retailers the agility, flexibility and foundation they need to deliver personalisation at scale. It’s a future-ready approach that turns fragmented customer experiences into unified journeys that drive loyalty, boost revenue and help brands stand out in a crowded market.

To explore more about how composable commerce can transform your e-commerce strategy, and access expert insight and real-world implementation guidance sign up for early access to our new ebook “Composable commerce: The blueprint for modern e‑commerce”.

If you’re ready to embrace a future-ready approach to digital commerce, contact our team today to start your digital transformation journey.