May 30, 2025
The internet has been transformative for retailers, opening up new opportunities and global markets in previously unimaginable ways. E-commerce and online shopping are now an indispensable part of global retail, with sales estimated to exceed 4.3 trillion U.S. dollars worldwide in 2025.
But as customer expectations rise and demand increases, retailers must ensure that their platforms are resilient not only during normal everyday traffic but also during peak periods. Systems also need to be able to recover quickly during unexpected outages to minimise the impact on revenue.
Retailers without resilient, scalable and efficient platforms cannot deliver the seamless customer experiences that modern consumers have come to expect, risking sales, customer loyalty and ongoing revenue.
During high-traffic events like Black Friday or major product launches, platform bottlenecks can cause serious performance degradation. Traditional systems often falter under pressure because everything is tightly coupled—if one part slows down, the whole system suffers.
Composable commerce is increasingly shaping a more resilient, scalable future for e-commerce merchants, replacing a traditional commerce monolith with modular, best-of-breed solutions in an architectural approach built for speed, innovation and customer-centricity.
Decoupling functionalities into modular components enables retailers to be confident that every component can continue to perform optimally, even under immense load scenarios. This approach enables each service to be independently developed, deployed and upgraded without disrupting the entire ecosystem. If a sale is attracting more people to the website, composable commerce enables a business to dynamically scale the storefront using advanced load balancing and dynamic rendering techniques without affecting backend inventory or payment processing systems.
By deploying autoscaling, enforcing spending guardrails, and continuously monitoring usage, retailers can scale efficiently while keeping cloud costs under control.
Composable architectures also enhance system resilience with a failure in one component not necessarily leading to a full‑scale system breakdown. This inherent isolation improves resilience, ensuring higher availability and minimal service disruptions when compared to a monolithic platform, where one error can bring down the entire commerce stack.
By further leveraging technologies such as edge computing, serverless architectures and robust content delivery networks, composable commerce platforms optimise content delivery and processing time. This not only reduces latency but also ensures consistent performance during traffic spikes or high‑demand periods. A platform that can dynamically handle high traffic without degradation in performance builds trust and encourages repeat business.
At Equal Experts, we helped a leading Australian retailer transform and dramatically improve its system resilience in order to handle peak periods. With online orders fulfilled from stores rather than large warehouses, during Black Friday and other large sales events, the retailer had previously relied on an entire team of people to manually reallocate hundreds of online orders between different stores to prevent some stores from becoming overwhelmed with orders.
After its product availability and online order sourcing services had been separated from the e-commerce monolith into microservices, the new system could optimise the store chosen for fulfilment, without human intervention. In fact, during the 2022 Black Friday sales only one order needed to be manually reallocated, ensuring customers received their ordered products in a timely, efficient manner.
A resilient platform is one that anticipates disruptions and is prepared to recover quickly, with observability a critical piece of a system’s resilience. Without it, you’re flying blind and often unaware of an issue until it’s already impacted customer experience and revenue.
According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime was approximately $5,600 per minute in 2014, with more recent estimations placing the figure at nearly $9,000 per minute. Online giant Amazon missed out on an estimated $34m in sales during an outage that lasted just 59 minutes in 2021.
Composable commerce architectures inherently offer fault isolation—if one module fails, it does not bring down the entire system. This isolation, combined with comprehensive monitoring and disaster recovery protocols, minimises downtime and protects customer experience. Proactive observability and stringent security measures further ensure that potential issues are detected and addressed before they escalate.
In modern retail, resilience is no longer a metric that only the technology team are concerned with. A resilient scalable platform is a strategic enabler in e-commerce, helping to build customer trust, minimise lost sales and ultimately increase revenue. When customers know they can rely on your platform, even during sales or popular promotions, they’re far more likely to return.
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.
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