E-commerce once promised faster fulfillment, frictionless checkouts and hyper-personalization on a global scale, however, rising customer expectations, operational complexities and technical inefficiencies have made delivering seamless experiences harder than ever.
And if creating engaging e-commerce experiences is difficult for retailers, customers will suffer an unpleasant shopping experience, too.
Changing shopper behaviors warrant a new retail approach
Among the many outcomes of these painful e-commerce experiences is losing customers, which ultimately costs brands sales.
According to a recently-conducted 2025 Scayle survey, 87% of U.S. shoppers have abandoned a brand in the last 12 months — citing product quality issues, slow delivery times and poor online shopping experiences as the top causes.
Cart abandonment rates are sky-high, too — reaching a shocking 70% across the board. The shoppers who make it through checkout are unfortunately sending goods back at an alarming rate: Returns have doubled since 2019, significantly impacting retailers’ bottom lines. But if brands ditch free returns to stem the flow, customers simply won’t buy: Unsatisfactory return policies cause around 18% of shoppers to spend elsewhere, according to Baymard research. It’s a catch-22 for retailers.
A lean tech stack and a new returns method help retailers with conversions
To address these challenges, brands and retailers can find some answers in their tech stack.
Regarding returns, reintroducing return shipping fees is one way to make up for lost revenue. Enticing customers to return items directly in-store, free of charge, is another. This way, brands and retailers can either collect returns in-store in bulk before forwarding them to a warehouse for processing or have them reenter the sales cycle instantly by adding them to the store’s local stock.
The in-store option also bears the advantage of tempting customers to make impulse purchases while already in the store. H&M and other large retailers gradually implemented this practice to reduce the cost of processing returns, streamline operations and offset their environmental footprints.
This requires a lean tech stack that integrates the exact features needed to connect online and offline stores and enables teams to manage stock and availability directly from their own devices.
The same goes for refining checkout processes to keep cart abandonment rates at bay. Streamlining checkout steps and creating a fully localized experience, including offering customers’ most trusted payment methods, will entice more people to click through to the finish line.
Flexible setups enable growth while eliminating bottlenecks for a more agile strategy
However, rather than enabling the agility needed to respond to these challenges, the complexity of most traditional commerce platforms often results in additional obstacles instead of solutions. Instead of facilitating innovation and agility, they demand constant developer intervention, complex workarounds and costly updates to be maintained or upgraded. As a result, many businesses are stuck with high development costs, limited scalability and an inability to respond quickly to market trends. With this, even minor fixes and updates usually require support tickets and customizations, which can turn into costly, long-term projects that might never see the light of day.
Rigid and complex tech setups stifle growth potential and chew up funds that could be allocated to innovations that secure the longevity and profitability of brands’ and retailers’ enterprises.
A unified and composable tech stack provides the flexibility to mix, match and connect the features teams need via lightning-fast APIs — regardless of whether they are straight out-of-the-box, third-party or custom-built integrations.
This ensures faster launch times and frees tech teams to focus on complex, high-value projects that drive businesses forward. At the same time, a unified and composable e-commerce platform gives commerce teams more autonomy over the customer experience while reducing dependencies on development teams.
As e-commerce continues to be more demanding, composable commerce is helping retailers reshape how they build and scale their online businesses. Unlike traditional platforms, it provides flexibility to adapt, innovate and grow on their terms. Retailers who continue relying on outdated, inflexible systems will struggle to keep up, while those who embrace agility and scalability will shape the future of retail.
Sponsored by Scayle
