Why wellness marketplace Maavee decided on a composable solution from Onport

Company Introduction

Maavee is a wellness platform built for humans, offered by employers, and architected with purpose. Rather than offering wellness solutions with broad appeal that miss the mark, Maavee allows employers to meet the unique needs of their diverse employees through a stipend to be spent along each employee's highly personal wellness journey.

Company Representatives

Frank A. Ricciardi | CEO & Founder | Maavee Thomas Laaber | Head of Business Operations | Maaveee

Can you tell us how the Maavee brand came about and the core idea behind it?

FAR - “We set out to build the best wellness marketplace on the planet. The wellness industry is a US$4.4 trillion global market (according to the Global Wellness Institute), meaning consumers have a lot of complexity. At Maavee, one of our superpowers is curation, and we endeavor to make it easy to connect to your personal journey and discover the best of wellness along the way."

"There’s no silver bullet to being well, and each of our needs and interests changes over time—wellness is a highly personal and lifelong journey. We created a new way to experience that journey through our digital platform, which includes the ability to shop well to be well in our marketplace. Maavee is a consumer-first app employers provide employees as a wellness benefit."

What factors led you to opt for a SaaS backend marketplace solution instead of building one? 

FAR -  “Two reasons: First, as a start-up, we simply did not have the resources to build a marketplace layer into our technology stack.  We looked at full-blown marketplace solutions with incredible entry barriers, especially cost and time to implement.  So, we decided to implement a headless e-commerce platform alongside a marketplace “layer” through Onport, which gave us everything we needed to get to market fast and at an acceptable cost."

"Second, our business model is unique in that our B2B2C solution can be connected to and/or embedded in other platforms to service large audiences that are not ours.  We knew we could only do this using a MACH architecture. We were just a start-up with only two developers, so we constantly tried to balance time-to-market, cost, and flexibility to accommodate our future requirements and growth." 

"Many solutions were just too expensive or not robust enough to handle our anticipated scale, so we chose Elastic Path as our e-commerce solution and Onport as our backend marketplace platform.”

What challenges did you encounter when starting your business, and how has Onport supported you to scale faster?

FAR - “We wanted a cloud solution; we knew it needed to be multi-tenant because of how our business is structured; it had to be API-first.  We didn't want just a monolith with a few APIs, we wanted a solution architected as an  API-first solution from the get-go.”

TL - “API-first platforms like Onport allow companies with limited resources to focus on the right things, like the business plan, go-to-market strategy, acquiring and servicing clients, etc. We could focus on growth since we already knew it worked.”

FAR - “We can scale much faster and control what we want, the experience, and the service we provide and differentiate our offering. It gives us options but allows us to control what we do with our business.”

As a company that uses Elastic Path for its front end - could you give us some details about your experience using it alongside Onport?

FAR - “We knew we wanted a fully MACH-based architecture to provide us the ultimate flexibility. We are big fans of composable e-commerce which gives us the flexibility to choose and implement the solutions that make the most sense for our business when we need them as we grow and evolve." 

"Elastic Path is a true, headless e-commerce platform, and Onport easily integrates with that core component of our tech stack. Because of this component-based approach, we could implement both Elastic Path and Onport in parallel using technical resources only for the integration."

"They work very well together and we continue to evolve the integration.  Most importantly, Onport allows our more than 225 brand partners (and growing!) to seamlessly authenticate to Onport so that orders, inventory, fulfillment, and other data flow bidirectionally between Maavee and our brand partners."

"This is a game-changer for us since our brand partners do not require any technical knowledge or resources to “connect” their e-commerce platform to Maavee. With both of these solutions in our tech stack, we could not only get to market fast but also scale much faster as very few resources are required on our side to support the brands.”

What advice would you give to ecommerce companies facing the build vs. buy choice, and how has your experience influenced your opinion?

FAR - “You need to understand the concepts of headless, composable, and MACH; often, solutions exist on a spectrum and to varying degrees along that spectrum. We learned that we needed greater flexibility than we initially anticipated. A MACH approach allows you to architect for exactly what you need today and feel confident that you will be able to address future needs as they evolve." 

"When talking to providers, you have to take the perspective of the whole solution - not just the product itself. If the product is excellent but the surrounding elements, like service, support, flexibility, product roadmaps, and access to key resources on the provider’s team,, you will uncover surprises along your journey.  You have to consider all these factors before making your decision."