Today, flexibility and the ability to adapt to continuously changing market conditions are crucial for any e-commerce company that desires to grow while remaining effective and competitive. From a technology perspective, success depends on your ability to innovate quickly, increase computing power and leverage latest content delivery channels. In other words, do all the pieces you may’t do without scalable e-commerce architecture.
In this text, we’ll discuss the advantages of a scalable e-commerce architecture and provide suggestions on how to build one.
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Why scalability is essential
In short, with a scalable e-commerce architecture, retailers can quickly expand their web sites, mobile applications or entire digital infrastructure horizontally and vertically. In practice, scalability can provide you with these and other business advantages.
Increase efficiency
As traffic and load increases, your organization’s website or app may start to decelerate, which could prompt customers to switch to faster competitors. Meanwhile, with a scalable architecture, you may scale quickly and get the computing power you would like to handle your growing workloads.
Better customer experience
Customers expect exceptional service from sellers, which is unimaginable without features like smart search, multiple payment options, customer reviews, and so on. By working with a scalable e-commerce architecture, developers can quickly implement this and other features, helping to provide a high-quality customer experience.
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Faster updates and upgrades
Upgrading software based on legacy architecture may be prohibitively expensive and demanding because it often requires a complete replatform to avoid compatibility issues. Adopting a scalable e-commerce architecture helps retailers overcome this challenge by enabling them to easily update any software components.
3 steps to building a scalable e-commerce architecture
Now that we have covered the essential advantages of developing a more scalable architecture, let’s move on to how to implement it.
Analysis of the existing e-commerce architecture
Before developing a latest program, the existing one needs to be analyzed. This is crucial to understand whether it is price starting this software development project, in addition to to make clear specific facets of business scalability.
Basically, at this stage you would like to resolve whether the existing structure can scale and evolve according to your small business needs. To make clear this issue, decision makers can organize a series of meetings with their IT departments to discuss the following:
- Is the existing e-commerce architecture able to support our development strategy? Will this software architecture remain relevant in a 12 months or two?
- Can our e-commerce architecture support the growth in website or mobile device users? What if there is a sudden increase in traffic?
- Will we give you the option to continuously update our software ecosystem? Could maintaining legacy architecture turn out to be too costly and complex?
As we have already mentioned, answering these questions will show you how to understand whether it’s price investing in a more scalable architecture. Additionally, this information could also be useful later when defining business requirements.
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Choosing the right technologies
Typically, a scalable e-commerce architecture is built using the following technology concepts:
Unlike a monolithic architecture, which represents a single entity in which all elements are tightly coupled, a microservices architecture consists of several independent software components connected via APIs. From a practical viewpoint, microservices architecture allows developers to quickly and easily modify any element of the system or add a latest one, which makes such an architecture much more flexible than monolithic ones.
One of the most typical variations of the microservices concept, headless architecture allows developers to separate any software system into external and internal layers connected to each other via APIs. Choosing a headless architecture could also be the best choice for sellers who want to give you the option to launch latest content delivery channels and distribute content across all of them.
Migrating to a public or private cloud is one other way to increase the scalability of your software systems. In this manner, the enterprise can increase the crucial computing resources on demand, thereby accelerating innovation and avoiding performance bottlenecks.
MACH (the term stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud and Headless) is one of the progressive technology concepts that suits merchants looking for a complete transformation. By combining the above-mentioned technologies, MACH could also be the most future-proof e-commerce architecture, enabling developers to constantly deploy, scale and replace any software components, thereby helping businesses meet their evolving needs.
Defining the right approach to development
Once you have reviewed your existing architecture and determined what approach to take to build a latest, scalable architecture, it is time to resolve how to approach software development. For example, at this stage you may determine whether the skills of your internal IT department are sufficient to develop, support and maintain the latest software architecture.
In particular, such considerations might help determine whether a company should conduct development itself or turn to third-party software developers. For example, if you choose to develop a microservices architecture, but your IT department doesn’t know how to work with JavaScript and the React and Vue frameworks, the project has little likelihood of success without outside help.
Final thoughts
Today, software flexibility and scalability are the only keys to survival in the e-commerce industry. Only those firms that may quickly scale their operations, functionalities and computing power shall be agile enough to grow, evolve and meet continuously changing customer requirements.
From a technology perspective, having a scalable and future-proof e-commerce architecture is essential to support growth while ensuring a high-quality customer experience and avoiding downtime. Fortunately, a company can develop a scalable e-commerce architecture if it approaches the task properly by analyzing existing architectures, then defining a set of appropriate technologies, and finally selecting the right development approach.