Archive

Merchant of Record.

The Merchant of Record (MoR) is the legal entity that makes the sale. It is the statement descriptor that appears on the bank statements. Not only does this role affect payments, but also compliance, tax handling, and liability.

How to avoid chargebacks.

Chargebacks are inevitable, however, there are ways to mitigate the problem. A safe approach is to refund the customer as soon as the chargeback is requested. In this way, you avoid chargeback fees and the risk of being listed on a TMF.

Pull vs push marketing.

Considering how fast CAC is growing, profiting from existing audiences is getting more and more important, and I can see a world where websites will just be a tool for acquiring customers, with push marketing taking care of monetization.

Splitting payments.

Payments follow a simple path: a buyer pays a seller and the funds are transferred from the buyer's bank account to the seller's. However, there are times when the payment is split between more buyers, more sellers, or both.

Eat your own dog food.

When developing a software product, be the one who uses it first. Not for testing, but for production use cases. In this way, you will truly make your customers happy, since you are one of them and wish to have the best product for yourself.

Dynamic pricing.

Some businesses need to adjust prices in real-time depending on market demand and other conditions. In such cases, you need a dynamic pricing engine that provides you with the current price for a given product and context.

AI Functions.

Incorporating functions into an AI chatbot can turn it into a sales assistant that can recommend products to customers and handle shopping carts—all while chatting about the weather, just like a human would do in a physical store.

Just sell it.

You don’t need a website to sell online. Explore new ways to sell your products. Offer your customers a more personalized shopping experience by bringing your products to them rather than bringing them to your online store.

Deep linking.

Linking to a specific product page without knowing the customer's location can be challenging for an international brand. A possible solution is to build an intermediate link that uses geocoding before redirecting the customer.

Teleshopping is back.

For those of you who grew up in the 90's, you may remember infomercials. TV sellers were similar to influencers today. There was a dark web of television in those TV shows. Today, live shopping is becoming the dark web of ecommerce.

Conversational commerce.

Traditionally, the marketplace served as a place for people to come together and communicate. The Internet is providing a means for anyone to re-enter such a virtual marketplace and transact through conversations.

Show me the money.

All of us want to create amazing customer experiences. But where's the money? Are we really sure our value propositions matter to merchants? Show them the money. Here's how you'll make them happy. It's that simple. I promise.

Buy now.

So you want to add a shopping cart to your site. Do you really think this is a good idea? A shopping cart separates the PDP from the checkout by one additional click. Skip that click, and the whole purchase funnel will be shorter and faster.

The ideal composable stack.

Some might argue that the ideal composable commerce stack doesn't exist. Anyhow, I would dare define it my way. This is based on my experience working with enterprise-grade brands across a wide range of industries.

Learning from gamers.

Assembling a composable stack is like building a gaming PC. You have to pick the right parts, put them together, and make sure they're compatible. All within budget so you don't end up with a super PC that costs a fortune.

Security is a zero-sum game.

Security is never binary. In fact, nothing is really secure or insecure in absolute terms, but rather secure enough, or potentially insecure. It's all about the use case, and security is always compromised for ease of use.

AI Magic.

AI code generation feels like magic. Get the most out of it to boost your productivity but never stop being a developer, as the most successful applications and companies will continue to come from the brightest (human) minds.

Micro experiences.

There's another way to use microservices and micro frontends. Instead of reassembling those services into one monolithic frontend experience, it uses them to construct many highly personalized micro experiences for customers.

Editing orders.

There are many reasons why order editing might be necessary. If this occurs, the editing process should have as little impact as possible on business operations. Often, the way you handle errors can be your most powerful marketing tool.

Visible but not sellable.

Unpublishing out-of-stock products is very common practice. However, I do not understand the value of this choice. When a product runs out of stock, displaying its page opens up many business opportunities that would otherwise be lost.

Commerce of Things.

The Internet of Things (IoT) was big just a few years ago. We envisioned a world where everything could communicate and buy stuff online. In fact, IoT devices are quite popular today. Yet, this future of commerce is still a long way off.

The new OMS.

The rise of omnichannel has changed the meaning of an OMS completely. As a result, it is imperative to reconsider its role in the architecture. Otherwise, we risk tackling a new problem with old solutions that are no longer relevant.

One API.

Business and technology are more interconnected in ecommerce than anywhere else. Certainly, unified commerce is the holy grail for any retailer with an online presence, and I think one unified API can push that goal forward.

Order management is a system.

Oftentimes, technology uses platforms to describe processes or systems. As an example, ERP is an acronym for Enterprise Resource Planning, an extremely broad concept. However, ERP is commonly understood as a platform to manage a company's finances, human resources, manufacturing, supply chain, and services. As another example, PIM

Compose by domain.

Many components are not always better than one, and sometimes monolithic approaches make sense. The key is to determine the right boundaries for each domain, or you will end up building another monolith without even knowing it.

Unified payments.

There are several players in the payments space that promote unified commerce as a value proposition, and I predict the best online payment providers will continue to gain a bigger share of the retail market over the next few years.

Employee stores.

Employee stores tend to offer a very basic customer experience. The marketing initiatives are very limited and closer to B2B than B2C. However, that does not mean the company doesn't care about the revenues generated by those store.

Carts are orders.

Placing orders online is very different from shopping in person. So why do ecommerce platforms mimic the cart model? The goal is to make buying easy and quick, so why not let customers create an order as soon as they add to cart?

Start with one country.

If you sell internationally, an effective replatforming strategy is to move country by country. In my career, I have seen this pattern applied successfully many times, and it is becoming the de facto standard for all global brands.

Headless or die.

Let's be clear: Going headless in 2024 is no longer an option, it's a necessity. Businesses that fail to invest in the right technology and hire the right talent today risk becoming obsolete and facing extinction in just a few years.

The Bezos API mandate.

As a tech legend tells it, Jeff Bezos issued a mandate to all Amazon employees in 2002 that would serve as the foundation for Amazon's success. This manifesto laid the foundation for the modern API-first development paradigm.

Store credit.

Assigning store credits to customers is a simple, yet effective way to handle customer relationships and increase loyalty. A common example is in returns. The merchant doesn't lose any money, and the customer has an incentive to return.

Inventory thresholds.

Overselling is one of the worst experiences a customer can have. To mitigate the risk, most merchants set inventory thresholds. A problem arises when the threshold is so high that they undersell their products instead.

Semantic search.

One of the best things you can do to boost conversions on an ecommerce site is to have a fast, relevant search feature. Give customers a good search and you'll see a lot more journeys that begin with a search and end with a purchase.

Employee experience.

Employee experience is extremely relevant, but only if it's not prioritized over customer experience. When that's the case, it's a good idea to look at the processes from a broader perspective, which may make some people happier than others.

Handling promotions.

Poorly engineered promotion engines are one of the major causes of slow website performance. Be sure to pick or design your promotion engine carefully, or you'll fall into the trap of underestimating the impact on your overall architecture.

Stay humble.

The most visionary people I've met in my life are also the most curious. They've taught me you're never done learning. Anyone can teach you something, no matter what. Stay humble. Eventually, incredible things will happen.

The new normal.

Unlike many expected, the COVID-19 pandemic has not accelerated ecommerce, which continues to grow at the same pace as always. In-person shopping isn't dead. What has been accelerated, instead, is the digitalization of physical stores.

One customer, one brand.

Despite the concept of one customer, one brand having been around for a while, true omnichannel customer journeys are still very rare. Enter unified commerce as a way of providing seamless omnichannel experiences using a single platform.

The build vs buy dilemma.

Build or buy? The answer to this question depends on many factors, but if I had to summarize my thoughts in a single sentence, I'd say buy your components and build your differentiators. In the end, this is what composable commerce is all about.

Checkout is more than payment.

Often, checkout refers to the process of paying for an order. While this is true for in-store purchases, payment is only one step of the online checkout process. The challenge is to speed up the flow while maintaining consistent customer data.

Time to market.

One of the key reasons for replatforming is that companies cannot execute on their business goals effectively. As developers, our best way of supporting customers in improving their time to market is to improve our own.

How to strangle a monolith.

Based on the strangler figs analogy, it is best to strangle a monolith from the user interface out. In this way, the migration to a composable architecture can provide immediate ROI that will eventually be consolidated into its roots.

The cost of doing nothing.

In an ever evolving digital landscape, where AI and other dozens of innovations are on the agenda, doing things as you have always done in the past is likely to be the most risky and dangerous choice you can make for your business.

Card-present transactions.

Maybe one day online and offline channels will finally converge. Meanwhile, we need to better integrate these two worlds so retailers don't view the online channel as a competitor, but as a partner that can lead them into the modern era.

Multi-cart sessions.

Monolithic ecommerce platforms assume that each user session has one shopping cart. Even though this approach is almost always sufficient, there are cases when you want to maintain more shopping carts per user session.

B2B.

The digitalization of B2B has traditionally been slower than that of B2C. Today, many merchants manage B2B orders manually, using spreadsheets or even pen and paper. However, B2B ecommerce has grown in popularity in recent years.

Composable explained with LEGO.

It is often necessary for developers to explain composable architecture to non-developers. As I tried to make these concepts as easy to understand and digest as possible for non-technical people, I found the LEGO analogy very useful.

Splitting orders.

Orders can sometimes be split into multiple shipments. Whether this is a typical OMS capability, there are some cases where you want to split orders at checkout, moving some order splitting logic to your commerce engine.

Made to order.

A made-to-order model differs from a traditional workflow in which customers select a product from a catalog. Instead, they design customized products that are not part of the brand's default offering, becoming product creators.

The commerce layer.

Back in 2015, I was walking on the beach with my wife when I told her about a new idea I had. I explained that ecommerce had become so important that the Internet protocol, particularly the OSI model, needed a new layer for commerce.

Selling without stock.

Merchants may offer the possibility of purchasing a product even if it is out of stock or has never been produced before. By doing so, they can optimize their revenues and reduce the overhead of maintaining higher stock levels.

Composable begins with two components.

Moving to composable commerce is a journey, not a project. Rather than jumping from one platform to many tools, switch from one to two. Then, iterate in smaller steps, selecting only what you need and evolving your stack over time.

Optimistic checkouts.

An optimistic checkout skips payment authorization and stock availability checks assuming that the card is valid and that all items are available. Once the order is placed, it is put into a queue, and a worker performs all validations asynchronously.

Thinking REST.

Ecommerce is penetrating every angle of the Internet. In a world where acronyms like headless, API-first, and composable change every week, we need anchors that are going to last, so we can build the Web as an open platform that scales.

Populate dynamic content.

Back in 2011, I was hired by Gucci to help them build their ecommerce platform. At the time, the company had a small team in NYC who had followed an approach that was new to me and I didn’t particularly like. But I was wrong.

Marketplace model.

Depending on who you talk to, marketplaces can mean different things to different people. The purpose of this article is to describe the marketplace model and all its possible variations, so that you can start learning how to build one yourself.

In store.

Brands and retailers with brick-and-mortar stores have a huge potential that is often untapped. They can use their stores as stock locations for online sales, optimizing stock availability and providing engaging omnichannel experiences.

Motherf***ing website.

A few years ago, I discovered one of my favorite websites on the Internet. A website that has influenced the way I've built software over the past two decades. Although it is obviously a provocation, we developers can learn a lot from it.

JSON Web Tokens.

The JWT standard is a simple, elegant, and self-contained way to transmit data securely between parties. It allows you to design more scalable ecommerce stacks using independent microservices with centralized SSO.

Developer experience.

Developer experience refers to the overall feelings that developers have when interacting with a technical product. Until recently, it was considered a nice to have. Today, it has become an important factor for the success of any business.

Rate limits.

While rate limits may seem annoying at first glance, they are essential to guarantee an API service’s performance, ensure the quality of your code, and improve the overall customer experience.

Ecommerce automation.

Composing an ecommerce stack using API-first solutions lets you automate any integration without coding. Using platforms like Zapier, Patchworks, and Alloy, you can connect different apps visually and save tons of time.

Multi-domain shopping carts.

Imagine a cross-domain shopping experience where you navigate a website, find a product you like, and add it to your cart. Then you visit another website, find another product, and add it to the same shopping cart.

Modeling gift cards.

Gift cards are simple, yet powerful payment instruments that unlock interesting business flows. Depending on the use case, they can be viewed as digital products, payment methods, promotions, or a combination of these.

Express payments.

Nothing boosts conversions more than speed and trust at checkout. Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal Express, Amazon Pay, or Shop Pay—which is being made available to merchants not on Shopify—all offer both.

Authorize and capture.

There are all kinds of things that can go wrong after an order is placed, or customers can just change their mind. This is why it's a good idea to authorize the payment at checkout and capture only when the order is ready to be shipped.

AI demystified.

Machines haven't evolved into intelligent beings. They are simply fed by more sophisticated models. Understanding those models is the only way we can grasp what is happening around us and make better predictions about the future.

Two-stack CMS.

Content management and delivery have very different requirements and it may be worth splitting your CMS architecture into two components: a flexible content management stack and a high-performance content delivery stack.

Why we need a MACH protocol.

One of the key promises of composable commerce is that it will eliminate vendor lock-in. To achieve this level of composability, we would need a protocol that defines how the different MACH components interact.

Generating an ecommerce glossary with AI.

I created a glossary of ecommerce terms using ChatGPT in two hours. With this experiment, I aim to measure the impact of AI on SEO, while also providing my readers with a useful resource and something to play around with!

Abandoned cart recovery.

No matter how seamless your checkout process is, there will always be a percentage of customers who abandon their carts. Businesses can use these highly targeted list of contacts to run abandoned cart recovery campaigns.

Product listing pages.

Search engines are powerful tools for adding search capabilities to your website. But if you think about it, a category page or a list of recommended items can still be considered as search results pages, just filtered by different attributes.

Out of stock.

When a product runs out of stock, you can remove it from the website or keep it online, but with a different call to action. There are pros and cons to both options, plus a possible third way that might be the best compromise.

No code.

No-code solutions can dramatically reduce time to market without compromising flexibility. They allow you to focus on building your differentiators and give business users some time back to distinguish their brand.

Omnichannel content management.

In order to achieve true omnichannel, developers must be diligent and treat their content as data. It is the frontend's responsibility to interpret those data and give them a visual layout that is appropriate for each customer touchpoint.

Add to cart.

The shopping cart analogy originated in the physical world, and it has been transferred to the digital realm. Using a stateless cart API, it is possible to embed an "add to cart" button anywhere, enabling true omnichannel commerce.

Commerce has always been composable.

Despite all the recent hype, composable commerce has always existed. A great deal has changed because of the technology that now allows for that composition to be really effective. Nonetheless, it's important to understand how we got here.

The order pipeline.

Having an attractive website, with great content and fast loading times is essential, but the order pipeline is arguably the heart of any business. An ecommerce system should be designed around a flexible, reliable, and stateless order flow.

Stateless carts.

With stateless architecture, carts and checkout are no longer just the final steps of your ecommerce website, but rather a shared service for your organization that enables any customer interaction to become a shoppable moment.

Markets, explained.

The Internet has eliminated many of the barriers between markets. However, cultural, commercial, and legal differences between markets still exist, and it is the seller who must adapt, not the buyer.

Delivery lead time.

Besides the product itself, customers consider two things when making a purchase decision. The first is the price of the product, and the second is the delivery lead time, or how long it will take for the order to arrive at their doorstep.

Convention over synchronization.

As monoliths are replaced by microservices and APIs, too much synchronization between systems can be problematic. By using SKUs as conventional shared identifiers, you can connect multiple data sources without writing any glue code.

How to model product catalogs.

A poorly managed catalog can result in operational complexity, SEO problems, and performance issues. The good news is that headless CMSs and modern search engines give us a solution that is very elegant, scalable, and even fun to code!

Choose your country.

Multi-country is often confused with multi-language by developers. Selling internationally isn't just about translating an ecommerce website in different languages, but also about localizing its business settings for different countries and regions.

Dealing with prices and currencies.

Ecommerce platforms often rely on currency conversions to handle multicurrency. This method has many limitations. It is much better to manage multiple independent price lists and gain full control over your pricing strategy.

Content is not commerce.

Product content is commonly misunderstood to be different from editorial content. Moving your product catalog to a headless CMS simplifies your stack and makes your editors' life much easier.

Do I need a PIM?

Many clients ask me whether they should invest in a PIM or not. This article aims to answer this question by exploring three different options.

Strongly typed product modeling.

You should model your catalog using a solution that provides a flexible schema, such as a headless CMS. This will allow you to define strongly typed product models, simplify your development, and make your merchandisers' lives much easier.

Understanding products and variants.

There is no such thing as products and variants in the real world. Products and variants exist only in the context of an ecommerce website as product pages and variant selectors.

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