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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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