How to build a modern e-commerce platform? Monogo E-commerce News, #58
Frontend was the last topic covered, which is directly visible to the end user. Or, to put it another way, it has a direct impact on the end customer. But that same customer will not see anything without the e-commerce engine serving data from the backend.
Backend
Here you basically have two options. The first is an engine from the ground up and initially built for your business and your needs. The second is a proven solution that will cover everything or (far more often), part of the required business processes and allow you to add those that are not there.
Each of these solutions has its own advantages and disadvantages. It is impossible to say unequivocally, without exploring your company's requirements, which option will be more beneficial for your online shop. However, from the experience we have had in recent years, I can say that far more companies go for the platform that already exists on the market and add modules that implement process deficiencies.
Such a solution allows you to launch a minimum viable version (MVP) of your e-commerce platform more quickly, which will achieve two main objectives:
- testing the business model hypothesis with the first customers,
- To start recovering the investment sooner.
Outside the bracket is the cost it takes to maintain the platform and support it. Maintaining a custom is usually more expensive than a platform that receives updates from the manufacturer, and it is only on your side to maintain your modules.
How do you find the right platform?
Exactly how you look for products and services for yourself can be done with an e-commerce platform. Reports from companies that keep statistics on the popularity of systems and customer reviews will help. The best beacons in the e-commerce platform market will be the Gartner and Forester reports. These are factual studies showing not only the leaders, but also the strong-followers.
CI/CD and containerisation
Once the engine is selected, implementation follows. Typically, a contract is signed with an implementation company whose job it is to deliver an online shop equipped with all the necessary functions and business processes.
It is the responsibility of this company to prepare the infrastructure and CI/CD. Ideally, the infrastructure should not be based on physical servers, which will either be under-utilised or, if there is more traffic, prevent more customers from shopping or even accessing the site. A few years ago, the concept of containerisation emerged.
With this solution, you can keep the cost of your infrastructure at an optimum level. E.g. at night when there are the fewest customers, automatically the number of available 'machines' will be reduced. And when there are the most customers, they will automatically be added.
CI/CD
Another important piece of the jigsaw is to prepare the process of implementing changes to environments, particularly production environments. Today's applications, in order to be properly installed, or updated, require a series of steps that must be performed in the right order.
So that you don't have to do it manually every time, you should have the right pipelines in place. One example of such software is Jenkins. It will perform all the steps, and if any of them are not successful it will notify the relevant people.
In this way, your development team, can deploy daily (or even several times a day) changes that can be pre-reviewed. And production deployments will be predictable and the number of errors is likely to be reduced.
Quality management
In 2023 at Monogo, we had the first projects whose acceptance tests (UATs) passed flawlessly. Imagine picking up a platform with business users in your company and after several days of intensive testing, they not only find no critical bugs, but are ready to give the go-ahead for a production launch.
To anyone who has ever been involved in a software implementation project, this sounds like utopia. However, it can be achieved with hard work. For us, quality is one of our strategic values. This means that we make sure above all that we have a strong and good test architecture, and well-described tests. And their execution itself must be under controlled conditions and documented.
Thanks to this approach, we are able to define project schedules in a predictable way.
This is not the end
This subjective set of challenges and areas that need to be taken care of in building an e-commerce ecosystem is the beginning of the journey. Beyond its boundary are areas such as User Experience, automation, etc. I have written many times on our blog about these elements. I know that 2024 will bring quite a lot of new developments that will certainly need to be described. In the meantime, successful planning and big profits!