Want more freedom in designing unique customer experiences on your D2C website? Want to speed up your marketing operations and boost ROI? Want to offer a personalized shopping experience across various channels? Last but most important; want to save cost and time in implementing new features and technology on your D2C site? I know you said yes! And this is all possible through MACH architecture for ecommerce.
Monolithic platforms offer less flexibility and scalability. These limitations become a roadblock to a company's growth in the long run when businesses want to pivot to new models quickly. MACH in contrast to monolithic platforms offers a highly flexible and scalable infrastructure. Meaning, it is capable of handling exponential business growth by giving developers the freedom to use the best of breed software, tools and technologies.
In layman language, MACH architecture offers flexibility to enterprise D2C brands to update or alter their ecommerce platform in accordance with their business requirements. Enterprises can quickly adapt to changing consumer behaviour and market demands.
MACH stands for Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. Let's understand each one of them.
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Microservices: These are Individual pieces of business functionality that can be independently developed, deployed and scaled.
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API-first: API can effortlessly integrate multiple platforms and channels, so that they can communicate with each other and offer a seamless omnichannel experience.
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Cloud-Native SaaS: Leverage the scalability, elasticity of cloud infrastructure to build a SaaS ecommerce solution that is scalable with respect to business needs.
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Headless commerce: Headless enables quick communication between Frontend and backend via APIs to deliver personalized content to end users on various devices/channels.
Want to learn about the power of MACH architecture for ecommerce? Let’s reveal its benefits to D2C enterprise ecommerce businesses.
Table of Contents
9 Convincing Reasons To Adapt MACH Architecture For Disruptive Growth
The ability to quickly adapt to new trends is the key to survival for businesses today. Learn how a sophisticated MACH architecture gives a competitive advantage in this dynamic ecommerce industry.
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Here are 9 reasons to convince you why MACH architecture is right for you:
1. Flexibility
By adopting MACH architecture, brands get a great deal of flexibility to choose their preferred technologies, providers, sales channels and more. MACH offers D2C brands the freedom to experiment and quickly scale their business, without interrupting original architecture.
With microservices in MACH, you can use different coding languages and development frameworks, which is impossible in traditional architecture. For example, you can use CSS, HTML, and JavaScript for the frontend and PHP, Java, Python for the backend.
Business Benefits
- Flexibility to use any coding language
- Power to develop frontend and backend in a different programming language
- Freedom to experiment and test new technology/trend
2. Reliability
In monolithic platforms, a single bug (technical flaw) in any of the business modules could degrade the entire server performance and may impact the availability of the entire system to the end-user.
MACH divides each module (e.g order status) into microservices (e.g. order details, product details, etc). Any technical issue to the existing microservice will not impact the entire system, as they are deployed independently, and are autonomous.
Business Benefits
- MACH architecture for ecommerce saves a lot of time during implementation
- Power to alter the site without disrupting the existing backend system or code.
3. Less Cost Of Development
Traditional ecommerce platforms deliver storefronts with very little room for customization. The close coupling of frontend and backend is a big chunk of expense for D2C businesses looking to redesign some parts of their existing ecommerce store. They have to restructure their entire site, which is equal to building a site from scratch.
In headless infrastructure, APIs and code can be reused on various projects. So when a developer redesigns an app or site, he doesn't have to start from scratch, which is costly and time-consuming.
Business Benefits
- Quick upgrades to any small/large sections of a site.
- Easy designing and redesigning of the storefront
- Cost-effective development process
4. Outstanding Omnichannel Customer Experience
With retail moving from offline to online, customer experience is a core competitive differentiator for brands. Using Storehippo MACH architecture, you can build content experiences on any channel - website or app, or the channels you may use in the future ~ store display or VR.
With headless commerce, your backend already knows what a consumer has bought, and it can then use that data to power personalization engines on CMS platforms, mobile apps and social channels. Hence, it allows D2C buyers to purchase on various channels; with access to consistent data (like promotions, pricing) across channels.
Business Benefits
- Give more personalized customer experience
- Enhance customer satisfaction across channels
- Boost your revenue, traffic and sales.
5. Quick Adaptation To New Technology And Consumer Trends
Want to become a sustainable D2C brand? Want to scale your business faster? With MACH architecture for ecommerce, businesses of all sizes can remain sustainable regardless of new trends coming and going.
You can quickly introduce new customer touchpoints to meet ever-changing customer expectations. Whenever there is introduction of new technology, you can quickly adapt, without altering the entire application.
Business Benefits
- Enhances the return on investment.
- No technological limitations
- No infrastructural limitations from Ecommerce solution, a D2C brand might have been chosen initially.
6. Easy Deployment
Removing the frontend of the platform sets developers free from the limitations of the traditional commerce platform. Thus, allowing them the flexibility to build an immersive experience for users. However, this does mean that the developers are building everything from the ground up.
Business Benefits
- Allows for more creativity and developmental freedom.
- Quickly launch marketing campaigns
7. Quick Updation
Monolithic architecture requires developers to work with many different layers. Completing a simple task ~ e.g. creating a custom promotion and showing in the frontend for users ~ sometimes require backend developers to redeploy the entire application on each update. As a result, developers have to do extensive manual testing.
As the backend is separated from the frontend in MACH headless infrastructure, you can tweak and publish content at greater speed. Thus, your team can devote time to drafting marketing strategies and growth plans.
Business Benefits
- Easily handle content and product updates on your own.
- Fast-tracks marketing and promotional campaigns.
- Promotes better team collaboration.
8. Integrate Efficiently And Effectively
Unlike traditional software, MACH architecture in ecommerce platforms harnesses the power of integrations to create a tech stack specific to your business. Integration is the lifeblood of future-proof and forward-thinking brands. It allows companies to quickly deliver the seamless, personalized experiences their customers desire. Helping in creating time-saving automated workflows — no coding required.
Business Benefits
- Efficiency And Productivity
- No need to build a new expensive system
- Greater Scalability and security
9. Reusable Code
The code reuse in microservices architecture enables the developers to write a code once and use it multiple times at numerous points in the application. A code written for a certain function can be used as a building block for another feature. This allows an application to bootstrap off itself, as developers can create new capabilities without writing code from scratch.
Business Benefits
- Faster development periods
- Lower development Risks
- Reduced development cost
Case Study: Amazon’s Transition From Monolithic To MACH Architecture For Ecommerce
Started as an Ecommerce bookstore, Amazon has evolved its business model which awarded it the status of the world’s largest e-commerce platform, serving B2C, D2C and B2B customers. Amazon was initially built as a two-tier monolithic app. Over time, as they started to expand in the market, they faced pressing problems with the system's scalability like frequent server outages leading to financial losses.
When they shifted to a microservices approach, all the bottlenecks disappeared such as ~ long development and deployments process, difficulty in managing enormous databases, the adaption of the latest features to the system was complex and risky, fluctuating website traffic.
Amazon realized that the current system was limiting the company’s growth. So they decided to move to a flexible infrastructure. The idea was that every feature of the platform would be provided by a microservice and that all those services would interact with each other via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
Using the Microservices API first infrastructure allowed Amazon to automate operational processes and scale their platform, in accordance with elevating traffic and business needs. This also resulted in the adoption of a continuous delivery approach, which allowed Amazon a faster and more flexible development.
Final Takeaways (and How StoreHippo MACH Can Help)
Are you the most forward-thinking D2C brand? Want to become invincible whatever be the D2C and ecommerce trend? Then, MACH architecture for ecommerce is the technology you need to adopt.
It's time to upgrade from an inflexible traditional platform to StoreHippo’s microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, and headless (MACH) platform. StoreHippo MACH infrastructure will transform your entire digital customer experience. Let's see how StoreHippo benefits your business.
Benefits Of StoreHippo MACH Platform
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Speed up your publishing, development, and content delivery
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Get 300+ APIs that process thousands of API calls between various applications to enable fast communication
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Quickly react to the burgeoning customers' needs and market
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Witness a significant spike in conversion rates and customer loyalty
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Free your business and marketing teams from relying on IT so they can make changes wherever and whenever needed
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Add new touchpoints with unmatched speed to grow revenue, loyalty, and brand followers
Want a practical demonstration of how StoreHippo MACH works in real-time? Schedule a free demo with our expert team, who will give you a tour of StoreHippo MACH and top-notch features.
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