ECommerce has been an essential part of business growth over the past two decades. A digital strategy that maximizes a company’s income-generating activities and minimizes development complexity is the key to growth in today’s digital age. In the past, many businesses have had to endure eCommerce platforms that were time-consuming, not customization friendly, and would take a significant amount of time to produce a positive rate of return.
These technologies, such as EJBs, were a process in itself to create a database table along with enabling access to a table. Further complex techniques include ORM, as well as writing controllers, and JSPs with code deeply embedded within the UI/UX. At the time, these types of platforms got the job done despite having a very tightly coupled front-end and back-end architecture.
In today’s dynamically evolving digital environment, automation and SaaS are taking over the world and the realm of eCommerce is increasing in demand. For businesses to stay ahead of the competition, they need a developer-friendly platform. In our deep search looking for a cloud-based, dynamic, and headless platform, we found VTEX.
VTEX is the enterprise digital commerce platform that enables brands and retailers to achieve faster time to market, reach their customers across any channel, and uncover new growth areas. This modern eCommerce platform helps unshackle brands from the constraints imposed on them by legacy systems. Today, we are sharing the reasons we have chosen VTEX in our digital strategy and all the benefits it brought to our business.
The E-Commerce Landscape
The eCommerce platform architecture is continuously evolving and the need for businesses to pick the right solution that enables rapid development is still a challenge. With endless platform options available, it is important to do your research. Diving deeper into a product allows you to see if the platform itself is developer-friendly, and oftentimes you may find that many platforms still have endless complexities. The VTEX platform, on the other hand, is built on a modern technology stack with cloud enablement with a developer-friendly platform at its core. One of the unique features of VTEX is the OMS (Order management & Fulfillment) as a part of the same platform and the integrations are part of the base product.
Speed To Market
C It’s important to select an eCommerce platform that drives speed to market and allows businesses with an established enterprise, an eCommerce store, and mature processes to succeed. It would be in any business’s best interest to pick an eCommerce that is not retrofitted but is instead built from scratch to be headless/microservices enabled. The headless platform provides APIs that can be used to connect many front-ends and allows for new enablements across various platforms, such as, PWAs, social media applications, point of sale, and new ways that customers can be enabled to purchase products. VTEX knocks out the competition with this built-in DNA that provides customizable REST APIs for every aspect of the platform.
Developer Friendly, From Start to Finish
Within the industry, it’s common to see eCommerce platforms boasting and glamourizing their many features and add-ons. However, the most important things you should be looking for in an eCommerce platform are the flexibility to customize and how developer-friendly the architecture is. With the tech stack using easy-to-use frameworks such as Typescript, Node, React, and GraphQL, a developer can change the shopping experience, create integrations and custom admin as well as storefront Apps. The framework architecture allows for the extensibility and reusability of the components in the platform. This not only makes a developer’s job fun, but it saves the business money and time.
A Composable and Complete Platform
Building software is an iterative process. For this reason, launching the first version of the software as soon as possible and then from there learning and adapting to the user’s needs is the key to a sustainable and successful platform. An eCommerce store should have the same strategy. Launch, listen to your users and customers and then adapt. VTEX offers a complete eCommerce solution with a very composable architecture that allows businesses to add more components down the line as they expand, grow, and adapt to the modern digital environment. The startup mindset, launching something fast so that you can then customize and adjust as you go, allows a company the look and feel of the site or new features or introduce a brand new ways to shop are very important for any modern eCommerce platform.
Data is the King
The ability to own your own data is very important for any eCommerce business today as information becomes more and more abundant. When you own your data and can easily access it, you can use that data for marketing and analytical purposes to help you in your overall business strategy. Look at the success of Amazon or any major eCommerce business, for such businesses, data is a key component of an online store. VTEX allows you to own and control your data so that you can always feel confident in your company’s growth.
Cloud-Native
Choosing a cloud-native platform is really important in the eCommerce business. Stability, reliability, scalability, and security are key components to the growth of all eCommerce businesses, and these are all key pillars built into the platform. VTEX is built to handle the spikes in the traffic from campaigns for big shopping days like Black Friday. Out of the box, the platform offers multiple layers of security to secure customer and platform data. In addition, all updates are done automatically with a multi-tenant SaaS architecture that allows you to focus on the core business and not worry about updates.
In conclusion, VTEX is certain to be a driving force in the eCommerce world for years to come. By many estimations, this dynamic platform has the potential to become more ubiquitous than the current eCommerce giants like Shopify and BigCommerce. By enabling businesses with digital transformation, speed to market, embracing a developer-friendly approach, providing a scalable and complete solution, and taking a cloud-native approach that emphasizes and embraces the crucial role of data, VTEX is undoubtedly a force to be reckoned with.
To learn more about VTEX’s eCommerce platform, download the whitepaper, Modern Commerce Architecture for a Modern World
