This is very true. It's also why we have svelte-kit, remix, astrojs, and other frameworks that take a transitional app approach. They are server-rendered where it makes sense and client-rendered where necessary. Before developers had to choose between a server-rendered website and full on single-page application, now there are great options that blend the two depending on needs.
Company description: Elastic Path powers mission-critical digital commerce for the world’s leading brands, such as Intuit, Pella, Deckers Brands, T-Mobile, and over 250 other leading enterprises. As relentless innovators, Elastic Path pioneered the API-Commerce space in 2011 and spearheaded Composable Commerce in 2020. Elastic Path provides industry-leading commerce APIs to help developers rapidly build, deploy, and continuously optimize unique commerce solutions.
My take: Elastic Path is an amazing place to work. We have a very modern stack consisting of microservices written in Go, k8s on AWS, MongoDB, etc. At this point we may be one of the only ecommerce companies that hasn't had a round of layoffs and is still hiring. Definitely speaks to the stability and growth of the company.
We are seeing a distinct split in the space. Monolithic applications are trying to adopt as many features as possible to stay relevant and interesting for potential buyers. They are morphing into all-in-one solutions that try to handle every possible need. Clearly this is what you have been seeing. In this model you may see 2-3 pieces of software which may all come from a single company.
On the other side you have composable commerce, a term created by Gartner (https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3986490), and pioneered by Elastic Path (https://www.elasticpath.com/). In this model, each specific business capability is broken up into separate offerings, most often from different vendors. In this way you can choose the absolute best option for each feature you need. Then the composable commerce engine will help to stitch everything back together with an integration hub. Here you end up with many more software options including ERP, CMS, Search, Front-end, Personalization, etc.
It will be interesting to see what happens in 5-10-15 years. The big monolithic systems can make things easier to get going, but they struggle to scale and have terrible performance. Meanwhile composable commerce continues to become easier to adopt with project times quickly shrinking and comes with huge benefits once launched. But there is a lot of noise in the market, some companies claiming to be composable commerce don't have any integrations and are instead buying the other pieces. In additional monolithic applications are trying to rebrand as composable to capitalize on the trend.
Saleor.io is a good start. Consider Medusa and Vendure if you want to stay open-source.
If you are interested in SaaS, look at Elastic Path.
I see a lot of people recommending the MACH Alliance. That is a marketing organization where members pay in to push their products. Nothing wrong with MACH technology, but worth understanding what it is before going down that road.
I'm going to have to disagree. While basic startups may be best served by shopify anything with complexity should consider an API-First platform. B2B2C, Multi, etc. all benefit from the flexibility it provides. What is important is finding a SaaS with a true multi-tenant infrastructure so they can price based on usage instead of having a large yearly minimum contract value.
Startups can have great success going API-First, but it's contingent on working with the right company.
It's worth considering a composable commerce SaaS. Many let you pick and choose the pieces you need, so you can fill out the remaining components and only replace what you built if their version brings significant value.
At this point, the answer is always buy and then build later if necessary. Just as we once questioned building a server vs using the cloud, using pre-built flexible components gets you to market faster.
Just be careful as the market right now has many monoliths and old systems claiming to be "headless" and "composable", but in reality Magento, Salesforce, Oracle, etc. are all expensive to work with and should only be considered for basic needs.
Looking at a marketplace you can consider marketplace specific vendors like mirakl and convictional, but being niche they can be very expensive. I would instead look at composable commerce solutions that are very flexible and can meet your marketplace needs.
This seems like an old view of the current ecommerce landscape. Sure Magento is still an option, but as you pointed out it should only be considered for basic implementations where it can be used off-the-shelf with minimal customization.
Building a fully custom solution is the most expensive option today and really unnecessary. There is no reason to build your own product management system when so many flexible options exist. Just as I would never recommend building a server and push people towards containerization and the cloud, I recommend finding components that can be leveraged to streamline the custom build.
In terms of high-end headless systems, the market is large and growing. Some leading composable commerce SaaS offerings can offer free tiers and have pre-built front-ends and integrations.
Company description: Elastic Path powers mission-critical digital commerce for the world’s leading brands, such as Intuit, Pella, Deckers Brands, T-Mobile, and over 250 other leading enterprises. As relentless innovators, Elastic Path pioneered the API-Commerce space in 2011 and spearheaded [Composable Commerce](https://www.elasticpath.com/composable-commerce) in 2020. Elastic Path provides industry-leading commerce APIs to help developers rapidly build, deploy, and continuously optimize unique commerce solutions.
My take: Elastic Path is an amazing place to work. We have a very modern stack consisting of microservices written in Go, k8s on AWS, MongoDB, etc. Beyond working with great tech it's a wonderful company culture and has been growing steadily. You can play with the tech and APIs at https://elasticpath.dev/
IP is valued on it's ability to generate revenue. This is why the patent on swinging sideways in a playground is worthless, but the patent on the telephone was extremely valuable.
Disclaimer: I work for Elastic Path. We are an ecommerce solution with a leading product management solution (Gartner recognized us for both ecommerce and PIM) and a new integration hub that can sync data across systems. For example it can sync an entire product catalog to a dedicated search provider in just a couple minutes. I'm not adding a link as that feel scammy, if you are interested you can find it, the rest of this post is unbiased advice.
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Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, let me chat about what I've seen with other systems before joining Elastic Path (EP).
Products are more difficult to model between systems, but easier to sync as they are less dynamic. You can find plenty of ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) systems from inexpensive to premium and costly. There are also many low-code offerings that allow you to map fields. I don't know which ecommerce system you are using, but almost all do not include this functionality. Some systems may include a community created plugin or basic CSV upload, but they will not be as robust as a dedicated system.
If you write a custom product sync it can often be a basic console application running in a container on the cloud that is run on a set schedule. Nothing fancy, just mapping fields and calling APIs with very good error handling and alerts.
I have also seen multiple systems participate in product data management. In this scenario a dedicated PIM is setup to create the initial product data. It is then synced to the ecommerce provider where a merchandising team may do additional categorization, pricing, or web enrichment. It is important that the data is always a one-way flow and that it's clear any data synced from the PIM can be overwritten at any time. This solution works and is typically adopted by large companies who need the advanced capabilities of a PIM. With the exception of EP ecommerce engines only provide light product management capabilities.
Inventory is much more difficult to sync as it is constantly changing. You will want to be very clear which system is your source of truth. Ideally each inventory lookup can call directly to that source of truth to identify the inventory levels, but this is not always possible and then you are left syncing information. The inventory sync will never be perfect, it will always be off by a bit off. Most commerce solutions don't have strong inventory capability so it is left to an ERP or backend system that can handle inventory balancing, allocation, and other advanced functionality. Unfortunately, all of this functionality slows down the system and makes it a poor choice for live API inventory lookups. In this scenario you would want to sync a cache of highlevel inventory data into your ecommerce provider or other system.
You can attempt to use a low-code syncing tool or ETL, but they will often be too slow. So an option is to build it yourself, but in this case a single console application will also take too long. The best way I have seen is to ingest the inventory data in chunks and then call a serverless function for each entry. That function will then make the update in your target system. This will allow you to sync the data very quickly, often fast enough to take down the ecommerce software so throttling may be necessary.
Because it never matches correctly it's worth setting up inventory thresholds based on through-put. Basically saying if inventory is below X it will either be treated as OOS OR will require a callback to the source of truth during checkout. This ensures items are not oversold.
If you provide a bit more details around what systems you are syncing from and to I can provide more details information around tools or infrastructure.
Company description: Elastic Path powers mission-critical digital commerce for the world’s leading brands, such as Intuit, Pella, Deckers Brands, T-Mobile, and over 250 other leading enterprises. As relentless innovators, Elastic Path pioneered the API-Commerce space in 2011 and spearheaded Composable Commerce in 2020. Elastic Path provides industry-leading commerce APIs to help developers rapidly build, deploy, and continuously optimize unique commerce solutions.
My take: Elastic Path is an amazing place to work. We have a very modern stack consisting of microservices written in Go, k8s on AWS, MongoDB, etc. Beyond working with great tech it's a wonderful company culture and has been growing steadily. They are focused on sustained profitable growth instead of VC funds, definitely a safe place with this uncertain economy.
Company description: Elastic Path powers mission-critical digital commerce for the world’s leading brands, such as Intuit, Pella, Deckers Brands, T-Mobile, and over 250 other leading enterprises. As relentless innovators, Elastic Path pioneered the API-Commerce space in 2011 and spearheaded Composable Commerce in 2020. Elastic Path provides industry-leading commerce APIs to help developers rapidly build, deploy, and continuously optimize unique commerce solutions.
My take: Elastic Path is an amazing place to work. We have a very modern stack consisting of microservices written in Go, k8s on AWS, MongoDB, etc. Beyond working with great tech it's a wonderful company culture and has been growing steadily. They are focused on sustained profitable growth instead of VC funds, definitely a safe place with this uncertain economy.
GraphQL was designed to solve a singular problem, slow mobile internet speeds. Now that mobile internet (5G) is faster then some wired home connections I'm worried that GraphQL will die off. It's a solution that no longer has a problem. Though it is a cool tech.
Building a platform or building an ecommerce business? For a platform I would say the number of variations and edge cases from one business to the next. eCommerce looks deceptively simple, some category pages, product pages, cart & checkout, but once you get into the weeds with multiple brands you realize how immense the requirement list is and how flexible the solution needs to be. So it ends up requiring a large team with extensive experience to build something worth purchasing, which means it's a massive expense before signing a first customer. Most run out of funding before becoming profitable.
Company description:
Elastic Path powers mission-critical digital commerce for the world’s leading brands, such as Intuit, Pella, Deckers Brands, T-Mobile, and over 250 other leading enterprises. As relentless innovators, Elastic Path pioneered the API-Commerce space in 2011 and spearheaded Composable Commerce in 2020. Elastic Path provides industry-leading commerce APIs to help developers rapidly build, deploy, and continuously optimize unique commerce solutions.
My take:
Elastic Path is an amazing place to work. We have a very modern stack consisting of microservices written in Go, k8s on AWS, MongoDB, etc. Beyond working with great tech it's a wonderful company culture. I enjoy it so much I did a blog write-up on my experiences to date - https://www.jamesluterek.com/60-days-with-elastic-path/
You are probably correct for small to medium sized tech teams building software. With that said, in 2022 I'd expect any company selling a SaaS product to be built with micro-services. Buying a SaaS I want all of the benefits, but no longer need to deal with the hard parts.
What did I miss? Which ones do you disagree with?