Bård Farstad

Besides your product/service, pricing is at the very heart of eCommerce. Customizing product prices in Crystallize has become a lot easier with the price list.

Turning your product information into PDF in seconds. Publish catalogs, datasheets, and price lists in a flash with a headless PIM system.

Our journey to reimagining eCommerce is not about adding features. It's about delivering core, modern commerce business requirements and future-proofing tech stacks.

The frontend frameworks ecosystem is booming so much that finding the right one for your online business/store has become challenging (at best). We’d love to help. This post is all about that.

Content modeling is an interesting topic and lays the foundation for a great eCommerce architecture. When done correctly, of course.

Remix is getting quite some attention lately, and being in the eCommerce space, it has caught our eye.

Let us dive into the topic typically described as the most complicated topic to learn for developers. Or better, the hardest to master.

The static website hosting landscape has changed significantly in the past few years and is only getting better.

Creating a seamless and engaging on-site customer experience is the ultimate goal for everyone running an online store. Besides your product/service, your store performance and product videos ensure you get the much-needed attention.

It makes no sense, but it is true. The reason for waiting in line is that many online stores are running on outdated technologies that simply do not scale, like Elkjøp in Norway or Jeffree Star.

The Jamstack strategy is gaining momentum these days, and rightfully so. Benefits such as better performance and easier scaling alongside better developer experience come to mind immediately. One of the main reasons we got into the business of reimagining ecommerce is giving devs the freedom to BYOF (bring your own front end). To tailor-make the front end and build a process for continuous deployment for fast iterations and deliver the best possible customer experience.

To make it even easier to start a Gatsby JS ecommerce project, we combined our Crystallize PIM with Gatsby, a modern React-based framework, to build out a super scalable Jamstack headless commerce solution. The results are staggering. Pagespeed score of 100 and a 3ms average response time when scaling out with 500 concurrent users on Vercel. Fast.

We have server-side rendered React using an early version of the Next.js framework on the front end and Crystallize powering the backend for complete product information, product storytelling, and order fulfillment management.

Video is dominating the digital marketing landscape and contrary to what you may have heard there are a couple of ways you can easily add them to your Jamstack website.

Not your average list but a comprehensive 16-point eCommerce SEO checklist with everything you need to know to optimize your store and successfully grow organic traffic and revenue.

Why does only B2C eCommerce tech have all the shiny toys? Well, this is about to change.

Subscription ecommerce business models have seen fantastic growth in recent years. With Crystallize being at the forefront of it, now is the time to dive into the ins and outs of starting, running, and scaling an eCommerce subscription business.

A different, heavily opinionated look at the future of eCommerce. Let’s talk about the eCommerce trends like owned channels, community building, sustainability, App commerce, and B2B commerce that I think will dominate 2022.

Check out the top reasons your ecommerce platform needs to be blazing fast if the satisfied customer is not a good enough explanation.

For many businesses, site search comes as an afterthought, while in reality, if done right, it can be another significant revenue stream.

Remember the unicorn designer? The designer also knows how to build that markup with HTML and CSS - or even in React. Well, the times have changed. Google launched the core web vitals for measuring site speed and the bar is raised. It is now significantly harder to get a 90+ score in PageSpeed Insights for mobile than just a few weeks ago. Site speed affects Adwords pricing as well as SEO ranking. As a result, the designers of today have to take into account site speed as part of the design process.

We've talked lengths about site speed and performance affecting your search engine ranking and organic traffic but did you know site speed affects Adwords pricing and ranking as well?

A headless PIM means having a service ready to manage product information in seconds. Product information and content are delivered via an API. No templates, no webpages, only structured content. Pure developer bliss.

With the rapid growth of tools and solutions available in the space now is probably the best time to move your online store to Jamstack eCommerce architecture.

Genuine internet craftsmanship is performed by experienced UX designers, front-end developers, and information architects. The combined focus on customer experience, frontend performance, and beautiful reusable information architecture is rocket fuel for SEO, conversion and click-through rates, and reusable content services.

The differentiation is in the execution—in the details.

Instead of building a better PIM, CMS, eCommerce, or order management service, we wanted to design an API layer you need to market and sell your products on any channel, at any scale, and in any way you want it. A perfect product story engine, if you will.

Hyperlinks are one of the most important aspects of content creation, copywriting, and website management in general. And we should all know by now how to use hyperlinks properly, right?

Headless commerce allows businesses to provide a personalized and brand-consistent experience across channels using APIs that connect the front-end presentation layer with back-end infrastructure that enables the ecommerce experience.

Today PIM is a whole lot more than a single source of truth for your product information. It is a stepping stone for modern eCommerce businesses.

TL;DR chunks give more possibilities of re-use, logic, and referencing other content. Future-proofing and time-saving.

Nowadays the performance of your website matters big time.

Site speed matters we know that. But how does speed affect your SEO efforts and, ultimately, ranking? To figure that out we did a Monstera Obliqua identification and care keyword test project.

There is a shift in the way we buy and use the software. Most software is today rolled out as API services using a saas business model. Basically democratization of technology. You get full access to all features and pay for usage. No feature differentiation based on size. By creating a best-of-breed headless stack you can achieve a bigger focus on innovation rather than building and maintaining commodity services.

By using structured data to describe your web pages you are contributing to a more semantic web. This is a web where we describe the data being shown and not just how it should look, making it machine-readable. Structured data is also used by Google to enhance search results. Here is how you can add, test, and verify that your web pages are properly structured for the semantic web - as Google sees it. An important skill for better Internet craftsmanship.

Polymorphic comes from Greek where poly means many and morph means forms. Related to content it basically means that the content can have many forms. In the context of content modeling and Crystallize this allows you to define multiple editorial choices for specific content.

Google is updating its ranking algorithm in June of 2021 to include the page experience scores. The goal is to reward websites that have a great page experience and to put extra pressure on slow websites. In short, you get better rankings in organic search and pay less for Google Ads if you score well in-page experience. Core web vitals will then be part of the page experience score.

Learning Vue.js doesn’t require a lot of upfront knowledge (classic CSS, HTML, and JavaScript is enough). That fact alone plays a huge part in its adoption. The lightweight nature of Vue.js is the other.

How fast and well your website can handle serious amounts of simultaneous order placements can make or break businesses. It depends on your chosen ecommerce platform, of course. So we tested ours.

Being able to use actual data is a great way to stress-test your design. Thanks to the use of API and a pre-made plugin you can now populate your Figma design file with product information from your Crystallize PIM.

Today, you need to be able to curate rich products descriptions alongside classic product information to market and sell products more successfully.

The power of structured product information lays in future-proofing the product information. It allows for easier adoption of new delivery channels, like Alexa for example, in your marketing strategies.

Export your data with a simple push-button copy-paste to a spreadsheet. Use the sales insight to support better decisions for your online business.

Realtime PIM API means that you can rely on your product information backend to power your eCommerce site directly.

The product catalog (PIM) is the heart of any e-commerce solution. In Crystallize we have based our API for the product catalog on GraphQL to have a great developer experience and to provide a low latency API. We wanted the developers to have the freedom when building the user interface, typically in React, without having a back-end that slows them down.

Our friends at Snowball recently stated that fast websites drive sales. In order to succeed in building fast-performing e-commerce websites, you need to make sure your API backend does not slow you down. There are many factors that make out the total perceived and measured frontend performance of a website of course. We are making sure that it is not lagging in our API. Our APIs typically respond in around 5ms.

One of the most traditional items in Norway is the national costume Bunad. The magazine Bunad Magasinet recently did some business model innovation with a focus on digitalization. Magasinet Bunad introduced Crystallize as a subscription commerce engine and eZ Platform to deliver a paywall restricted version of their magazine content. The result was 70% increased sales and a better offering for subscribers with full access to content archives dating back to 2004. 

Crystallize is designed to rapidly launch new subscription-based digital services. Integrated with over the top (OTT) live and on-demand video delivery with AWS Media Services you have a game-changing recipe. Allowing brands to launch new subscription-based streaming services at an unprecedented pace.

We just finalized the legal stuff for Crystallize together with the brilliant team at Bull, what a great name for a legal firm btw. We wanted to have friendly and balanced terms of service to reflect our philosophy and customer focus. Slack, which we think is awesome, set the bar at about 5900 words. The Crystallize terms of service count today 2272 words which is just 38,5% of what the great team at Slack has, and that is including the order form.

If you are making a decision on architecture for a new e-commerce App these days: stay away from monolithic monsters. You should jump on the trend of tailor-making Internet Apps with React and GraphQL. It allows you to control every byte of the delivery and make the user experience just so. It will give you a better user experience, better Google ranking and not to mention: an awesome developer experience.

Matrix-based organization of products enables information architecture that is not easily done with hierarchical or topic map-based organizers. The grid organizer gives you a powerful product information management tool to build powerful taxonomies for your ecommerce. Simply manage products in a grid with drag and drop. Easy.

The oldest Norwegian football club Odds Ballklubb launched a new subscription-based streaming service Gullpila for their fans using Crystallize and AWS Elemental streaming services. Gullpila delivers engaging live and on-demand HD video content to their fans and represents a new direct revenue stream for the club. The service was launched in weeks, rather than months, due to the emerging technology it is built upon.

React is super popular for eCommerce these days. Single-page applications (SPA) are typically the starting point due it their awesomeness. React SPA is however not awesome for SEO and time to first meaningful render. This is where server-side rendering (SSR) with Next.JS comes in. Frontend performance is super-important according to the ecommerce SEO checklist so you need to have fast APIs. GraphQL done properly could help your performance that you should verify with profiling and benchmarking. For eCommerce SEO the good old best practice still applies like title and h1 tag usage.

Topic maps can be used to visualize your SEO strategy as well as building awesome internal navigation. Combined this makes for great internal and external findability. Get found in the search engines. Customers can easily navigate once they land on your website when proper information architecture is applied and connected with semantic topic maps.

We are proud to welcome the JavaScript engineering consultancy Formidable as the first official partner to Crystallize. After getting to know the team we are super impressed by their skills and their attitude towards leveling up their peers and customers. This is a team we are very much looking forward to being working with.

Tell the story behind the product.

At Crystallize we are information architecture geeks, well at least many of us. We believe in the natural state of product information and providing the building blocks so you can create the product shapes that fit your products and market. This is the underlying design criteria when creating the concept of product shapes in Crystallize. So you can build a tailor-made ecommerce experience and ultimately sell more products. In any channel.

MyRevolution is a Norwegian manufacturer of premium nutrition products sold directly to customers from their webshop. They switched to Crystallize last year and saw 72% increase in ecommerce conversions. Now they are rolling out subscription-based purchasing for a better customer experience and to boost online sales via increased loyalty. Most of their customers are regularly buying the same products as their kollagen product. Now they can subscribe and manage their subscription easily.

With starting my new software venture, Crystallize, I hired a designer as employee number one the second was an illustrator. I wanted to front-load focus on design, user experience, visualization, and content strategy and not have that being an afterthought. Here is why.

Crystallize has had a GraphQL API for the fast delivery of product information from day one. However, we used a REST API for creating, updating, deleting, and general product information management. We have now killed off our REST API entirely and replaced it with GraphQL. Performance and developer experience are the main drivers.

Website speed is very important for ecommerce SEO. Frontend performance should be part of your daily web development routine by using tools like PageSpeed Insights. In the last couple of days, Google has rolled out speed monitoring as part of the dashboard in Google Search Console. This really confirms the importance of frontend performance and it also makes it easier for you to be on top of how your site is developing in regards to speed.

Webhooks are used to orchestrate events in our headless ecommerce service. We have now introduced GraphQL to allow you to select exactly the data you need for each webhook. You do not need to circle back to fetch the data you need. Simple, quick - and you are in control.

Frontend performance optimization in Magento is hard. MyRevolution moved from Magento to Crystallize to get in control over frontend performance. The move from Magento resulted in increased conversion with better frontend performance and a tailor-made checkout process, increased organic traffic with better SERP placement in Google. Finally, MyRevolution enabled subscription sales of their products to deliver a better user experience and increased sales over time.

GraphQL delivers a better developer experience with a self-describing API, query and mutation input validation, and a single query to your backend that returns exactly the data you need. This is why we based our fast ecommerce API on GraphQL.

Break the silos with central orchestration of product information to enable omnichannel ecommerce. A well-executed omnichannel ecommerce strategy enables you to reuse product information across all channels with the use of a PIM. Channels including web-based ecommerce, native apps ecommerce, in-store ecommerce, point of sales, and even in-store digital signage. Building the foundation for modern design-driven and iterative development based on data and insight.

React Native is a popular framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. With this in mind, we've built React Native ecommerce app boilerplate from scratch, and in this short tutorial, I will explain how to use it.

With site speed becoming an important part of a customer experience making sure that the number of backend requests during runtime has become important.

Online events are in demand as ever before. With Crystallize you can build a tailor-made experience for online events including on-demand and live streaming with paid access as a one-off or a subscription. A good example is Gullpila which is an online live streaming and on-demand service built on Crystallize. Allowing the football club to reach a broader audience and build new revenue streams.

You can use long-form storytelling to increase engagement by creating authentic experiences. Learn from Patagonia and The New York Times how to build trust and grow your online audience. Emotional stories that inspire are more likely to be shared and if you are lucky even go viral. We have created an open-source eCommerce boilerplate to get you started with long-form storytelling.

Price variants allow you to build a pricing scheme for your products to support B2B, B2C, international multi-currency sales, or discount management. In Crystallize you define global price variants that apply to all products. The user guide shows how price variants work.