Bård Farstad

Product catalogs are rapidly expanding, and customer expectations for seamless, dynamic experiences are sky-high, making efficient Product Information Management (PIM) a necessity rather than a nice-to-have feature.

The headless approach is eating the web dev world… There is a good reason for it. Traditional monolith eCommerce platforms (like WordPress, Wix, Magento, Shopify, Drupal, etc.) often limit customization and agility due to their tightly coupled front and back systems.

Headless architecture, on the other hand, allows businesses to use different technologies for the front and back end, providing the freedom to create unique customer experiences without being constrained by the limitations of a monolithic architecture. Additionally, it allows for a best-of-breed approach to building your online store, where you can pick and choose the best solutions for your use case.

For many businesses, the decision to re-platform to a headless architecture is a technological upgrade and a strategic business move because it offers opportunities for enhanced agility, scalability, and a deeper engagement with customers through bespoke user experiences. This, more often than not, means a loyal audience and, ultimately, more sales.

How easy/hard it is to migrate to a new CMS/eCommerce/PIM platform depends heavily on your starting point, i.e., do you have a platform, and are you moving from a monolith or headless solution?

No platform/CMS? This should be easy because you are building a new digital experience for your audience and your team from scratch, which means there are no pre-defined restrictions your team should know.

Moving from monolith solution? Migration depends heavily on the solution you’ve used before. Migrating to a headless architecture involves significant technical challenges, including the re-architecture of the existing system, integration of APIs, and ensuring that all components work seamlessly together.

Changing headless platform? Again, it depends on the solution. Decupled front and back ends mean you can quickly adopt the exact content modeling in your new setting.

Transition requires meticulous and strategic planning, considering various factors, including technological limitations, integration complexities, future growth prospects, and budget constraints, making it much more difficult than anticipated.

However, there are general recommendations that will help you map out migration steps more easily.

Accelerate your product configurator development. This boilerplate enables visual shopping experiences with complex products. Powered by Crystallize and CharpstAR and wrapped in the frontend framework Next.js, this open source gives you a foundational immersive shopping experience. You can check out the boilerplate live in our running product configurator demo.

Sweef.se, renowned for its unique, high-quality, on-demand furniture at reasonable prices, is doing it by offering not just furniture but Sweden's comfiest furniture, fostering a culture of comfort, quality, and individual expression. They needed solid tech to back their efforts to deliver that via their digital storefront.

The previous platform, PrestaShop, although functional, lacked the flexibility and speed essential for delivering a superior user experience and managing the complex product configurations offered by Sweef.

Betting on a monolithic approach in the age of omnichannel demand, composable commerce, and best-of-breed tech stacks is an arduous task doomed from the beginning. So, instead of going the beaten path of eCommerce, they took a leap of faith and opted for a headless approach.

Do you want to build an eCommerce storefront using SvelteKit, Houdini, Tailwind, and with product information from the Crystallize GraphQL API? Well, look no further. We have created an open-source boilerplate that connects the dots for this stack.

Have you ever wondered why certain products make such a lasting impression? What separates Apple from any other tech brand or Starbucks from any other coffee shop? The secret lies in their stories. And guess what? You don't have to be a renowned brand to leverage this power.

Rich storytelling is the core of Crystallize headless commerce. Re-imagine eCommerce and a case study of a project that brought Crystallize to life are all about product storytelling. After all, Crystallize is conceptualized as a single source from which you can tell the story behind your brand and product with ease and build a stronger customer experience by inspiring and informing your audience on every channel of interest (resulting in higher conversion rates, a more sticky customer experience, and fewer interactions via customer support of course).

Every product has a story; it's all about how you tell it (and who's backing your efforts).

According to Semrush, 50% of brands are still not using structured content. This means that the content a half of businesses out there create isn't reaching relevant people or at least isn't doing it nearly as successfully as it could be.

The online world is more crowded and competitive than ever, making it difficult to stand out and get noticed. And don't get us started with AI stuff that is published/made at a staggering rate. On top of all that, your audience's expectations are higher than ever: they want personalized, relevant, and engaging content everywhere they go online.

All this is made possible with structured content.

Structured content enables you to do more with your content. Not only does it enhance the user experience by providing precise navigation and consistency, but it also improves search engine optimization (SEO) by increasing relevance and improving ranking.

Implementing structured content on your website is becoming a crucial step to drive traffic, engage users, and achieve online success.

But first …

Gartner magic quadrant view, business expectations, industry leaders' opinions, most popular solutions… best of articles come in all shapes and sizes. This one of ours about eCommerce platforms is a bit different… we hope.

Driving customer acquisition, optimizing the eCommerce experience, fostering loyalty, and scaling operations are the reason why brands opt out for Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) approach in business and marketing. But is it for everyone, and how do you start with it?

Edge computing makes it possible to deliver and process data even closer to end-users today, and businesses are slowly discovering the potential it offers.

NextJS on the front + Crystallize on the back for content management and subscription management for new blazing-fast BUNAD Magasinet website.

Gullpila delivers engaging live and on-demand HD video content to Odds Ballklubb football club fans and represents a new direct revenue stream for the club.

Did you know it takes users around 50 milliseconds (source) to form an opinion about your website? And if their first impression and experience are bad, 88% of consumers (source) are less likely to return to your website. How your products are organized and how easy it is for your customers to find what they are looking for play a massive part in that first impression.

That’s where product taxonomy comes in. A well-defined taxonomy helps manage large inventories and create a seamless and efficient shopping experience. It can make or break the user experience and seriously impact your bottom line.

Let’s start from the beginning.

The benefits and competitive advantages of headless commerce are many. When done right, of course. Let’s look at some of the primary advantages that a proper headless commerce buildout can provide.

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 B2B eCommerce sector is undeniably booming, marked by an exhilarating growth trajectory. As of 2021, different sources have reported the market size ranging from USD 2.3 billion to a staggering USD 7.35 trillion, with a projected Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) varying from 17.48% to 29.3% for the coming years​.

One notable driver of this growth is the swift ascendancy of manufacturers in the eCommerce arena, who amplified their online sales by 18.4% in 2021, reaching $543.25 billion from the previous $458.7 billion​.

The fervent expectations of B2B sellers further underscore this upward trend, as nearly 20% anticipate their eCommerce sales to burgeon by at least 25% in 2023​.

B2B eCommerce is not just a modern-day convenience; it's a strategic imperative for businesses aiming to secure a competitive edge in today's digital-first marketplace.

But is it an approach for your business?

As a headless eCommerce platform, our primary goal is to create services that delight front-end developers. This involves extensive research, hands-on experimentation with cutting-edge frontend frameworks, and the development of open-source eCommerce starters utilizing these technologies.

With React, Angular, and Vue, along with frameworks built on top of React, such as Next JS and Remix Run, and Vue, like Nuxt JS + frameworks like Svelte, Astro, and 11ty, the landscape of front-end frameworks appears nearly limitless. Still, this post is not about comparing or choosing the best one.

Instead, here we will highlight the frameworks we’ve found most rewarding to work with and believe should be part of your tech stack. By the way, our enthusiastic endorsement of these frameworks is admittedly biased, shaped entirely and solely by our own meandering experiences.

A subscription business model is a revenue model that allows customers to pay a recurring fee, typically monthly or annually, to gain access to a product or service. Unlike traditional sales models, which focus on one-time transactions, subscription models emphasize ongoing customer relationships, providing continuous value in exchange for recurring payments.

Subscriptions are already embedded in our culture, so much so that we do not consider them special. The average U.S. consumer subscribes to 3.7 services (source), spanning from electricity and apartment rent, streaming services like Netflix or Spotify over office furniture renting like Nuwo, and phone cloud storage iCloud to (why not?) commerce platforms like Crystallize and productivity apps such as Microsoft Office.

The above should not come as a surprise because the demand is there. As of 2023, the average monthly spending on subscription services per consumer in the U.S. was approximately $237 (source).

The subscription model has gained immense popularity due to its ability to create predictable revenue streams, enhance customer retention, and provide businesses with valuable insights into customer preferences and behaviors.

Wow… that’s great, but is it the right fit for your business? Let's explore that.

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

Composable Commerce represents a paradigm shift in eCommerce architecture, fundamentally redefining how businesses approach their online shopping experiences.

Gartner predicts that by 2023, organizations that have taken to the composable approach will outpace the competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation.

Monolith, headless, microservices, Jamstack, MACH, composable… just when you thought you’d caught up, a new tech term popped up on the market. Distinguishing what they mean for you and your business is as hard as understanding their subtle differences, so let’s unwrap them today.

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.

Netlify, Vercel, Platform.sh … the static website hosting landscape has changed significantly in the past few years and is only getting better.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Nowadays the performance of your website matters big time.

New sales channels appear every day. Instagram now has a shopping tab, WhatsApp is getting one, TikTok is jumping onto the eCommerce wagon, and purchasing groceries from your smart fridge has become a reality. If your online store is your only sales platform, then you’re seriously missing out.

Yes, we get it.

First, it’s creating content for your website. Then, it’s creating content for mobile. It’s creating social media sales channels, smartwatches, and other IoT devices. Moreover, the number of these will only increase in the future.

And who has a team that large? Not many! But hey, that’s why you’re here because this is where headless commerce shines.

Headless commerce and headless architecture have gained much traction lately, so the market for headless commerce is projected to expand to around USD 2.2 billion by 2023. Over six in ten retail companies plan to migrate to headless commerce platforms by 2024, while over 20 percent already use them (source: headless commerce stats 2024).

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.

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

By using structured data to describe your web pages, you contribute 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. Google also uses structured data 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

REST vs. GraphQL dilema from the perspective of a eCommerce platform. Both sides have pros and cons, but here is what moved the needle for us.

Not your average list but a comprehensive 19-point eCommerce SEO checklist with everything you need to know to optimize your store and successfully grow organic traffic and revenue.

Core Web Vitals, LCP, Cumulative Layout Shift, FID, Webpagetest.org, Google Lighthouse, Pagespeed Insight, CrUX, or the latest one, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) —we're sure you've stumbled upon one of these in your quest to improve front-end performance.

But how do you measure performance? And why do you need to be data-driven and continuously monitor, optimize, and build a performance testing and optimization culture?

Let's explore that. Let's go millisecond hunting.

PIM is your centralized product information system from which the product data is distributed to all relevant stakeholders, teams, and sales channels.

The product catalog (PIM) is the heart of any eCommerce solution. With Crystallize, we've based our APIs on GraphQL. We wanted developers to have freedom and flexibility when building their user interfaces without having a backend that slows them down.

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.

A headless Product Information Management (PIM) system represents an evolution in how businesses manage and distribute product data. Unlike traditional PIM systems, a headless PIM decouples the back-end (the services layer) management of product information from the front-end (the presentation layer), providing greater flexibility and scalability.

Now, we’ve already discussed what PIM is and why and how you should use it. We also discussed the headless architecture approach in length. As the first and original headless PIM platform, here we'd like to go a bit in-depth about it and delve into essential topics such as data modeling, information architecture, digital asset management, access control, data quality, and governance.

React and React-based frameworks are super popular for eCommerce these days. Due to their awesomeness, single-page applications are typically the starting point for many businesses. However, React SPA is far from awesome for SEO, search, and time to first meaningful render.

Let’s delve into effective strategies for optimizing React eCommerce SPAs for SEO, ensuring that your web application is not only user-friendly but also highly visible in search engine results.

Tell the story behind the product.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.