Sébastien Morel

73% of all businesses are currently using headless website architecture, and among those not currently using headless, nearly 98% plan to evaluate headless solutions over the next 12 months (source: headless commerce stats).

Imagine your website as a puppet show. In traditional setups, the puppet (frontend) and the puppeteer (backend) are tethered together, moving in unison. But what if the puppet could perform independently, responding to various cues without being directly controlled?

That's the essence of headless architecture.

Headless architecture enables a decoupled approach to web and app development, allowing content and services to be mismatched and shared across different channels or heads while being perfectly interoperable. With a proper headless architecture, you can also build a centralized repository of reusable services within your organization.

Compared to a monolith approach (we'll talk some more about this later), decoupling everything will also sophisticate the architecture and force you to make more decisions. You will have to select different technologies and services, but that’s for the greater good, and the inherent challenges can be quickly resolved by being pragmatic, with reasonable anticipation and best practices.

Before we start, since this article will cover an entire Subscription System, I recommend revisiting and reading the Subscription API Overview blog post to understand the different concepts. Subscription documentation and Subscription Commerce Masterclass are excellent sources of knowledge and can help you overcome any hiccups you might encounter with this article.

Finally, you might want to juggle your memory and revisit the subscription business models post for business insight and the bigger picture.

Subscriptions can mean various things in e-commerce, such as recurring payments, plans, tiers, and more. But what exactly does a subscription entail in e-commerce and with Crystallize headless commerce?

The traditional eCommerce setup often entails substantial upfront investments in server infrastructure, complex management, and maintenance routines. Additionally, the rigidity of such setups can impede the scalability essential for handling traffic surges during sales events, thus affecting performance and user experience.

Serverless eCommerce emerges as a solution to these challenges, offering a new approach that significantly reduces operational overhead, enhances scalability, and optimizes cost-efficiency.

The State of Serverless 2023 report by Datadog underscores a rising trend in major cloud providers adopting serverless technologies​. The global serverless architecture market, valued at over USD 9 billion in 2022, is projected to burgeon at a CAGR of over 25% from 2023 to 2032​. Similarly, the global serverless computing market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 20.8% from 2022 to 2028​.

The statistics we mentioned above testify to the significant strides the serverless approach is making. It's (kind of) evident that if you haven't done so already, now is the time to delve deeper and enumerate serverless benefits, check real-world use cases, discuss technical considerations, and understand best practices for businesses eyeing a transition to this modern eCommerce paradigm.

But before all that we've got some term explaining first.

Welcome aboard, tech enthusiasts! In today’s digital world, there’s no such thing as being too secure. With data breaches making headlines, it’s high time we pull up our socks and look at security essentials.

So, what’s all the hullabaloo about authentication vs. authorization?

Well, let’s break it down.

These two A’s are like the Batman and Robin of security protocols. They work hand in glove to protect the Batcave (read: your data). Hang tight, as we’re about to get down and dirty with these two superheroes.

More and more businesses are relying on cloud-native microservice apps to increase development speed and take advantage of the cloud's scalability and availability.

Nasdaq’s prediction that 95% of all purchases will be made online through eCommerce by 2040 should not be surprising. Even today, you either have an eCommerce store or don’t exist. What’s surprisingly challenging is keeping the technology at the core of your online store up to date with the modern trends and frameworks that emerge regularly.

The rapid evolution of technology is generally good news for developers and clients, as it improves the experience of building and using websites and online stores.

However, this rapid pace of change raises a crucial question for today's e-commerce businesses: which tools should I use for my online store?

The technical side of building your online store, e-commerce website development, involves selecting or creating a solution that displays products appealingly and guarantees flawless operation, safe payment processing, and a user-friendly experience. Designing user-friendly interfaces, integrating dependable payment gateways, and implementing responsive behaviors to user actions are all part of this process while maintaining an aesthetically pleasing design.

With Crystallize at the forefront of modern tech, we know we can help you navigate the murky waters of e-commerce web development and achieve the best possible outcome/technology for your use case.

Several forces are shaping the future of e-commerce, pushing brands to rethink their digital strategies.

AI is no longer an experimental feature—it’s driving everything from dynamic pricing, fraud detection, and hyper-personalized shopping recommendations to automated content generation and real-time customer support.

Supply chain disruptions in 2024 forced brands to rethink fulfillment strategies. New legislation, such as the Digital Product Passport (DPP), is changing how Europe and the world make, buy, and sell products, forcing brands to explore blockchain.

TikTok Shop, Instagram Checkout, and live-stream shopping are emerging revenue channels, especially for Gen Z and Millennial consumers. Brands no longer just advertise on social media—they sell directly within the platforms.

Businesses that once relied on traditional online storefronts have adopted a headless, composable, and API-first approach.

One-time purchases are being replaced by loyalty-driven subscription models, with more brands experimenting with exclusive membership programs, gated content, and community-driven commerce.

Consumers' expectations have changed. Instant checkout, AI-powered recommendations, and seamless device transactions are necessary. Brands that offer slow shipping, outdated UX, or lack automation struggle to compete.

Not a dog-eat-dog world yet, but we're damn close. So, what are the latest developments and design trends shaping the future of eCommerce that businesses need to do to stay ahead in 2025?

Remix and eCommerce go well hand in hand, and we have a free open-source boilerplate for retail storefronts to prove it.

“Crystallize apps” have been released! We are pleased to announce that you can now build an “Application” that can be injected into the main Crystallize App.

Crystallize #jamstackconf2022 story. In short: “I had a blast.”

I am sure that the dev community is going to talk about the Next 13 in the upcoming weeks extensively, so this post is more about my first impression from the perspective of Crystallize users. Bare with me, will ya!

There are numerous approaches to developing a web application that is performant. Going the static site way is just one of them. Pause here. What do we/I mean when we/I say static sites?

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.

You've probably heard the terms APIs, and Microservices used when talking about web development. What are they? How do you use them, and what is the difference between them?

So RemixConf2022 happened last month. Remix Run is on fire. This tool/framework is the key to Frontend performance with its progressive unique approach. During the conference we’ve learned a lot about Remix, from its core concepts to navigation through the state machine, forms, HTTP cache, and more, and all transparently degraded when Javascript is off!

But let’s start from the beginning.

Working as a team on a professional setup that implies many “micro/macro” services is challenging and can lead to invisible and unexpected errors if not set up well. Time to market, first time to success, and reducing the feedback loop are important topics for all your teams. This article is about setting up your project for a successful production workflow.

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.

Trends in every industry tend to cycle, and web development is no different. What has made the biggest comeback in the past few years? Static websites! However, how we build them today has changed, as has how we host them. Numerous static website hosting platforms are available today, and every year, we review the most popular options to provide you with a quick overview of their advantages and disadvantages.

We no longer call them hosting companies; we call them PaaS or Platform-as-a-service because they allow developers to deploy sites quickly and easily (more on this later).

Why is this important? To put it bluntly, just about any server can host static pages. However, not all of them can meet the needs and expectations of modern web development. 

We’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, let’s define precisely what a static website means and what PaaS is.

Whenever you write about frameworks, you end up with 50% of the article trying to explain concepts around rendering on the web. So, the topic deserves its own post, this one.

Before we get started, we need some background and definitions. What is rendering on the web? To answer that question, we'll take a stroll down history lane.

More than thirty years ago, the web started as a collection of static documents built for scientists to share their findings and ideas. Over the following decades, the web became more dynamic, and technologies like PHP, MySQL, and others enabled developers to build more dynamic functionalities.

Since then, JS frameworks and a class of static site generators have been introduced, rendering has become complex, and different models are suitable for different use cases. This article attempts to make sense of all this complexity. If we succeed, you will be empowered to determine which methodologies are best suited for your next web project.

Recent State of JS 2024 survey data shows that developers are increasingly performance-conscious and open to new tools in and out of the React ecosystem. Next.js still tops usage charts, but its interest and satisfaction scores have cooled slightly as it “follows a similar trajectory” to React (still widely used, but no longer the shiny new thing)​.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution but a spectrum of tools optimized for different priorities. A content-heavy blog maintained by a small team might thrive with a simple static-oriented tool like Astro or even Gatsby (remember that one!?). At the same time, a large enterprise dashboard would favor Next.js for its flexibility.

Unlike previous iterations of this article, we’re casting a wider net today, covering a bit more than the title suggests. There are many reasons for this, but mainly, we want you to consider how “React-dependent” you want your stack to be while waging solutions.

If you love React and want to stick with it everywhere, Next.js or Gatsby or Docusaurus let you stay in that ecosystem. If you mainly want to deliver content fast and don’t mind a more framework-agnostic approach, Astro or Remix… sorry, we mean React Router v7 is likely your friend. And if you’re feeling adventurous about the future of web frameworks, you might experiment with Waku, Tanstack, or Qwik’s new paradigm to get that edge in performance. The good news is that the React ecosystem is broad – you can mix and match (for example, embed React components in Astro or use Qwik for parts of an Astro site.

All of these frameworks are converging toward better performance and developer experience, so one can feel confident picking the one that fits their workflow.

Image source: State of JS 2024 survey.

Crystallize users and customers trust us to keep their data safe. We take security very seriously and aim to be as clear and open as possible about the way we handle security.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Crystallize team.