Insights

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 shift towards sustainability in tech stacks, some even say towards building eco-friendly websites, is nothing new. It aligns with modern demands for responsible business practices. According to some estimates, the carbon footprint of our gadgets, the internet, and the systems supporting them accounts for about 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions (source), And these emissions are predicted to double by 2025.

Clearly, (besides hype), there is a need to embrace more energy-efficient and sustainable solutions and tech, and oddly enough, there are business gains that come with it.

The key to creating a sustainable, green, eco-friendly, energy-efficient, or (call it what you will) eCommerce tech stack and reducing your online carbon footprint is to focus on efficiency and scalability at every level, from infrastructure overbuild tools and practices to user interaction.

The subscription business model has seen exponential growth in recent years, with notable success stories in industries ranging from software and entertainment to physical goods and professional services.

Still, even with growing adoption, many businesses are unaware of the full spectrum of benefits that a subscription model can offer. We’ve already discussed this in our What's a Subscription Business Model and How Does It Work? blog post. So, here, let’s just quickly go over the benefits of subscription models for businesses and customers.

For Businesses:

• Predictable Revenue: Subscription models ensure a steady cash flow, aiding in better financial management and planning.
• Customer Loyalty: Continuous customer engagement fosters loyalty, reducing churn rates and increasing lifetime value.
• Operational Efficiency: Streamlined processes and automated billing reduce administrative burdens and costs.
• Market Differentiation: Unique subscription offerings can differentiate a business in a competitive market.

For Customers:

• Convenience: Regular, automated deliveries or services eliminate the need for repeated purchases.
• Cost Savings: Subscriptions often provide better value than one-time purchases, especially with bundled offers or long-term commitments.
• Personalization: Ongoing services can be tailored to individual preferences, enhancing customer satisfaction.
• Exclusive Access: Subscribers often enjoy exclusive content, products, or services, adding to the perceived value.

It is not all bells and whistles. There are some challenges as well. The subscription market is becoming increasingly saturated, with numerous players vying for the same customers. Retaining customers is a significant challenge, and high churn rates can undermine the benefits of the subscription model, leading to revenue instability.

Finally, scalability issues, such as maintaining service quality with a growing subscriber base or the technical challenges of scaling a subscription platform, are a concern for growing businesses.

It’s smart to know where eCommerce is now. It’s even smarter to know where eCommerce is headed in the future. If you invest time and effort in the right things, such moves may pay off later through higher profits and a large, loyal customer base.

With Crystallize as your backend, it’ll be easy–and fun–to keep up with the latest trends.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have always been about more than just boosting sales—they’re about creating lasting customer relationships. The best way to do this? Videos. Let me explain.

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.

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.

Online shopping stores have taken off in recent years. As of 2024, there are 2.64 billion online buyers worldwide, a big chunk of the world's population. The success of any e-commerce business relies heavily on more than great products and competitive prices.

Users expect an online store to be performant and provide a smooth experience. After all, that is one way to convert window shoppers and browsers into buyers (more on that in our CRO strategies post).

This is where Global Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) come in. A CDN is a powerful tool that has had a big impact on how online retailers deliver content to their customers, ensuring lightning-fast loading times and a seamless shopping experience across the globe.

Let’s explain this with an example.

An entrepreneur runs a jewelry store. The web designs are amazing, but she has noticed high bounce rates and a lot of abandoned carts. The culprit? Product images are loading too slowly, and checkout is laggy for international customers. This is not a unique story; many eCommerce stores face this problem.

We’ll discuss how CDNs can be properly leveraged to make visiting that jewelry store from the example (and your online store) a great experience.

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.

With Google having a clear bias towards big media publishers (trustworthy, authority sites) and thousands of mediocre AI content published daily, how do you fight for those top places in search engine results in 2024?

Even if your business isn’t global, every language you add to your eCommerce platform increases the number of people who can use your services or products.

Nearly 73% of consumers said they would be more inclined to buy a product with information in their language. In comparison, 56.2% said that the ability to obtain information in their language is more important than price.

And it makes sense.

Imagine you’re in a foreign country where no one speaks your language. There is a certain level of anxiety when you purchase something, right? And it feels great when you finally find someone who speaks your language.

So it goes without saying that it is a great business move. At first glance, becoming a multilingual online store may seem complicated and impossible, but with the right tools, it’s trouble-free.

Often critiqued for NOT delivering on a promise of transforming front-end development, since its release in 2013, React JS has been under the fray of the dev world.

Last year's annual State of JS report on front-end frameworks and libraries survey showed interest may be falling, but React usage is growing (source link). Furthermore, insights from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023 reinforce React's position in the ecosystem as the most loved web framework, with a notable percentage of developers either using it or expressing interest in using it shortly (source link).

While we wait on fresh stats, one could argue it is the framework of the web. Still, web development is an ever-changing beast. Yesterday's underdogs are today's hyped frameworks/libraries/approaches/architectures/concepts _________________(add anything here).

Not long ago, most businesses relied on monolithic solutions for content management (CMS) and eCommerce with coupled front and back end. That became a problem as new screens, markets, and channels emerged. The rise of headless architecture allowed businesses to think differently.

New technologies/frameworks significantly simplify the web development, management, and distribution processes while allowing for better reach, performance, and the web in general.

Why are we mentioning this here? Well, if you know React and are ready to take advantage of headless architecture in your blog or online store, all you'll need is a static site generator to get you going  (so to speak).

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.

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.

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.

The global eCommerce sales for 2023 surpassed $6.5 trillion for all online products (source). What can we expect this year? Well, can't be sure about the exact number, but I feel it will only go up.

While this rapid growth means more opportunities, it also means tougher competition where only the best make it. I've read somewhere you need to sell where everyone scrolls, searches, and shops. It's only partially true because you need to sell where YOUR audience is scrolling, searching, and shopping, not everyone.

How do you do that?

I'm glad you asked. With an effective marketing strategy that helps your businesses increase brand awareness, drive traffic, generate leads, and ultimately boost sales and revenue.

That's easier said than done🤔

While it is never good when you have to explain why you are doing something, this article (kind of) deserves it because it has been in the making for quite some time and comes as a sum of conversations with our clients and my personal meandering past and present experiences. The article is tailored for emerging eCommerce ventures and seasoned brands aiming to enhance their digital footprint. It's crucial to acknowledge the unique nature of each business, which means that not all strategies discussed may align with your specific business model and use case.

The key takeaway for you is to use this article as a starting point for developing a strategic framework that will help your business increase website traffic and elevate revenue.

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?

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?

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.

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).

Are you considering going headless with your project/business? Good🤘

The headless commerce surge continues redefining the eCommerce landscape, offering enhanced flexibility, better performance, and tailored customer experiences. However, getting all stakeholders on board with the idea of adopting headless architecture (or rather moving away from known monolith solutions) is not always easy.

To help you plead the case to your team, we did in-depth research on the current state and trends in adopting headless and gathered statistics that underscore the momentum headless commerce is gaining. We'll lay it all here and let you asses and interpret the stats.

Let’s dive in!

In the rapid and ever-evolving world of eCommerce, keeping a grasp on product information is imperative for businesses to thrive. Product Information Management (PIM) platforms are at the forefront of this endeavor, offering companies unparalleled organization, efficiency, and scalability.

The 21st-century consumer is discerning and well-informed and demands immediacy with a personal touch and feel while navigating seamlessly between online and offline channels. For businesses, this means maintaining an accurate, updated, and consistent database of product information is a must, and this is becoming an arduous task, especially for enterprises with vast product portfolios spread across multiple channels (we really did not want to say Excell sheets 🫨).

The eCommerce space is animated with various business models, each with its unique set of advantages, challenges, and requisites, making it hard to identify which is the best fit for your use case.

What follows is a mish-mash of research, dry definitions, suggestions gathered from our clients, and our in-house and world-famous brand examples in an article to help you make that decision a little easier.

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).

To begin, it's essential to make sure we understand what GraphQL is. It's a technology developed by Facebook in 2012 to address their issues with mobile platforms. One of the technologies they were trying to use, REST, was not performing well in their particular setup, so they decided to replace it with a homegrown solution. GraphQL was the result. A few years later, the GraphQL specification was made open-source so that anyone could potentially benefit from it and contribute to it.

GraphQL is a query language for APIs (application programming interfaces) and a server for executing those queries. APIs are the means by which computer programs communicate with each other to exchange and manipulate data. 

REST is the most-used API architecture by far (as Postman's recent API report shows | graph is below); however, GraphQL adoption is on the rise, and many already are using it in place of REST to facilitate communication with all the different APIs that an application may have to talk to.

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.

More than a buzzword, decupled eCommerce is the future of online shopping that is already here. Let’s talk about it.

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.

Are you struggling to convert your website traffic into paying customers? Are you tired of spending hours and resources on driving traffic to your site with little to no return on investment? Then it's time to focus on Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

On-Premise and Cloud PIM, the benefits, the differences, and drawbacks of each, with examples of PIM platforms for both.

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

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.

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

In the simplest possible terms, a headless CMS is a backend content management system (CMS) that exists independently of the front end - the presentation layer.

With the number of available tech solutions, tools, architectures, and approaches to web development today, it is easy to get overwhelmed when choosing the one for your online store.

With just a couple of months before G sunsets Universal Analytics for GA4, I’ve wondered if there are any Google Analytics alternatives you might want to move to.

When it comes to managing digital content, there are two main types of systems that professional businesses use (oftentimes together): Product Information Management (PIM) systems and Content Management Systems (CMS).

Headless, composable, API-first, Remix, UI or UX-driven design, etc. Tracking development and design trends in eCommerce is both tough and rewarding at the same time.

Wondering if a multichannel approach could help you increase sales in 2023? Wonder no more, your hunch is correct: multichannel eCommerce will help you reach those goals.

In today's society of continuous technological innovation, consumers expect businesses to have a strong omnichannel strategy: they demand highly relevant and customized interactions across various platforms.

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?

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.

Raw, uncontrollable power. That’s what word-of-mouth is. Word-of-mouth marketing is what you do to create that power.

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.

Developing web applications has never been easier and more enjoyable. The open-source communities are building more and more tools that enable us, developers, to become more efficient and improve the overall developer experience (DX). Now the question becomes: which are the essential web development tools to pick in 2022?

Omnichannel commerce is all about meeting your customers where they feel comfortable shopping - and with just the right information.

It was 2006 and eCommerce was the wild west. You don't need much of a history lesson to remember how Shopify entered the market.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.