According to 2020 Salesforce research, 80% of customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its product or service. Hence, for ecommerce businesses to succeed in 2021, they must prepare themselves to adopt the latest marketing trends sooner rather than later. Matt Bradbeer, MACH business lead, EPAM Systems, talks about how headless technology can result in improve business agility and lead to a better, omnichannel customer experience.
Ecommerce, done properly, is the greatest of equalizers for businesses of every size and shape. But where that equality becomes a little cloudy — like Animal Farm cloudy — is in the costly, monolithic enterprise software platforms that have traditionally been the foundation of most ecommerce ecosystems. Modern technology has evolved, enabling new ways to think about and do business. This is why we have started the MACH AllianceOpens a new window to help companies take advantage of the most innovative and flexible enterprise technologies available and break the traditional software release cycle.
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It is no secret how much we love our acronyms in the software development world, especially the ones that sound cool but do not quite seem to match up with what they really mean. So, what does MACH really mean for you and your best ecommerce practices?
- Microservices: Individual pieces of business functionality that are independently developed, deployed, and managed
- API first: All functionality is exposed through an API
- Cloud-native: SaaS that leverages the cloud, beyond storage and hosting, including elastic scaling and automatically updating
- Headless: Front-end presentation is decoupled from back-end logic and channel, programming language, and is framework-agnostic
That last pillar of the MACH philosophy is where most businesses can see the most immediate positive impact. The key importance of going ‘Headless’ is that it enables the business to control the layer with which the customers or the end-users engage. This will also free up business teams to deliver experiences to customers and end-users that you cannot necessarily do when your head is controlled by the back end. It is one of the easiest ways to start the journey toward adopting the MACH approach. This is because you are not trying to break down what is in the middle, which frees up that experience layer before you start tackling some of the bigger, more expensive things underneath.
Because of that renewed focus on the customer experience, the real beauty of headless ecommerce is that it breaks down the usual silos within a business and allows everyone to get involved, which, in turn, creates an even better customer experience. It is revolutionary because it allows you to bring in your business development, graphic design, marketing, and customer service teams and let them have that whole presentation layer. You do not need to worry about release schedules dictated by back-end architecture anymore. You do not need to worry about code freezes. That really changes the way your entire business operates. This is because now you have got the freedom to rapidly create new content and new experiences for your customers and users and quickly realize that value back into your business.
Of course, the other side of the headless coin is that all of this brave new development still has to be done responsibly. Suppose you have got fundamental functionality around how you are delivering products, the actual capability of your commerce platform, or whatever your transactional platform is, going headless is not going to fix that. One mistake people make is that they oversell what it is going to achieve because they have got unrealistic ideas about what can actually be done. As a business, you are no longer tied down by development teams, but before you make that change to the homepage, do some research about what your customers want and how they are behaving. That is where insight and behavioral data become really important. But the larger point is that either way, no single change is going to break your system, so you have the freedom to experiment, analyze and then go back to the table to make adjustments — all with the customer in mind. And either way, it certainly beats the alternative.
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That alternative may seem obviously bad and ripe for change. But all too often, the old way of doing things is held in place by the crushing weight of bureaucracy and sunken cost. For instance, in the early days of PayPal, a larger company could spend something like 18 months on integration because the process involved numerous code releases, gates, and committees. But those security concerns were primarily based on an insufficient understanding of how PayPal works. On top of that, because of the time involved, the finished product was almost obsolete by the time it finally went live, but they still had to deliver it because there was also so much cost involved.
By contrast, a smaller business using a MACH ecommerce development philosophy could get the same result literally in minutes because the process is agnostic. And because it is also so quick and flexible, that smaller, more agile company gets to skip ahead to the good part — the part where it starts making more money. There is still a cost associated with it, but it is a composable cost where the business has more freedom around how it is arranged and where it goes. It is like a symphony where your content and data are the notes, and those notes are agnostic until you create that symphony. Done right, it will be music to your ears.