Optimizing Ecommerce Performance and Scalability with MACH Architecture

The goal of ecommerce is to provide customers with what they want: faster loading, good navigation, and personalized interactions. That's what ecommerce is all about. Most online shoppers won't return to a website if they have a bad experience.

It's no surprise that MACH architecture is becoming increasingly popular. This modern strategy helps ecommerce platforms perform better and scale more easily. It uses microservices, API-first design, cloud-native solutions, and headless capabilities. This makes platforms more flexible and responsive to changes, which improves the customer experience.

Performance and scalability: indispensable in ecommerce

It would be fair to say that performance and scalability are two sides of the same coin when it comes to running a successful ecommerce business. Both performance and scalability have an important bearing on how customers experience your website, the revenue you generate, and how your brand is perceived.

Performance reflects the speed and smoothness of how your site works, while scalability deals with how well the site handles more visitors and demand when your business starts to pick up. By focusing on both of these core areas, you may find that you create a much better shopping experience for your customers, drive more sales, and build a strong reputation. Let's take a closer look at why we believe these factors are so vital:

Faster loading times = more sales

We all love a fast and easy website to navigate, don't we? It makes us feel good when we can get what we want without any fuss. And that's exactly what makes customers more likely to make purchases.

You may not know that 53% of mobile users will leave your site if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Yes, you heard that right. The faster your website loads, the more likely customers are to complete a purchase. It's estimated that every 1 second delay in page load time can reduce conversions by up to 7%. It's not just about convenience, it's a sales driver.

Handling traffic surges with scalability

Your ecommerce platform should be ready for the inevitable spike in traffic that comes with high-demand periods such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Christmas sales.

A scalable website will not go down or slow down, allowing customers to shop smoothly even on the busiest days. For example, Amazon received more than 175 million visitors on Prime Day in 2023 - just imagine what would have happened on a less scalable website.

SEO benefits for visibility

A fast website keeps your customers happy, yes, but it also actually helps you rank higher on Google. Page speed is a key ranking factor, and faster sites get more visibility. As 8.5 billion searches happen on Google every single day, so the faster your site goes, the more visibility your site will get, meaning more visitors and opportunities to grow your business.

Reduced downtime = more opportunities

Downtime is a business killer. The average cost of downtime for an ecommerce site can be as much as $5,600 per minute, according to a study. With a scalable infrastructure, your site experiences fewer disruptions, ensuring that your business remains operational 24/7. That means more time for growth and less worrying about technical issues.

Standing out with a fast, scalable platform

The digital marketplace is crowded, with millions of ecommerce websites competing for attention. By focusing on performance and scalability, you can differentiate your brand and enhance customer loyalty. 82% of consumers say that they’re more likely to return to a website that provides a fast and seamless experience.

Business growth and market expansion

A scalable ecommerce platform is like a engine for your business. It helps you grow by expanding into new markets, releasing new products, or taking your operations to a global audience. Scalability gives you the resources you need to match increased demand. For example, Shopify powers more than 4.1 million businesses globally, supporting companies of all sizes – from small startups to large enterprises.

As you see, these 2 concepts represent the essential elements that contribute to a company's success. Our online marketplace development services are designed with your success in mind. We'll make sure your platform is fast and scalable, so you can focus on what matters most: delighting your customers and growing your business.

Optimizing ecommerce performance with MACH architecture

With online shopping becoming so popular, the pressure to perform is more important than ever.

Optimizing your ecommerce with MACH architecture can be a significant improvement for customers. Each of the elements in MACH is there to help make your ecommerce platform perform at its best. MACH is seamless, responsive, and offers speed and reliability. Plus, you can personalize interactions and adapt to changing customer preferences in real time.

Paying attention to these focal areas will help you connect with your audience, foster loyalty, and promote sustainable growth in the marketplace.

Performance monitoring for microservices

Keep an eye on how the different microservices are performing, especially when it comes to response times and how they're using resources. This is really important for ecommerce because how the customer experiences the site affects sales.

Monitoring helps you see which microservices are under the most strain, so you can make targeted fixes to keep everything running smoothly during peak shopping times.

APIs for quick data access

APIs make ecommerce performance better by letting different parts of a business talk to each other and to other systems. They let you see the latest data in real time, so you know what's available, what the prices are, and who your customers are. This means your site loads quickly and it's easy to buy things.

Optimized APIs can cut latency and make it easier for customers to use your site, which improves their shopping experience and makes them return for more.

Cloud-native architecture for scaling on demand

Cloud-native architecture is a great way to make sure your ecommerce performance is always on point. It offers dynamic scalability of services depending on demand, so you don't have to worry about scaling your entire application. Instead, you can focus on scaling particular services that you know will be in high demand when high volumes of traffic come your way—like during holiday sales or promotional events.

This approach helps you make the most of your resources and save on costs, too. Your ecommerce platform can easily handle more traffic without any hiccups, so your customers get a great experience every time.

Headless commerce for flexible user experiences

Headless commerce is about making ecommerce performance better by separating the way it looks from the way it works: backend from frontend. Thus, letting brands be more flexible in sharing content and experiences across lots of different channels, including websites, mobile apps, and social media.

The headless approach means you can respond quickly to what customers want and add new features without affecting how your backend runs.

Boosting ecommerce scalability with MACH architecture

Scalability isn't just a nice-to-have, it's a must-have if you want to come out on top in the competition.

MACH architecture is designed with the end user in mind, offering businesses a flexible and modular system that can be easily adapted to new technologies and changing customer needs.

This'll help you respond quickly to what your customers want, make their shopping experience better, and set up your business for long-term growth – no matter what the market does next.

Microservices for independent scaling

Each microservice can be scaled independently based on demand. For example, during high-traffic events like Black Friday, you can scale up services related to product browsing and checkout without affecting other parts of the system.

By the way, this modular approach lets businesses make sure they're only paying for the resources they need, which helps keep costs down while performance stays consistent.

API-first for seamless integration

With an API-first design, you can easily add third-party services like payment processors, shipping providers, and inventory management systems. This is great for scaling your operations without having to rewrite the whole system.

As your ecommerce needs change, it's easy to add or change APIs, letting your platform grow with new services and tech.

Cloud-native for elastic scalability

Cloud-native infrastructure automatically adjusts to meet demand in real time. This means your ecommerce platform won't crash when you get a sudden spike in traffic, so your customers can enjoy a smooth experience.

Most cloud services are available on a pay-as-you-go basis, which helps businesses manage their costs effectively while scaling up or down resources as needed.

Headless for frontend flexibility

By separating the frontend from the backend, businesses can quickly add new frontend technology or redesign user interfaces without affecting backend operations. This flexibility is key to scaling user experience across multiple channels, including web, mobile, and social media.

Headless architecture lets you create experiences that can grow and change along with what your customers want, which helps them engage with your brand and ultimately make purchases.

5 best practices to optimize ecommerce with MACH architecture

Codica’s experts have put together some great tips to help you get the most out of your ecommerce solution using MACH architecture.

1. Optimize API usage and efficiency

A study by Google found that 53% of mobile site visitors may abandon a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. It may therefore be helpful to consider API usage optimization not just from the perspective of performance, but also from that of potential operational cost reduction.

By designing light and purposeful APIs, you may find that data flow between your microservices and the frontend is more efficient, which could in turn lead to a faster and more intuitive user experience.

• Design for efficient APIs. RESTful or GraphQL APIs are great for keeping the payload size to a minimum because they only return the data that's needed.
• Rate limiting. Set limits on rates to stop people from abusing the system and make sure resources are shared fairly.
• Batch requests. Let the client group a bunch of requests into one API call to speed things up and improve performance.

2. Implement load balancing and auto-scaling

Research shows that 79% of online shoppers who have a bad experience with a site are unlikely to come back. If you don't have the right load balancing and auto-scaling in place, your site could crash. This could mean lost sales and unhappy customers.

• Load balancers. Set up load balancers to spread the incoming traffic across multiple servers. That way, no single server will get overloaded.
• Auto-scaling. Set up auto-scaling rules based on what you see in your traffic and server performance metrics so you can adjust resources as needed.

Use a load balancer to distribute the incoming traffic across your servers so there's no single point of failure. You'll get very high uptimes of performance, with auto-scaling that adjusts resources according to real-time demand while remaining responsive to peaks in load. This, in turn, further enables a superior shopping experience for your customers.

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3. Containerization for microservices

As your ecommerce platform expands, managing multiple microservices can become quite complex. It's been shown that around 90% of organizations use containers in production, according to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). This observation appears to align with the broader trend of transitioning towards a microservices-oriented architectural approach.

• Container usage. Microservices shall be deployed in containers, for instance, Podman or Docker, in an effort to ensure consistency across different environments and to simplify deployments.
• Orchestration tools. Utilize container orchestration tools, like Kubernetes, that will keep the containers working and highly available, and the scaling will not be a challenge at all.

Containerization is a good solution that makes things easier in many ways, by enclosing each microservice and its dependencies in a self-sufficient environment. This increases consistency across different environments, such as development and testing or production. It also ensures deployment processes go smoothly.

Tools like Docker and Kubernetes support ecommerce microservices scaling, allowing for easy adjustments up or down while ensuring resilience and maintaining operational efficiency.

4. Caching strategies for faster response times

Akamai definitively states that with each additional 100 milliseconds of load time, the conversion rate is hurt by 7%. Effective caching will bring a great increase in responsiveness to your platform and allow users to shop with ease.

• Edge caching. It may be beneficial to consider using content delivery networks to cache static content at edge locations as a way of potentially reducing user load times across the globe. Examples of caching systems include CDNs like Akamai and Cloudflare, server-side solutions like Varnish and Redis, and client-side options like Service Workers and Local Storage.
• API caching. It may be beneficial to store API responses when possible to avoid redundant processing and reduce data retrieval time.
• Database caching. Use in-memory data stores like Redis to cache frequently accessed data and reduce loads on the database.

Caching data at various layers – from static assets to API responses and even to frequent database queries – will reduce server loads and latency, which will help you reduce page load times. This will also lead to increased conversions since users will not abandon their carts due to slow response times.

5. Monitor and optimize regularly

You have to continuously improve your responsive ecommerce platform to keep it functional. As reported in Forbes, data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain customers, and 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result.

• Performance monitoring. Monitor your response times, uptimes, and error rates with tools like New Relic or Datadog.
• A/B testing. Test the changes regularly to identify the best performance improvement from optimization.
• Feedback loops. Establish feedback loops with stakeholders and users. This is the only way to continuously understand the system and make improvements.

Monitoring regularly is the key to understanding performance bottlenecks, user behavior trends, and minor issues before they cause serious problems. Analytics and monitoring toolkits provide the insight you need to optimize your system's performance under any conditions.

This data-driven approach ensures informed decisions about optimizations and enhancements that keep your platform competitive and responsive to customer needs.

Future trends in MACH architecture that will transform ecommerce

MACH architecture represents the future of ecommerce - agile, connected and customer-centric - driving the innovation and adaptability that will be required for success well into the future.

• Mainstream headless commerce. Decoupling the frontend from the backend can offer full customisation to the retailer, enabling rapid implementation by retailers and seamless adoption of new interfaces across multiple channels.
• Better API ecosystems. The future will be all about service connectivity through APIs, shared data that improves the customer experience.
• Personalized customer experience. Personalisation with a focus on diversity will tailor experiences, offers and communications to individual preferences.
• Sustainability and ethics. As consumers become more environmentally conscious, the MACH architecture can make inventory management lean with real-time data to minimize waste and attract environmentally conscious consumers.
• Improved security protocols. As such, in the face of advanced threats from cyberspaces, ecommerce has no option but to direct its attention to very advanced security measures. And the MACH architecture will support robust protocols at every microservice level to protect sensitive customer data.

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Turning insights into action

The MACH architecture is a great fit for ecommerce businesses.

By embracing microservices, API-first design, cloud-native infrastructure, and headless commerce, you can build a flexible, responsive ecommerce platform that adapts to changing market demands and customer expectations. And there's more: you can go further in optimization, going into the best practices for API fine-tuning, load balancing, containerization, proper caching, and monitoring on a continuous basis.

With 9 years of experience in the software development industry, Codica’s experts are ready to help you meet customer expectations with MACH architecture.

Let’s take what we’ve figured out and turn it into a strategy for lasting success in your online store. Got any questions? We'd love to hear from you. Contact us.