Introduction

In today’s dynamic business landscape, companies must swiftly adapt to market changes, scale operations as needed, and maintain stability amid unforeseen events. The answer lies in resilient ecommerce architecture designed for scalability. Such systems can grow and adapt to meet customer demands and address market challenges, enabling merchants to expand efficiently without a significant increase in overhead.

However, resilience is not just about architecture. It is a philosophy encompassing confidence, consistency, and care. A resilient system is responsible, and built with the understanding that the customer-company relationship is always valuable and often delicate.

Now more than ever, merchants face unexpected and unprecedented events, from the latest zero-day attacks to sudden viral trends. Businesses must be poised to navigate chaos and stay focused on their long-term objectives.

The Cost of Opportunity

Every business opportunity has associated costs, whether it’s reallocating funds from one area to another or missing out due to technological shortcomings. The goal for any business is to move from being reactive to being proactive, to anticipate changing forces, and to pivot ahead of the competition.

As customer expectations rise and competition among online retailers intensifies, it becomes increasingly critical to quickly accommodate new customers and emerging needs while maintaining system reliability. It’s not enough to have a stable, reliable ecommerce platform; you need one that can support future growth.

The Evolution of Ecommerce Platforms

Today’s ecommerce platforms are extraordinarily complex, often serving as the central hub of customer experience. They must be adaptable to shifting customer desires. Historically, as systems grew larger, they became more cumbersome and resistant to change, bogged down by legacy technologies and technical debt.

These platforms required extensive redesigns and refactoring to meet new customer needs, resulting in significant opportunity costs. While such platforms might be reliable and stable, they often lack the flexibility needed for resilience and scalability.

Case Studies: Successes and Struggles

Running Haute

A mid-market fashion retailer generating $10 million in annual sales hired an agency to develop an ecommerce store using a WYSIWYG site builder. The agency quickly built and launched the site with built-in features. However, after an initial growth boost, sales plateaued. The CMO realized the need for community engagement features, such as subscription services and box drops, which were unavailable on their current platform.

Within two years of launch, the company had to re-platform, incurring additional expenses and time. They rebuilt their site with the necessary features and scaled to $25 million, but began facing issues such as slow connectivity and abandoned carts due to the technologically expensive solutions they had implemented.

Cold Stones

A B2B fast food franchisor, supporting $500 million in annual sales, aimed to scale to $1 billion and beyond. The CTO recognized the need to refresh their merchant portal, providing features such as product ordering, inventory tracking, equipment financing, onboarding, and e-learning tools. Instead of building from scratch, they adopted MACH principles: microservices, APIs, cloud hosting, and headless architectures.

This approach allowed them to construct a platform with components connected by a scalable, composable framework. As market demands shifted over the next two years, they could add new features and functionality using pre-built components, unlike the fashion retailer who had to undergo a complete rebuild.

• Introduction
• What will your next opportunity cost?
• Running haute
• Cold stones
• How to build a resilient ecommerce organization
• Adaptive architecture
• Automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning
• Elastic resource management
• Customer relationship management
• Data security and compliance
• Composability and extensibility
• Intuitive support tools
• Managed failure states
• Resilient ecommerce with BigCommerce
• Next steps

Number of Pages:

• 17 pages

Pricing: 

• Free