Top Advantages of Microservices for Your eCommerce Business

Do You Feel Constrained By Fixed Deployments?

Microservices-based eCommerce architecture offers flexibility and agility, due to which it is better than traditional monolithic eCommerce architecture. They allow businesses to build and deploy services at their own pace. Hence, it makes the system more flexible, versatile and elevates its visibility. But how does the Microservices approach help your business? Let’s look into some statistics first.

According to a survey conducted in the UK, almost 60% of the respondents felt that changing IT architecture for an eCommerce platform was a complex operation. However, a 2020 report reveals that 77% of the respondents have incorporated some microservices platform, and 92% are experiencing increased business growth. These figures showcase microservices’ ultimate ability to help you meet fast-evolving customer demands, such as consistent services across multiple touchpoints personalization. Let’s understand the concept of Microservices and how they create a positive impact on a business.

What are Microservices?

Microservices are standalone, loosely bound applications that can be devised and deployed independently. Yes, they won’t cause an impact on the rest of the applications. Unlike traditional horizontal structures, microservices showcase a cross-functional structure with vertical teams. When microservices combine with online businesses, they make them more manageable, flexible, and agile. Hence, if a company is struggling to deal with a stringent architecture, one can resolve it with the help of microservices.

With the recent architectural evolution in eCommerce, you get more opportunities to develop hyper-personalized customer experience and seamless functionality. But how did this evolution take place? The ever-changing customer needs have led to this evolution in eCommerce architecture. Since then, several companies have rushed to deploy at the earliest with fewer incidents. Even today, the complicated and rigid monolithic application that many businesses use is gradually being substituted by Microservices.

What are the Benefits of the Microservices Platform?

1. Microservices are more effortless to scale: Microservices are separate elements that work individually. It is more comfortable to scale the whole function and enhance the overall performance of the entire application without scaling the whole business application.
2. Categorized responsibility: Teams are allotted various duties for specific microservices to offer more accuracy and advanced services. It also helps in enhancing team productivity and competence.
3. Expertise: Microservices offer elasticity when using a relevant tool for a particular task. You don’t have to rely on a single vendor! It also enables you to use its framework, language, and other ancillary services.
4. Teams work separately, enabling faster deployment: With microservices, cross-team dependency has been diminished. The loosely coupled services allow combining or modifying a feature without writing the entire codebase again. The specific services are individually testable and deployable. Therefore, a team can get its application faster in the market. 
5. Cost-Effective because of reduced downtime: Microservices provide swift deployment; hence, developers get more time to implement code reusability because the total time for development is reduced. Decoupling also allows you to reduce your infrastructure costs and improve overall efficacy.
6. A failed service shall not harm the other applications working independently: Your whole application is an arrangement of microservices decoupled and decentralized into services that work exclusively. Therefore, a failure in the code will not affect the respective service; it may cause a negligible impact.
7. Decreased software complexity: With confined functionality, managing and updating microservices is so much more manageable. For an E-commerce Business, the transformation from a monolithic architecture to microservices is therefore beneficial.

Is Headless Different from Microservices in Retail?

The compliance provided by microservices architecture helps an E-commerce Business to respond to market trends and customer expectations promptly. Not only for the company, but the loosely coupled microservices platform is also beneficial for the developers. Certain system elements are decoupled with headless, but microservices architecture provides a platform and service-driven architecture that can completely decouple. It also provides:

• Implementation of various new touchpoints to the frontend
• Headless systems that allow multiple frontends to work on one backend system.
• A decentralized development cycle offers rapid performance.
• Grants an effective technology stack that gives you the freedom to pick the functionalities and features essential for your business
• The frontend is segregated from the backend; therefore, the frontend traffic does not stir the backend.

Takeaway

As discussed above, the benefits of commercetools’ microservices involve better security, new features, lesser time to market, seamless implementation method, elasticity, and easy outsourcing. Depending upon the business requirement of the retailers, they can create social media channels or custom online shops. These are self-contained applications that can be curated and managed whenever there is a demand. 

Traditional architectures may have helped several businesses to get up and operate with limited technical knowledge. However, such architectures are too slow and rigid for turning a business into an industry-leading enterprise. To shake up the entire market and outsmart competitors, small and medium-size companies need Microservices. Once they introduce microservices architecture into their company, they can influence management, develop agility, and enhance productivity. It can foster an agile way of working as it helps businesses quickly adapt to new market needs.

About the Author

Pamela Martinez is a writer for The European Business Review. She is dedicated to crafting timely blog pieces about business acumen, changing leadership dynamics, emerging finance and technology trends, global breakthroughs and how these spaces intersect from a millennial’s perspective. She also works as an editor and content strategist and the sister publications of The European Business Review.