Jamstack commerce

Performance, security, and scalability are essential aspects of the internet in the 21st century, especially in the ecommerce industry. The "age of monolithic" is progressively evolving with new architectures, practices, and patterns of building applications that meet this mobile age requirement.

Now more than ever it's possible to satisfy customers with high demands, improve user experience, increase engagements, retain customers, improve sales, and positively impact businesses' revenue.

What is Jamstack?

Jamstack (Javascript, APIs, and Markup) is a modern architecture used to build modern web applications. As opposed to the traditional way of building websites where the presentation layer, server, database, and CMS are all coupled in one application, Jamstack uses the headless approach, microservices, static site generators, and content delivery networks (CDN) to serve pages to the end-user. Jamstack applications do not depend on server-side code and are served directly on a CDN as static pages, making them much faster and more secure.

With the Jamstack, websites become just plain HTML pages pre-generated by a static site generator during build time and are deployed to a CDN. Content can be created as markdown or plain text, wrapped around a template, and built into a static site. Server-side functionalities and dynamic content are encapsulated into APIs. These APIs are plugged into the application and still served as plain HTML pages. Hence, there is room for more flexibility and the use of third-party APIs to enhance development. Content can also be managed independently with the help of a headless content management system. This amazing development flow unlocks a lot of speed, performance, user experience, and developer experience advantages.

Benefits of the Jamstack

The Jamstack architecture brings a lot of benefits to how websites and applications are built. These benefits include better performance, higher security, better developer experience, and more efficient scaling.

Performance

According to Google, users will leave websites if they take longer than 3 seconds to load. Hence websites need to give users a first impression and win them over with the speed of light. A slow platform is directly proportional to reduced conversions and sales, which is bad for business. With the Jamstack pre-generating HTML files and serving them via CDNs, users' web requests become much faster to access as they won't be generated on the server at request time. This allows businesses to offer a faster user experience to customers.

Security

Jamstack architecture reduces vulnerabilities and attacks. Web pages are pre-generated and separated from servers. Without exposing your servers, your application is less exposed to any attack. The infrastructure becomes less complex and easier to debug in cases of security issues. Third-party services leveraged will also ensure more security as those services have experts who will do the heavy work and ensure their service is highly secured.

Developer Experience

It's fun to build with the Jamstack architecture. There are tons of tools, headless solutions, APIs, and more that can be utilized to build anything that runs on the web in any programming language. With an ecosystem of useful services and resources, developers can work more productively, keep using the tools they like more or experiment with new ones, and get creative in less time.

Scalability

Jamstack, by default, makes it easier to handle traffic spikes with less infrastructure cost. Serving one page to millions of users can be achieved easily by increasing bandwidth. Static pages are cached by default when the content is served, so it's closer to the user and served more quickly the next time it's requested. The entire simplicity of the Jamstack approach makes it easier to maintain and scale as the platform grows.

Benefits of the Jamstack in ecommerce

Jamstack commerce is the modern way to build web ecommerce platforms that deliver fast, secure, and better performant applications. This modern architecture fixes the issues with applications using monolithic architecture. Better performance results in higher conversions, easier scaling ends issues during traffic spikes (e.g., Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc.), and higher security makes PCI (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliance easier.

Performance determines the overall success of an ecommerce platform. Fast platforms increase revenue as opposed to slow platforms. Since more users are shopping on mobile devices, there is a need for ecommerce platforms to "speed-up" and satisfy their customers.

How Commerce Layer supports Jamstack commerce

Commerce Layer transforms a Jamstack website into an ecommerce website. Using Commerce Layer global and secured APIs, developers can build a new ecommerce website, turn an existing Jamstack site into an ecommerce site, or add multi-market capabilities to their existing Jamstack ecommerce platform served to any channel.

The traditional ways of building websites do not meet up to the standards of a fast-evolving age. The Jamstack architecture with Commerce Layer is the new way of building performant and revenue-generating ecommerce platforms on steroids that thrives.