How E-Commerce Can Deliver for Customers Who Want Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

It’s never been easier for businesses to make a sale. As the digital landscape grows, so do the pathways to consumer conversion, with shoppable opportunities integrated into everything from mobile apps and social media to smart appliances and beyond. But more digital touchpoints also mean more opportunities for technical failure—and that can have a sizable impact on the bottom line. Any number of issues can contribute to a platform slowdown or outage, from spikes in customer traffic to device misconfiguration—and such issues are exacerbated when businesses rely on legacy systems to manage their e-commerce. 

Consumers expect speed in their digital experiences, and they are less likely to repeat business with brands that lag: In a 2020 survey by data protection provider Infrascale, 37% of business leaders said they lost customers due to unexpected downtime. 

Legacy content management systems still have a tendency to view content through the lens of a web build, and this outdated handling of e-commerce can hamper performance on newer platforms, such as Pinterest, Instagram and TikTok—not to mention the amount of e-commerce that happens on mobile devices and wearables, places where there’s more limited bandwidth. 

“If I just deliver a full-fat webpage to something that was never designed for that purpose, like the smart screen on my fridge, it’s just going to inherently cause slowdowns, or maybe even crash the application,” says John Graham, a solutions strategist at Contentful.

The Contentful Composable Content Platform is an innovative alternative to legacy applications. Using a modular approach to e-commerce, Contentful allows teams to create smaller, more granular content that can be served on its own, or mixed and matched. This greatly reduces the bandwidth needed when publishing content on multiple channels, improving performance across the entire omnichannel ecosystem. 

Contentful employs an API-first approach, which is inherently more flexible than a traditional CMS. Legacy tools disappoint by trying to be all things to all people—an e-commerce platform, a marketing website and a community engagement platform all in one. 

Additionally, most monolithic CMS platforms can only be extended through rigid, specialized tools that require extensive amounts of time and resources to learn, making it difficult or impossible to integrate microservices that might be more efficient and up-to-date. 

Rather than invest resources in building out functionalities that other SaaS providers do well, Contentful partners with those providers and gives teams the freedom to integrate a wide range of specialized apps, including commerce apps like Commercetools and Shopify, and AI-powered customer engagement apps like Twilio Segment. 

“Any time you’re dependent on a software vendor, you’re at the mercy of their product team,” says Graham. “API-first allows any individual company the freedom to take a platform and build on top of that.”

For companies to stay relevant and commercially viable, it’s vital that they stay on top of e-commerce trends, whether that means exploring shoppable augmented reality activations or building commerce opportunities into YouTube videos. 

The way to ensure strong performance on each channel is not to invest vast resources, but to start small and create effective solutions. API-first platforms help businesses do just that by giving them a sandbox in which to experiment and common tooling that is easily reused many times across different platforms and experiences.

Using an API-first composable architecture allows businesses to select the highest-performing services for any given application. Additionally, modern architectural approaches, like those used for JAMStack applications, increase performance by pre-rendering content before visitors hit the page. 

Contentful also has protections in place to ensure that traffic spikes don’t cause any system to come crashing down. By using cloud-based auto-scaling, Contentful automatically balances workloads across multiple redundant services and hardware, so that when there is a spike in traffic, it automatically assigns extra resources to absorb demand. 

“When something goes viral or when the market explodes, you have to be able to move quickly,” says Graham. “We’ve really put a lot of thought into ensuring that anything we build is built to scale. We're so confident, in fact, that we make our response and uptime data publicly available on our site.”