Product & Software Development Archives - Page 2 of 2

Headless With Shogun Frontend To Reduce Tech Dependency

Posted on March 21, 2022February 13, 2024 by admin

Headless & Composable

As an eCommerce store operator, if you haven’t heard of, or considered headless as an option for your store, now might be a good time to do so. Headless, along with composable commerce, is promising to enable a flexible eCommerce ecosystem for modern commerce. Several factors make these newer paradigms necessary or at least desirable. In short, headless is about having a custom front end with better speed and user experience than is possible with the bundled front end that comes with platforms. Composable commerce lets you strip and replace specific parts of your eCommerce backend when newer innovations happen. For example, let’s say there’s a much better product discovery platform in the market. Using composable commerce, you could strip out the existing discovery product and replace it without affecting anything else. Our blog on headless and composable commerce explains in detail what it is and its advantages for beginners.

Headless Without Composable

The two paradigms are used together in many ways, including the newly formed MACH Alliance. However, they are not necessarily tied together. Composable commerce is a much more significant investment. We expect only the enterprises and larger mid-market companies to shift to composable commerce in the short term.

However, headless is a much smaller investment and has more immediate gains for stores of all sizes. Gains such as user experience and site speed, both of which are becoming not something desirable but necessary to survive in a competitive market. Headless can be implemented on top of any platform that supports an API like BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, or Shopify.

Shogun Frontend

However, headless implementation is not without downsides. One of the most significant downsides of a headless implementation is that any changes require the assistance of a technology team. Enter, Shogun Frontend, a platform that enables developers to create a custom frontend while allowing business and marketing users to edit content as needed without the technology team’s assistance. The folks at Shogun adopted PWA to make these sites superfast, giving stores an added boost in SEO ratings.

atmosol is a Certified Partner of Shogun Frontend

atmosol has been building eCommerce stores using platforms like BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, or Shopify for over 16 years.

Headless & Composable

Headless Without Composable

The two paradigms are used together in many ways, including the newly formed MACH Alliance. However, they are not necessarily tied together. Composable commerce is a much more significant investment. We expect enterprises and larger mid-market companies to shift to composable commerce in the short term.

However, headless is a much smaller investment and has more immediate gains for stores of all sizes. Gains such as user experience and site speed are becoming not something desirable but necessary to survive in a competitive market. Headless can be implemented on top of any platform that supports an API like BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, or Shopify.

Shogun Frontend

However, headless implementation is not without downsides. One of the most significant downsides of a headless implementation is that any changes require the assistance of a technology team. Enter Shogun Frontend is a platform that enables developers to create a custom frontend while allowing business and marketing users to edit content without the technology team’s assistance. The folks at Shogun adopted PWA to make these sites superfast, giving stores an added boost in SEO ratings.

atmosol is a Certified Partner of Shogun Frontend

atmosol has been building eCommerce stores using platforms like BigCommerce, Adobe Commerce, or Shopify for over 16 years. We’ve also worked with Shogun’s page builder on BigCommerce and Shopify for several years. Over a decade of experience building SaaS products using frontend technologies like React and Angular. This puts us in a unique position to have strong expertise in both areas and well placed to build headless stores.

We’ve also been building these products on the cloud using micro-services for a long time, thus enabling us to adapt even to composable commerce quickly. All these aspects made it an obvious choice for us and Shogun to partner and get atmosol certified to take our clients on a journey of better user experience and speed. So, here’s to a great partnership and next-level user experience for our clients!

5 Steps to SaaS Software Success

Posted on November 10, 2021February 13, 2024 by admin

November 10, 2021

If you are reading this article, I suspect you either have or are thinking of embarking on building a SaaS product. While there are no guarantees in entrepreneurship except for the thrill of being in it, I hope my experiences in this area accumulated over the last 15 years help you avoid some common pitfalls that I have not seen discussed much.

1. Let Sales & Marketing Plan Guide MVP

I am at the frontlines of sales and I get to speak a lot of entrepreneurs who seem to have great ideas that they want built. In most cases, clients would like a prototype built which then leads to an MVP. The most successful of our clients I have seen have already made a detailed plan on how they will market and sell the product before they even think of what goes into the prototype or MVP, and those thoughts guide what features are built first.

This, in my opinion, is very important because money is usually tight in the beginning and one has to ruthlessly prune unnecessary features and create the necessary ones really well. Being from a technology background, I have made the mistake of building product features before thinking of sales and have had to pivot unnecessarily.

2. Expect to Fail and Be Ready to Pivot

Which brings me to my next tip, which is to expect to pivot even if you have a solid plan. Many an entrepreneur have built products after discussions with several potential users, having gotten good feedback on the idea, and have still struggled to find paying customers.

One great strategy to reduce the risk of failure is to have a plan B or at least an option for a plan B. Many products have parts that can be used in other segments, and sometimes the “other segments” might be more successful.

Here’s an example. Inncrewin (now atmosol) built instagathering.com to bring easy event booking to consumers. While we have had moderate success in that segment, we realized and have been able to capitalize on the significantly more demand from corporate clients for our service by tweaking the product.

3. A CTO or a Trustworthy Tech Partner Does Help

Pivoting software can give entrepreneurs and software a second life, but it’s not always easy, even if there is a B segment to sell to. The software must be built correctly to easily pivot into new segments. Let me take another example to illustrate this.

Let’s say you are building a CRM system for a specific business segment. If the software is built as a generic CRM and then specialized to the segment, it can easily be pivoted to another segment by simply changing the specialization. For this and many other reasons, a CTO or a really trustworthy technology partner enhances the chances of success unless the entrepreneur has deep technical knowledge.

4. User Experience Makes or Breaks

I talked about pivoting when the original idea doesn’t seem to work, but one has to be careful about the real reason for the lack of adoption. Before pivoting to another segment, think hard about the product’s usability.

A usability test with your target audience is well worth the time and money if possible and affordable. If you can’t get users from your segment, even crowd-sourced usability tests can be helpful.

Modern SaaS users are accustomed to and expect user experiences that are unambiguous and seamless and are easily put off by clunky experiences.

5. Build to Scale

Now let’s say you avoid all the pitfalls and can sell your products successfully. Are you sure you can support all the new users on your platform? I have heard many entrepreneurs say, “That will be a good problem to have,” or “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there”.

If you know technology well enough though, you will know that reality can be quite different. Most SaaS software is now hosted on public clouds like Azure, AWS, or Google, which makes scaling easy. Or does it?

While it’s possible to have more server horsepower at the click of a button, how your software can use the real scaling capabilities will determine how well you can scale. So, make sure someone on your team is thinking of cloud architecture and not just hosting “somewhere” on the cloud.

Everything you need to know about Saas vs On-premise

Posted on April 1, 2019August 1, 2023 by admin

Which eCommerce Solution is Better for Your Business?

Whether you’re first starting out on your eCommerce journey, or you’ve made the decision to switch to a different shopping platform, deciding on what provider to use is an important decision.

From the site load time, to the protection of data, to the assisting of your growth, your choice of ecommerce platform affects much more than just the initial or on-going cost.

The decision usually starts with a choice between leveraging a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, which means outsourcing hosting and back-end management to a company specializing in ecommerce, or to select a platform that gives you the responsibility for all or some maintenance, like a fully on-premise solution or an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution.

When making your choice, you’re probably wondering which type of platform is better for your overall business costs, integrations with other platforms, and compliance.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the differences between ecommerce platforms to help you determine which is better for your business.

How much will the platform cost?

Cost is always going to be a determining factor in business — usually, it’s the most important. The cost difference between on-premise and SaaS ecommerce platforms can be significant.

Forrester estimates that 80% of on-premise spending goes toward maintenance, while 20% is used for new projects and initiatives.

SaaS platforms offer a couple of major cost savings:

The economics of scale — hosting software in the cloud is cost-saving, the same way that businesses going digital save on printer and paper costs. Moving to technology rather than on-premise maintenance takes less material and development.
Unlike on-premise platforms that require a high up-front cost, SaaS platforms grow with you — costs are smaller when you’re smaller, and they grow as your business ramps up to add more complexity and requirements.
The lifetime cost of SaaS platforms is significantly lower than other solutions, primarily due to the complexity and cost of building and maintaining an in-house data center.

How can I customize the platform?

It’s important that your site reflects your brand voice, both in images and in text, especially if you want to stand above your competition. From a user experience standpoint, you need to ensure that your site is easy to navigate and quickly gets visitors the information they need to purchase a product (convert).

It will be easier to create a well-designed site if you choose a platform that offers front-end flexibility. With a skilled design and development team, Magento and other on-premise / IaaS solutions can offer complete customization. They can also help your business manage its own development and deployment cycles. The Magento system is complex and requires development professionals with Magento-specific certification — so make sure you vet the partners you hire.

On-premise and IaaS platforms used to be the top choice for companies seeking customization — and sometimes they still are, but today’s SaaS platforms are fully equipped to meet the needs of your business. SaaS platforms are purpose-built for designers and developers to quickly build customized and branded ecommerce sites that help users convert.

Will the platform still work when my brand grows?

Everyone should expect their company to grow, so it’s important to consider scalability as part of your platform decision. IaaS, on-premise and SaaS platforms are all scalable, but the speed, cost, and ease of scaling is different.

For many growing companies, SaaS is the right choice because it eliminates the infrastructure costs and concerns that are associated with scaling.

How quickly will my store get up and running?

When it comes to launching a site, the clock is always ticking. Patience is a virtue, but it’s important to factor in the time to market.

Going into a build that isn’t fully SaaS is more of a marathon than a sprint. You’ll need to select and build the infrastructure, make staffing hires, implement security solutions, and make many other key decisions before beginning the design and development process.

With a SaaS platform, you start at the design and development stage, which can reduce your time to market by weeks or even months.

On-premise launches typically take about two to four times longer than SaaS launches.

Every company is subject to a massive amount of scrutiny when it comes to security and compliance. This is understandable when you consider the volume of credit card data that passes through databases while people are shopping online.

Will my customer’s data be secure?

Ensuring your ecommerce platform is as secure as possible means keeping up with security patches, updates, and PCI compliance standards.

Since neither type of platform (SaaS or on-premise) is inherently safer, your decision will rely on whether you prefer to have control over updates and compliance auditing or whether you want to pass off that responsibility to an ecommerce provider.

Conclusion

For mid-sized companies, the choice between SaaS, IaaS, and on-premise is not terribly difficult. In addition to being more cost-effective, SaaS ecommerce platforms save time, complexity, headcount, and a great deal of uncertainty—all of which add up to a compelling packaged solution for growing businesses.

Where the decision becomes more complicated is for larger organizations, for which staffing, expense, and complexity are less of an obstacle. On-premise solutions are endlessly flexible and give companies complete access to their source code and customer database—a benefit for enterprises who need to do real-time data mining. However, SaaS platforms are also highly customizable, are far more cost-effective, and enable enterprises to go to market much faster.

About BigCommerce

BigCommerce is the world’s leading cloud-based ecommerce platform for fast-growing and established brands. Combining enterprise functionality, an open architecture, and rich app ecosystem, BigCommerce enables businesses to grow online sales with 80% less cost, time and complexity than on-premise software.

About the Author: Corinne Watson

Corinne is a writer and researcher at BigCommerce, where she works directly with agency and technology partners to bring their tools, services and ideas to the commerce industry at large with educational content. When she’s not working, she’s creating and designing for fun online

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