Decisions about design patterns and dependencies can have a profound impact on the success of your move to cloud commerce.
That’s because the inherent flexibility of cloud commerce enables rapid iterations on tight timelines. This lets you disrupt your market with new services or quickly adapt to new competitive challenges and changing marketplace realities — but to accomplish this, you need to manage dependent systems and applications very tightly.
Reaping these advantages requires a careful balance of creativity and consistency in commerce system design and dependency management. The design must account for dependencies such as third-party apps and data sources that need to come together to deliver an engaging, cohesive customer experience.
Here’s why you don’t want to overlook these often-overlooked variables in your journey to cloud commerce:
Standard Patterns Enable Fast, Nimble Designs
When you’re building a cloud commerce platform, your development teams must decide how to pull together all the platform’s components, such as APIs, microservices and SaaS tools. It’s not easy because you have so many options to choose from. This quandary extends to system design patterns — the processes your system architects and coders follow when pulling platform components together.
Meanwhile, your teams will build quickly in time frames as short as two weeks. Achieving speed and flexibility requires defining standard, consistent design patterns, aligning your teams with them and making a commitment to automated testing. That, in turn, enables you to build a cohesive, well-designed cloud commerce system and deploy predictable releases. By contrast, leaving design patterns up to individual teams and coders tempts each one to choose a different pattern, which will yield a confusing, convoluted cloud solution.
This is all a part of assessing your current application landscape and choosing a cloud architecture that fits best with your assessment.
Dependencies Shouldn’t Stall Your Progress
Cloud commerce leans heavily on third-party applications and data sources that must be coordinated systematically. Thus, as you develop your system you need to define dependencies up-front and establish processes that are integrated into the structure of your cloud commerce project and migration.
Imagine, for example, that you’re integrating a third-party content management system like Joomla and a popular customer-relationship-management service like Salesforce. These dependencies are sophisticated pieces of software whose unique quirks have to be accommodated in your system design, while all changes must be coordinated across teams.
You’re not in full control of your fate in a cloud commerce environment. Proper planning on dependencies and dependency management is fundamental to addressing this new reality.
A Savvy Partner for Cloud Commerce Development
Mastering the intricacies of cloud commerce requires intense attention to detail in areas like design patterns and dependencies. Success lies in knowing where to focus that attention. Effective dependency management and cross-team coordination can make or break a project of this nature.
At DMI, we’ve helped a diverse range of retailers navigate the twists and turns of online commerce and implement modern technologies that help them stay competitive. Our mastery of customer experience design helps them craft experiences that build strong bonds with buyers.
Our experts guide clients through the entire commerce migration process, from strategy to integration to continuous iteration. These are the skills and experience that will help commerce operations thrive in the 2020s.
—Andrew Powers, senior vice president, solutions delivery, digital commerce
