As user experience is often the deciding factor for customers choosing where to spend their money online, a flexible, modular e-commerce platform is the key to retaining consumer attention. Successful businesses are typically early adopters of trends and innovations that quickly saturate the digital marketplace.
By using a platform that’s microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, and headless, you can provide an engaging experience from first impression to post-delivery follow-up. These four core principles define the MACH architecture, a certification standard maintained by the vendor-neutral, not-for-profit MACH Alliance.
Software conforming to MACH principles is especially valuable in e-commerce. Its composability, flexibility, wide industry adoption, and certification process by the MACH Alliance make it an outstanding way to future-proof your commercial offerings.
This article explores how building your e-commerce platform on MACH principles ensures a fresh, convenient, and reliable shopping experience for your customers.
The modularity of microservices-based, headless architectures simplifies the process of composing a front-end experience from globally distributed back-end sources. The pieces all come together in a paradigm driven by standardized, extensible, and adaptable connectivity, emphasizing APIs as the backbone of your architecture.
A MACH e-commerce platform architecture is also scalable from top to bottom, meaning your e-commerce platform can easily grow alongside your customer base.
Associating your brand with the consistent, hassle-free experience of a MACH architecture gives you the following benefits:
- Scalability and deployment flexibility
- Shorter time to market
- Improved reliability
- Easier integration
- Improved user experience
- Cost savings
A MACH architecture allows you to make changes to your platform’s back end without affecting the customer experience. A scalable application’s downstream benefits lower costs and improve reliability and efficiency.
You can gain much of this scalability by decoupling your application’s back-end components from each other and from front-end presentation systems. Rather than building a monolith, focusing on microservices lets you individually deploy new features and components without affecting the entire platform.
By treating resources as modular units, you can confidently make changes to your architecture without degrading your quality of service.
This granular control over resources makes configuring and deploying updates for specific audience segments easier. You can deliver tailored experiences that match customers’ expectations on high-bandwidth infrastructure or restricted data access. You can also implement changes to meet region-specific regulatory requirements.
Using independent, cloud-native components means you can quickly access additional resources and infrastructure to adapt to changing demands. A well-orchestrated, cloud-native SaaS arrangement also allows you to scale your operations efficiently to meet hourly or seasonal changes in demand.
In a cloud-native SaaS, horizontal scaling becomes a contractual matter between you and your SaaS provider rather than a maintenance task for your teams to tackle. A MACH e-commerce platform can easily add microservice instances and use your provider’s load-balancing capabilities to ensure customers enjoy a consistent shopping experience. Vertical scaling is similarly easy, as many providers can allocate additional resources to individual instances.
Together, these scaling measures offload the burden of infrastructure management to your provider, so your development team can focus on creating and optimizing the shopping experience.
Ensuring your team is focused on feature development and can reliably apply new tools and techniques is critical in an industry where trends change rapidly. MACH lets you independently develop, test, and deploy new features as small updates on competitive timescales, keeping your business agile and responsive.
An API-first design approach provides a standard interface that shortens the time needed to integrate new components. This composable architecture accepts pluggable, highly reusable components, allowing you to quickly integrate new technologies as they become available.
You can enjoy this rapid development cycle whether you build proprietary components or use off-the-shelf options. Modular development lets your team quickly pass features and updates through your CI/CD pipeline as smaller units that are easier to test and deploy. Rather than updating large parts of your codebase simultaneously, you can deliver features that autoscale and easily integrate with the rest of your cloud-based infrastructure without impacting your customers.
The core MACH principles work together to make your platform more reliable. API-first designs support graceful failovers and recoveries that you can easily automate, log, and analyze.
Microservices can run your application across multiple instances, and a cloud-native architecture ensures that your services are less dependent on in-house SRE teams. During an incident, your e-commerce platform can route traffic to unaffected instances while your team applies a fix. Uninterrupted service maintains your reputation for reliability and keeps your revenue steady.
This increased visibility is also valuable for tracing the root causes of small errors and responding to more significant incidents, such as those caused by natural disasters or central infrastructure failures.
The granular nature of updates in a MACH architecture also reduces the risks associated with deploying new products and features. You can quickly release or revoke targeted updates with fewer system-wide effects, giving you greater control over how much of your platform the deployment can impact.
The modularity that makes MACH architectures so scalable also makes them more technology- and vendor-agnostic. A cloud-native, API-first design is built around a standard communication protocol, letting each service interact. Pluggable CRM, ERP, and external third-party solutions become more than viable — they become automatable.
Even more critically, an API-first architecture remains accessible to AI tools, making MACH an invaluable way to future-proof your e-commerce platform. You can directly integrate AI into the shopping experience in various ways — from chatbot assistants to personal digital tailors. Integrating AI also ensures your platform’s viability as optimization strategies and technologies evolve. MACH principles handle every part of your platform and use AI to streamline your operations.
Decoupling your application data from its presentation using a headless architecture also benefits your platform’s front end.
Going headless is a natural fit for a MACH platform because a headless architecture already relies on well-designed APIs for inter-service communications. Extending this paradigm to the front end gives your developers the freedom to apply the best technology for each locale, campaign, and device they anticipate serving.
By conforming to your API rather than to the specific interfaces of each microservice in your application, your designers can freely apply whichever front-end framework they desire. A headless, API-first content delivery service can also programmatically optimize how you display the shopping experience. You can automatically generate a different front-end for a specific segment of your customer base, populated with optimized assets on demand — all from the same underlying dataset.
This flexibility ensures a more engaging and personalized customer shopping experience.
Cloud computing is a cost-efficient way to access infrastructure on demand. SaaS vendors offer pay-as-you-go subscription models that keep pace with your platform as it grows. Rather than splitting your business’ resources between SRE teams and development efforts, you can focus on feature development and leave reliability concerns to your cloud provider.
Like the RESTful standard, the MACH label is sometimes applied to solutions that don’t strictly adhere to the specifications it implies. MACH-certified independent software vendors (ISVs), such as Cloudinary, provide a fully MACH-compliant suite of features and products.
As part of the MACH Alliance, Cloudinary’s thought leadership and products direct the future of MACH as it becomes mainstream.
An e-commerce platform built on the Cloudinary Media Experience Cloud is extensible and purpose-built for media. Modular, native Cloudinary features and prebuilt third-party integrations make it easy to build a flexible architecture. Cloudinary APIs empower your developers to leverage every platform component to enrich your customers’ shopping experience.
Your developers can use Cloudinary Media Intelligence to automate the management of your media catalog. Cloudinary Programmable Media APIs provide cloud-native integrations, SDKs, and collaboration features so your developers can use their preferred tools and languages to create robust, adaptable services to support your presentation.
On the front end, you can generate optimized content using Cloudinary’s automation tools, such as digital asset management (DAM). API-based omnichannel tools support immersive innovations in visual media formats, such as 360-degree, AR, and VR, and let you programmatically and seamlessly revise content to keep it fresh.
More traditional media — the video and images in your catalog — also enjoy API-powered, content-aware customizations. Cloudinary’s AI tools use smart cropping, object-aware spotlights, smart tagging, and other transformations to automatically deliver the best possible presentation for your brand across any device type or connection quality, all using the same API your developers use.
As your customer base grows and shopping trends change, Cloudinary’s API-first design lets you update or hot-swap outdated components across your entire platform. Cloud-native design and multi-CDN capability ensure your application delivers a seamless shopping experience regardless of locale or infrastructure challenges.
As AI quickens the pace of breakthroughs in media management, a modular, future-proof architectural paradigm is key to capturing the attention of a customer base that prizes convenience.
Platforms built on a MACH architecture — one that’s microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, and headless — are scalable and highly flexible solutions to the challenges your business faces in the hyper-competitive field of e-commerce.
MACH solutions are built from loosely coupled, swappable, reusable components that are decoupled from the application front end and designed to take full advantage of a cloud-native environment. The architecture emphasizes designing around a central API that exposes component functions for management by automation tools, AI, and whichever technology enters the market next.
Switching from a legacy dynamic media solution to a MACH-certified architecture will help your e-commerce platform stand apart from the competition and ensure that it stays there as new innovations enter the market.
Check out Cloudinary to accelerate your business to MACH speed, or learn more about how Cloudinary leads the way in business transformation using composable architecture.
