During this year’s Modern Commerce Day, our customers, as well as the experts and visionaries of the commerce world, spilled the beans on their biggest learnings from adopting a MACH architecture. Spoiler alert: they all love it.
1. Fear no more
For all online retailers, there comes a certain anxiety when it comes to big shopping days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Mother’s Day. Will their web shop crash? Will poor site performance cause customers to abandon their carts? How much money will it cost the business? Transitioning to MACH means that you’ll never have to face these fears again because your web shop will have the ability to automatically scale should traffic on your website surge.
We saw a spike in traffic that was over 3x higher than the busiest hour of Black Friday. Its peak was more than 10% of all commercetools transactions in that hour. If this would have happened with our monolith system, the system would have crashed, we would have lost sales and spent hours bringing the system back online. With commercetools, we first noticed the situation when we got alerts that our systems were autoscaling. We carefully watched the business, and our customers didn’t notice a blip.
Chief Technology Officer, Express
2. Think local – agility with a central core
Global companies are able to use MACH architecture to build a modular system that gives each of their markets the autonomy to work at their own pace and develop features that meet their customer’s unique needs. This means is that digital retailers can endlessly customize their shops in each location whenever they want to match local preferences while keeping the brand experience consistent at its core. MACH also enables brands to provide access to their partners, vendors and their employees to customize the frontend of their web shops without any risk.
commercetools is at the heart of this because it is, through and through, built to be MACH first and it delivers on that promise, allowing our ecosystem to talk together seamlessly.
Chief Architect, Danone
3. Personalization made easy
With MACH, you can utilize customer data to the fullest to give customers tailored purchasing experiences that make shopping easier and more engaging for them to keep them coming back. One way to use this data is to make informed, targeted promotions for each customer – you control which promotion is created for what person – and that kind of personalization is more likely to lead to a conversion.
If you are a food delivery company, why would you target me on a burger promotion when I never wanted a burger before? I want sushi.
CEO, Talon.One
4. Agile Tech – Agile Business
For the past few years, the focus has been on embracing agile technology, as well as the importance of ensuring your business teams implement agile practices. This is because customer behavior can change fast and businesses need to be ready to adapt in an instant and have the technology to follow suit. Case in point: COVID-19. The pandemic profoundly affected customer purchasing behaviors and only the companies that could swiftly pivot to accommodate such changes, thrived with MACH architecture. That’s because commerce built on MACH systems can agilely respond to the latest trends, touchpoints, technologies and pandemics to match the ever-evolving needs of customers.
Speed, flexibility, sustainability – that’s what we were looking for in an eCommerce platform.
Product Manager eCommerce, Audi
5. Lower TCO, more possibilities
While brands may point to total cost of ownership (TCO) as a key factor holding them back from digital transformation. However, the idea that TCO is higher for MACH systems is simply incorrect. Companies are viewing the initial investment cost as part of TCO, but the highest portion of TCO costs are actually maintenance and labor costs (typically up to 85% of the entire “project” cost). The transparent, cloud-native structure and on-demand pricing MACH vendors offer, along with the ability to eliminate upgrade costs, actually lowers long-term cost. In other words, with MACH, you can do more at a lower price.
We have lowered our operations costs, reduced our time-to-market, made it easier to recruit talented employees and vastly improved our mobile experience. We received an award for the best German connected retail solution and…we’re just getting started.
Senior Manager, Non-Food eCommerce, Salling Group
Missed Modern Commerce Day and want to get filled in? Read the full Modern Commerce Day Report or our Modern Commerce Day recap.