Category: E-commerce

The democratisation of e-commerce: How technology has become invisible

The e-commerce landscape has undergone a major shift. What once required teams of developers, significant capital investment, and months of custom coding now has a much faster technical setup. The big players—Shopify, BigCommerce, and similar hosted platforms—have created such robust, well-documented ecosystems that enterprise-level functionality is now accessible to solo entrepreneurs and small businesses at a fraction of historical costs.

While the technical environment can be configured in a couple of days, launching a successful store still requires weeks of work. The hard part isn’t the technology anymore—it’s creating attractive content for buyers, setting up proper analytics, and configuring the right integrations to run your business effectively.

The great leveling: Enterprise features for everyone

Just three to five years ago, features we now take for granted would have cost tens of thousands of euros to implement. Multi-currency support, advanced inventory management, automated tax calculations, abandoned cart recovery, analytics dashboards, and seamless payment processing required custom development or expensive enterprise solutions.

Today, these capabilities come standard or are available through affordable apps and integrations. A small boutique can now offer the same checkout experience as a major corporation. The technology barrier that once separated small businesses from large enterprises has essentially disappeared.

The ecosystem effect has been transformative. When platforms like Shopify reached critical mass, they attracted thousands of developers building specialised apps, themes, and integrations. This created a positive cycle: more apps attracted more merchants, which attracted more developers, which created better solutions at lower prices. The result is a marketplace where complex e-commerce functionality is ready to use.

The shifting battleground, from backend to frontend

With the technical infrastructure commoditized, the competitive battleground has shifted dramatically. Success no longer hinges on having the most sophisticated backend system or the cleanest code. Instead, it’s about capturing attention and converting visitors in an increasingly crowded digital marketplace.

Video is becoming the new storefront

The shift toward video content represents the biggest change in how products are discovered and sold online. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and other platforms have trained consumers to expect engaging content. Static product photos now feel outdated.

Video allows for storytelling and emotional connection in ways that traditional e-commerce pages cannot. A 15-second video showing a product in use can communicate value better than long product descriptions. The line between entertainment and shopping continues to blur.

Most importantly, this is all happening on mobile devices. The vast majority of B2C purchases now happen on smartphones, with only a small fraction coming from desktop computers. This mobile-first reality changes everything about how brands need to communicate.

The paid media challenge

Organic reach on social platforms has dropped, making paid advertising necessary for visibility. The advertising platforms have grown more advanced, with AI-driven targeting, automated bidding, and cross-platform tracking becoming standard. Small businesses can now run advertising campaigns with precision that was once only available to large agencies.

However, this has made competition more intense. As barriers to entry have lowered, more players have entered the field, driving up advertising costs and making creative content crucial. The businesses that succeed are those that can create compelling content at scale while speaking directly to their target audience.

The AI revolution: The next frontier

Artificial intelligence is poised to reshape e-commerce discovery and shopping experiences in profound ways. We’re already seeing early implementations that hint at what’s coming:

Personalised shopping assistants

AI-powered chatbots and shopping assistants are evolving beyond simple FAQ responses to become sophisticated personal shoppers. These systems can understand context, remember preferences, and make nuanced recommendations based on browsing behavior, purchase history, and even external factors like weather or trending topics.

Visual search is changing product discovery

The way customers find products is changing significantly. Visual search allows customers to upload photos or take pictures and find similar items instantly. This technology is shifting how businesses think about product discovery – from keyword optimisation to visual optimisation. Instead of relying only on text descriptions, products need to be visually discoverable through AI-powered image recognition.

Predictive commerce

AI is enabling businesses to anticipate customer needs before customers realize them. By analyzing patterns in browsing behavior, purchase history, and external data, systems can suggest products at precisely the right moment in the customer journey.

Dynamic pricing and inventory

Real-time pricing adjustments based on demand, competitor analysis, and stock levels is becoming mainstream. AI can adjust prices across thousands of products instantly, maximising both conversion rates and profit margins.

The paradox of technological simplicity

Here’s the interesting paradox of modern e-commerce: as technology has become more sophisticated, running an online business has become less about technology. The complexity has been moved into platforms, apps, and services that simply work.

This democratisation means that success increasingly depends on human skills: understanding customer needs, creating compelling content, building authentic relationships, and crafting memorable brand experiences. The technical barriers that once protected established players have largely disappeared.

The winners will be brands that can meet customers where they are – on mobile devices, on social platforms, in the moments when they’re ready to buy. Success comes from differentiated communication that speaks directly to specific target groups, not generic messaging that tries to appeal to everyone.

Brand strength matters more than ever because when the technology is the same for everyone, what differentiates you is how well you connect with your audience.

Entrepreneurs today can focus on what matters most: finding the right product-market fit, understanding their customers, and building meaningful connections. The infrastructure that supports these efforts has become invisible, reliable, and affordable.

When complexity requires a different approach

While platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce work well for smaller brands, enterprise e-commerce often needs a different solution. When you’re dealing with multiple countries, multiple currencies, complex product catalogues, integrations with backend systems, POS systems, and B2B sales channels, the one-size-fits-all approach reaches its limits for now and trying to do it the simple way may cause a mess in a non maintainable solution.

However, the same democratisation concept that benefits small businesses can be applied to enterprise solutions. Instead of building everything from scratch, modern enterprise e-commerce leverages best-in-class components that work together.

At Nexer, we’ve created hybrid solutions that give you the best of both worlds. By combining specialised components like Storyblok for content management, Norce Commerce for complex e-commerce functionality, and Algolia for search, we can build enterprise-grade solutions faster and more cost-effectively than traditional custom development. With Owlstreet – the integration tool for digital commerce, the integrations are configured using pre built connectors to allow the project to focus on the value rather than the technology.

These solutions include state-of-the-art design based on user experience research and standard components that meet accessibility requirements. The difference is that instead of starting from zero, we’re assembling proven components that already handle the complex parts.

This approach means enterprise brands can benefit from the same trend toward democratisation – getting sophisticated functionality without the traditional time and cost barriers.

Looking forward: the importance of adaptability

As we look toward the future of commerce, the trend toward technological democratisation will likely continue. New AI tools, emerging platforms, and evolving consumer behaviours will continue to reshape the landscape. The businesses that thrive will be those that remain adaptable, customer-focused, and willing to experiment with new approaches to discovery and engagement.

The future belongs not to those with the most advanced technology, but to those who can best connect with customers in an increasingly digital-first world. Technology has become the table stakes; everything else is about the human connection.

The commerce of the future is here, and it’s more accessible than ever. The question isn’t whether you can build it—it’s whether you can capture hearts and minds in a world where everyone can build it.
Building a data model for Headless Commerce

Headless Commerce for the systems architect

When you are about to go headless, you will be in control of your own data model for commerce and is not just limited to the representation provided by the vendor of your headless platform. If you are a consultant with multiple implementations, you may take the oppurtunity to align several clients to use the same data model for easeier code reuse. In this blog post, I will address the question why you should want to have your own model and not be limited only to use the model provided by the vendor.

This blog postis the first in a series of blog posts explaining how to implement an e-commerce application on top of an existing CMS and headless commerce solution. For examples in the future posts, we will be using Sitecore and Umbraco as CMS and Storm Commerce as the headless commerce platform.

The layers of an application

But before we address the data model, we need to find out the purpose of why there may be a need for a data model different than the one provided by the vendor. This applies to you if you are using a multi layered appliction where some of the interaction with the end users includes exposure of the data in Json for the presentation layer.

The managers layer

This is the bottom layer that I’m using for accessing data from the systems where it is stored. Each manager has it’s purpose to be responsible for the business logic understaning how the systems underneath the managers layers and the database data is structured. Each manager is there for one purpose and is only allowed to perform actions in it’s own domain. Managers are managed by dependency injection. The managers are using the internal data model that is an implementation of the externally exposed interfaces on top of the model.

The services layer

A service may interact between multiple managers and is responsible for coordinating which managers that are invoked to perform a task regardless of how many managers there are. Each service has a constructor where it will receive it’s managers required by dependency injection. The service is invoked by the layers above and does expose the objects customized for the specific customer. To be able to reuse the data model, make sure that this model is only communicating by interfaces of the domain model. This layer may expose the data transfer objects implementing the interfaces of your domain model.

The frontend backend layer

This is where the logic happens that will be in interaction with the end user and where most of the code will not be shared between different clients except for the base functionality of an e-commerce site. This layer is allowed to communicate with the layers below by using the services layer. This layer will have no knowledge of the systems underneath and their implementations, it will just be aware of the services layer and the Data Transfer Objects data model. It will have the services required injected by dependency injection so that it does not know exactly which implementation of a service that is used, which will make it easy to replace a service underneath to provide customer specific logic in the service layer without altering the contract between the service and the models underneath.

The domain model

In order to be able to have code reuse and to not be totally dependant on to always keep the same infrastructure, I would recommend you to build your own data model on top of the systems that you are interacting with in your implementations, so if you decide to replace the customer services system with a different one, you don’t need to start all over again. This is why I’m always using the data model in three layers.

Top layer Data Transfer Objects

This layer is what may be exposed as JSON objects through my controllers. It is sufficient to do basic calculations and logic on, but is totally independant on which backnd system that is being used. It will implement an interface that allows this data transfer object to be sent down to the system levele underneath with the use of reflection or similar technologies.

The implementation layer

This is where the data model is managed so that it may contain all the attributes required to do business logic on them but where not all the information is intended for the top layers. It is i.e. irrevevant to expose purchase details about a product to any layer above or any kind of data that is not supposed to leave this layer. There are methods on this layer to transform from and to the data transfer layer and methods to interact with the vendor data model.

The vendor data model

This is the data model provided by the vendor. This model is used to send requests and interpret responses from the vendor. There are often different models from different vendors, such as the e-commerce headless commerce platform with it’s data model and the CMS that may also keep information about e-commerde data such as customer logins.

The result will be a model where your frontend logic will communicate down to the below systems using Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) and they will respond back in that way. You may replace the managers and services in different projects if those that you implement won’t do the job for the current project, but the data structure will be intact. Remember to use Dependency Injection to support this model.

About this series of blogs

This is the first entry in a series of entries to spread knowledge on the topic for how to implement an e-commerce solution that depends on one ore several underlying SAAS systems and local software.

The author, Fredrik Gustavsson at Jolix AB is working to spread the knowledge on how to be able to do this using standard platforms and how to be able to reuse code between clients.
Your old content may be your most valuable content
Products and content often has a date where the products are discontinued and content has been old and/or replaced. Your visitors that navigates on the site will not find those pages, but visitors that comes from external sites will still land on those pages. What could you do to not just have them bouncing from your site?

If you are working with your content in a good way where people like your content, you will have links pointing to your content. If some of those links come from relevant sites with a good reputation, those links will be important to you since they may help you climb the slippery SEO ladder on important keywords.

Old content may be a really good source for new visitors that did not visit you before.

E-commerce and products

For products in an e-commerce site, this is often solved by making the products still available to find by url, but visible in any content navigation trees or internal site search. This is good, since then the value of the product when it comes to value for your site may still not be affected in a negative way. When this product is discontinued, you have a couple of choices:
- Deleting the product from the site, hiding it for the outside world with a simple 404 page not found.
- Making the product inactive allowing it to be found by the URL leaving it just as it was before it was discontinued.
- Still having the inactive product available by the URL, updating the content about the product being replaced by another product or if none is available, some pieces of inspiration for how to find similar products related to the interests of those that previously bought that product.
In an e-commerce system, there is not always a way of pointing out a new product that has replaced the old one, but here you can be creative. Use the cross-sell, up-sale or even accessories references to point the potential customer to a page where he or she can purchase something similar so that this is not just a dead end for them.

Content with references to products

Good content may have a lot of external links pointing to it. Content tend to be shared and linked to easier from other sites since it’s not just about one single product, it may be a text that explains how to solve a problem or a text about product reviews. What is common for this kind of content is that is often related to products that is no longer available for purchase by the visitors. Having information about products that the customer potentially could buy that are no longer buyable is an approach that is not optimal. Of course – the visitor could try to navigate or search your site to find related products or content, but there is a big risk of loosing them where they exit you site here and now.

My approach to this problem is to make sure there is always relevant references to similar products based on the characteristics of those references in the original post.

This is not always something that is easy to maintain, since it may be hard to know which products that the purchasing department are dicscontinued and where the procurement team has decided that they will no longer purchase this product.

What I have started doing is to check to have the visitor stay for a little longer and hopefully becoming a customer is:
- Avoid relating to products by their product ID.
- Make references by searches and query conditions allowing other products to be displayed there as the old products disappear from the site.
Every content page is supposed to be a page where you can start or continue your shopping and by presenting relevant products that could replace or fit by sharing common characteristics of the original product, you will notice that the bounce rate for those pages will go down – a lot!

My piece of advice

Know the value of you content. Old content that has been around for a couple of years may be a really good source for traffic that are looking for something that is no longer available, but when they are aware of this, they may end up purchasing your suggestion for replacement products.

If you reference products from content, make sure to match by category, attribute etc to always have an updated list of related products that are buyable.