It is well established that page load times matter to users. In a study, BBC found that for every second of additional page load time, 10% of users leave. Pinterest increased traffic by 15% when they reduced page load times by 40%. Google reports a drop in traffic with 400 ms in page lag time.
At Comecero, our clients have customers all over the world, and require fast performance from Seattle to Singapore. Complicating matters, we allow our customers to deploy their custom shopping carts, customer management portals and other customer-facing “apps” to our infrastructure for hosting. This gives our clients complete control over the user experience, but removes many of the burdens associated with systems, servers, monitoring, PCI compliance, and more.
Our goal was to give our clients access to a globally-distributed, high-performance platform for their shopping carts and other customer-facing applications. We also wanted to enable version management, allowing them to change which version of their shopping cart app should receive live traffic on a moment’s notice, and allow them to test newly deployed versions in the live environment before sending live traffic to it. Is your new shopping cart not converting as well as the previous? Roll back to the previous version with a simple click. Have a new holiday theme you want to use for a few weeks? Deploy it and revert it on demand. Last, we wanted our clients to have full control to make these changes on their own, without the need to coordinate with us.
To get there, we spent many months designing and building our hosted application infrastructure. Our clients build their shopping cart using what is comfortable to them, or they start with our pre-built, open source shopping carts. React, Vue Angular, vanilla JavaScript or something else? Bootstrap, Foundation, Material or roll-your-own? Our clients can decide what works best for them, and then let us worry about making sure it’s secure, highly-available and loads quickly, no matter where their customers are located.
So, how did we get there? The solution comes in a few layers:
The Back End. In its most basic form, Comecero is an API. Yes, we provide all sorts of tools around it to make it easy to use, but everything Comecero does is routed through an open, public API. This makes it possible to interact with apps from virtually any environment: the web, native apps, server side applications and more. Since everything is available through a public API, the Comecero back end is accessible to any environment. If it’s not done through the API, it’s not done. Our clients are never surprised to find out they have to route their customers through a custom page on our site to perform a particular action.
The Front End. For web distribution, our customers can build client-side apps using the frameworks and tools that are comfortable to them. They don’t have to learn proprietary template engines and they are not limited to particular flows or user experiences. If they can dream it, they can do it.
The Hosting Environment. When ready, our clients upload their source code packages to us and install them with a single click. Before sending live traffic to their newly-installed shopping cart, they can test it, and even invite external parties to try it out. When ready, they flip the switch and start sending live traffic. If something unexpected happens, they can roll back to the previous version in a couple of clicks. We track the unique application ID and version with every cart and payment, making it easy to know how customers worked through the order process, and even track the conversion rate by shopping cart version.
The hosting environment automatically deploys our client’s applications to 200+ data centers distributed around the world, which improves speed, reliability and performance. Comecero takes care of version management and distribution automatically in the background, allowing our clients to focus on what’s important to them: increasing sales. Even more, our hosting environment allows for custom SSL/TLS certificates, allowing our clients to present their own brands from beginning to end.
But what about those that don’t want to build a custom shopping cart? No problem - Comecero provides everything needed to run a world-class online business to those who have no interest in coding or building. But if the day comes where their needs become very specific, Comecero can be adapted to meet their exact specifications, without compromise.
If you have questions about your online business, reach out to us. We’d love to see how we can help you grow.
