Shopify Plus: The Last E-Commerce Monolith
Headless commerce technology has received $1.6 billion in funding and is powering cutting-edge e-commerce applications. With headless commerce, separating the frontend of an application from the backend gives brands and retailers greater flexibility in how they create digital shopping experiences. Platforms like Shopify Plus offer headless capabilities, but the real magic is in modular commerce technology.
Commerce modules, also called commerce microservices, are dedicated pieces of commerce functionality including cart, pricing, promotions, items, orders, shipping, payments, and more. These are what Amazon used to grow from a simple online bookstore to a massive online marketplace. But before adopting modular commerce, Amazon had to break down its monolithic bookstore application into distinct modules, also known as a service-oriented architecture.
When I joined Amazon in 2002, this initiative was well underway. But Amazon developers had to create these modules in-house. There was no commerce platform back then that could support Amazon’s new approach to architecture. IBM Websphere, Oracle ATG, and other enterprise commerce platforms were all monolithic. They were good platforms at the time, but rigid and hard to customize.
