FAQ: All

Question 1

What is technology debt?

Accepted Answer

As we grow our e-commerce and roll out more technology solutions, we sometimes make mistakes in service architecture — we code in a hurry (without caring for code quality and readability) just to see the results of our work faster. Each time we make those compromises, our company takes on so-called technology debt.On one hand we ship faster or more, but at the cost of certain trade-offs that sooner or later will have to be repaid through:
 refactoring (changing existing site code so it runs more efficiently),
 or migrating the whole application (when a given technology solution loses official support, e.g. Magento 1).
Technology debt is hard to measure, so it's easy not to realize it exists. It can grow to the point where the company can no longer afford to migrate to a different technology, while the current one has reached its limits and is blocking the company's growth.

Question 2

How to choose hosting for e-commerce?

Accepted Answer

Hosting is about reconciling certain business risk with the scale and stability of the business. The bigger our sales, the more stability we expect. With a high level of stability comes a higher hosting cost. In addition to the average traffic volume on our store we should also factor in extra nuances that let us better fit hosting to our business:
  Is traffic steady or are there cyclical but sporadic spikes? Steady traffic enables better planning and maintaining dedicated servers. Sporadic spikes suggest a cloud, highly scalable environment may be cheaper.
 Do we have specialist administrators on hand to manage the environments?
 Do we need extra developer tools that e.g. AWS (Amazon Web Services) offers as part of its base hosting services?
 Are we optimizing the store for stability or for speed of recovery after a failure? If we go for stability we have to invest in new high-performance servers; if we go for speed of recovery we can pick much cheaper hardware that can be swapped during an outage.
If you want to read more on how to ensure the stability of an online store, especially during Black Friday or pre-holiday shopping, do read the article on our blog.

Question 3

Magento 1 — what is it?

Accepted Answer

Magento 1 is the first version of online-store software, released under an open-source license in 2008. It allows site management through an admin panel, including product catalog, order, payment, and shipping management. Magento 1 is no longer supported, so stores that haven't done so are advised to migrate from Magento 1 to Magento 2.

Question 4

Magento 2 — what is it?

Accepted Answer

Magento 2 is the new open-source online-store software, released in 2015. It allows site management through an admin panel, including product catalog, order, payment, and shipping management. Magento 2 has a paid version called Magento Commerce, dedicated to very large international e-stores.

Question 5

Can a PWA be built on top of an existing store?

Accepted Answer

A PWA service (Progressive Web App), like most apps, runs on top of communication with a backend. The app itself is responsible for the visual layer (the interface — UI) and marketing functions, while all the logic, product information, and order processing stays on the operational backend.
So to build a PWA on top of an existing store we have to make sure that the current platform can be the backend that provides the right data and communication channel (e.g. the popular REST API). 
Most open-source platforms or dedicated platforms where we have access to the source code can be adjusted accordingly to the PWA requirements. Closed apps — e.g. popular SaaS platforms — that don't expose a full API by default cannot be adapted.
Mature open-source platforms such as Magento 2 ship APIs that allow building apps on top of them. This typically requires some additional backend work, but much less than building the entire backend from scratch. On top of that, both for Magento and for other platforms, you can find ready-made frameworks based on PWA. One of them is Vue Storefront. As PWA gains traction, official tools are appearing too — for example PWA Studio from Adobe (a Magento-targeted solution).

Question 6

Is it worth investing in PWA on Magento?

Accepted Answer

Magento is a proven, mature e-commerce system, but its frontend (the part visible to the customer) leaves much to be desired. If the store's backend is properly set up and works at a satisfactory level (e.g. critical order paths run correctly), then to keep up with mobile-device requirements, adding a PWA layer to Magento is a good move. You don't have to take the big cost of changing the CMS or business logic reflected in process automation and the backend. You only change the "outer" layer, and you do it with modern technologies aligned with Google's guidelines and the challenges of mobile commerce.

Along the way, this architecture provides better security, because business-critical processes that take place in Magento are isolated from changes made in the visual layer (frontend), so many e-commerce rollouts can skip any changes to the Magento backend.

Magento 2 ships a solid API by default, which is the foundation for building PWAs and apps. This is what allows ready-made solutions like Vue Storefront — an open-source framework. Thanks to certain standards and ready-made solutions we can significantly lower the cost of such an implementation.

Question 7

What is Single Sign-On (SSO)?

Accepted Answer

Single Sign-On (SSO) — sometimes called reduced sign-on — is the ability to sign in once to a service or web application and thereby gain access to all authorized resources covered by that service or app. In simple terms: when you sign in to one of a provider's systems that uses SSO, you are automatically signed in to all other services available from your account (signing out from one of the systems works the same way). So you only need to remember one email address and one password to use various, independent services from the provider freely. 
If you want to learn the benefits of SSO in e-commerce — both from the user's and the business's point of view — and when investing in this solution makes sense, read our article!

Question 8

What is a high-availability system?

Accepted Answer

A high-availability system is an IT system whose reliability, availability, and performance are appropriately tuned to the specific, usually critical applications of that system. A system is considered high-availability if it is available between 99.999% and 99.9999% of the time. In practice this means it is unavailable for only about 5 minutes across an entire year. In practice this translates into uninterrupted availability of your online store for customers and a guarantee of fault-free operation.

Question 9

What is information architecture?

Accepted Answer

Information architecture (IA) is about creating and presenting information (textual and graphical) in a way that is readable and intuitive for the audience. Organizing content means grouping it into the right categories and naming them properly, giving them hierarchy, building clear navigation, and placing the right content groups in spots intuitively associated with them. Thanks to a properly designed information architecture, when a customer enters our store, they know how to reach the desired product category, how to filter results e.g. by size, and how to proceed to checkout (looking for the cart icon in the upper right corner). IA also affects SEO: properly planned content makes it easier for indexing bots to rank our store in search engines — e.g. using readable URLs and breadcrumb navigation, which shows users their current location on the site and lets them quickly return to the previous level in the structure.

Question 10

What is a UX audit?

Accepted Answer

A UX audit is a process during which an expert checks whether a service is well-designed for usability: that is, whether users complete their intended goals while using the service. For an online store this means that users for example:
 can find the product they're looking for,
 can comfortably review it, even on a small screen,
 find all needed information not only about products, but also about shipping or returns in a comfortable, effective, and satisfying way.
Through a UX audit, you can verify whether problems or inconveniences appear during use that may confuse users and potentially make them abandon the site. Identifying and fixing weak spots in the shopping experience is one of the ways to lift the conversion rate of the store.
An audit is performed using various methods (e.g. cognitive walkthrough or heuristic analysis) and based on data from tools such as Google Analytics or Hotjar. The analysis and audit usually identify usability issues and test hypotheses split into 3 categories — critical, important, and less important. The report should therefore order priorities and contain specific recommendations that make implementation of fixes easier.

Ecommerce, Magento 2 and AI concepts explained