The most successful online businesses are the ones that don’t solely rely on their shopfront, but rather the ones that lean heavily on automated technology stacks that run in the background behind their web presence.
More and more, these businesses are transitioning towards a front-end editor which is totally detached from the back-end architecture that the platform is built upon, allowing for far more scalability and personalization than ever before.
Ultimately, this ‘hidden’ technology stack comprises of five parts: the API-driven architecture, the automations that fulfil orders or operate the supply chain, an automated customer relationship management (CRM) system that leads to predictive marketing, a specialised content management system (CMS) allowing for user personalization, and finally, the business intelligence factors that underpin the decision making.
In this article, we will explore how each of these five parts is interwoven together by the most successful online businesses, and how using them can allow your business to thrive online.
It all starts with API-driven architecture
There is no better place to start than by discussing the specifics of the back-end. For many years now, the majority of businesses have bought into an all-in-one website builder. These particular platforms are, unfortunately, with their limitations and capabilities.
What you thought would be a piece of cake to design for yourself in a drag-and-drop website builder is actually the reason that you find yourself frustrated by being unable to offer the most complex and customizable services for your product.
Fast-scaling businesses instead rely on architecture that is API-driven: connecting their back-end to best-in-class microservices provided by specific tools. This means that the website loads incredibly fast, as it isn’t relying on large on-page plugins to load up their complex interactive windows, but rather pulling code from one unified source elsewhere. For developers, this also means that they can swap out elements easily and instantaneously.
It is for this reason that you may have noticed the large upswing in businesses that lean on a system like Shopify or BigCommerce to sell their products, as these are two of the very best sales APIs available. In order to create great user interfaces on the front-end, developers are also using either Next.js or React to ensure that their new web design is superfast and unencumbered by page loading speeds.
Automate your supply chain and order fulfilment
When your business is set up on these API-led building blocks, it also changes the way that your supply chain is fulfilled. Now, when a customer receives an order confirmation, the tech stack sees a list of successive automated steps. In terms of a physical supply chain and warehousing, the most sophisticated businesses can use these automations to pick, pack and deliver orders automatically.
ShipBob and ShipStation are two such tools designed to instantly route orders to the very nearest distribution centre and generate shipping labels for that warehouse to use. This speeds up the time it takes for the order to reach your customer, increasing customer satisfaction.
If you have multiple warehouses, using a tool like Brightpearl can track your stock levels in real-time across all your sales channels, and keep your accountancy automatically updated. These three tools all run via API and are built to be connected into your back-end, operating on their own servers, without slowing down any of the front-end experience that your customers experience by using your own server capacity.
Using an automated CRM leads to predictive marketing
An additional benefit of using these types of API systems is that they can also work in tandem with your choice of CRM, meaning that instead of waiting for customers to come back, you can run predictive marketing campaigns based on their own shipping history.
For example, after a recent order of coffee for the business, just three weeks later, you may be served a perfect pre-roll YouTube ad by the coffee brand advertising their latest products. A simple reminder that you need to buy new coffee based on their user habits of coming back to buy again, once a month.
These hyper-personalized and trigger-based marketing campaigns can maximize the lifetime value of your existing customer base without having to broaden your clientele further with more expensive marketing campaigns to attract new business. Instead, you’re making the most of your current audience and ensuring you get the maximum value.
The most successful e-commerce companies use a tool like Klaviyo to track user behavior to a granular level, sending perfectly timed emails or SMS messages to make the most of abandoned carts or customer browsing history. A tool like Intercom can provide end-to-end customer support, too, integrating live chat and basic return queries all from the storefront.
A specialised CMS permits front-end user personalization
When it comes to catering for different audiences and user behaviors, the best online businesses are actually opting to use a specialised CMS that allows them to give each customer the most ideal shopping experience on the front-end. These tools are completely detached from your web server, giving a lightning-fast experience for customers.
This means that instead of relying on slow databases sitting on your server, the specialised content management systems are delivering instantly to the customer’s mobile or desktop device. One such example is Contentful, which serves both text and media across all platforms almost instantaneously.
To drive those user requests further and quicker, some businesses also use a personalization AI tool like Algolia to give specific, personalized search results and product recommendations based on user intent. Using a combination of specialised CMS and user personalization tools can not only speed up the customer experience, but also generate a stronger customer loyalty as they will be more inclined to return to any business that caters exactly for their needs without fuss.
Build your business intelligence on a single source of truth
The final layer of the hidden technology stack that many successful online businesses lean on is having their data funnelled into one single source of truth, delivering an extremely high level of business intelligence that then gives founders the tools to make the most accurate, predictive decisions possible.
Google BigQuery is one of these data warehouses that can store raw data from across all your channels, whilst in order to visualize it successfully, a tool like either Tableau or Looker Studio can process the raw data into easy-to-read, real-time revenue and conversion dashboards.
Some businesses will also choose to operate their data gathering via a proxy server, as this can ensure that the automations run smoothly in the background by accessing the data from one consistent IP address. The best proxy service is the one that offers you a location near your head office, as well as a location in every country you operate within.
By having all the data centralized and available at any given moment, the business can make informed decisions on its next steps and future-proofing, and by connecting the data sources via a proxy server, you can ensure that you have as much uptime as possible on your automated data collection.
All five factors comprise the hidden technology stack
This may all sound complicated. However, it is actually by using these more complex tools that you can simplify the entire foundations of your business from the ground up. Ultimately, the most successful online businesses are the ones that offer an extremely quick web platform that does not hinder a customer’s buying intentions. To build this platform, you have to ensure that your back-end is headless: this means detached from your front-end user experience.
Underneath this, using a range of APIs that provide a specific service to your business means that you can make an extremely hard-working business without affecting the loading speeds of your website. Developers can switch out these tools or any front-end design aspects very quickly to reflect any changes that you may wish to make.
Finally, ensuring that you have one source of truth for all your business data means that you can make informed and reliable decisions on what promotion you should run, or what new product you should develop, based on up-to-the-minute sales and customer behavior. It is the combination of all five factors that make up this ‘hidden’ technology stack that gives the most successful online businesses the platform for success.
You must be logged in to post a comment.