In today’s fast-paced and ever-changing business landscape, extensibility has become increasingly crucial to meet the evolving needs of customers. Extensibility allows businesses to personalize shopping experiences to customers’ needs. And, when it comes to extensibility, Adobe Commerce’s extensibility platform empowers brands to efficiently customize processes, integrate systems, and deploy new capabilities while maintaining scalability and superior performance. When organizations opt for composable commerce and MACH architecture, Adobe’s API Mesh stands out as it allows quick access to the source data rather than duplicating customer data into backend systems.
But before getting to know how Adobe API Mesh enhances your Adobe Commerce capabilities, let’s understand the need for extensibility for your eCommerce business.
The need of extensibility in eCommerce
The eCommerce industry is constantly evolving, with new technologies, trends, and customer expectations emerging. Businesses want to effortlessly expand their operations, tailor their store to unique requirements, and seamlessly connect with third-party tools to stay ahead of evolving industry trends. In essence, extensibility empowers eCommerce stores to thrive in a dynamic and ever-changing digital marketplace. With custom functionalities, online merchants can deliver superior personalized experiences across touchpoints and channels. Let’s understand the need for extensibility for eCommerce:
#1. Continuous improvement
Customers expect their shopping experiences according to current trends in eCommerce. To keep up with the pace, your platform must be able to continuously implement new ideas and technologies with extensible designs. The new pages, product uploads or any content updates should be easy and seamless for your eCommerce developers.
#2. Adaptability
The expanding eCommerce ecosystem also presents concerns around security, requiring enterprises to stay up-to-date and monitor errors proactively. By incorporating extensible components and frameworks, you can easily adopt new functionalities integrated with emerging technologies like Generative AI and voice assistants, implementing the latest security measures. An extensible website continuously helps you make updates without risking your customers’ data.
#3. Easy integration
Extensibility enables you to extend the core capabilities of your eCommerce platform. It also requires less coding and can be done quickly with easy integrations through API. This includes integrating with third-party tools and payment gateways, implementing advanced search and enabling product recommendations. Extensibility empowers you to provide your customers a rich and seamless shopping experience.
#4. Composable commerce
As your business grows, your eCommerce store should be able to handle increased traffic, extensive product catalogs, and higher transaction volumes. Extensibility allows you to scale your store’s infrastructure and optimize performance by integrating with scalable solutions, implementing caching mechanisms, or leveraging cloud services. It ensures that your store can handle growing demands and maintain a smooth running online store. Composable commerce follows a modular architecture to support complex business models across channels.
#5. Customizations
Every eCommerce business has unique requirements, and extensibility allows you to customize your store’s functionality, design, and user experience to align with your specific needs. It enables you to tailor the store’s appearance, product catalog, checkout process, and other aspects to create a personalized shopping experience that resonates with your target audience. The extensible platform delivers lightning-fast experiences across multiple channels using microservices functionality. It streamlines unlimited catalog updates, offering flexibility to deliver products through personalization recommendations.
Hence businesses need a platform through which they can extend and customize APIs directly without making changes to the API source.
What is an API mesh?
In layman’s terms, API mesh refers to an architectural pattern that helps with the design and management of APIs. It is a scalable and flexible approach that allows for a seamless integration between third-party distributed systems, applications, and/or microservices, empowering the underlying solution with agility, autonomy, and interoperability while abstracting the complexity associated with API integrations. Typically, an API mesh is a network of interconnected APIs between several systems and services. You can imagine every API to be a building block of a node within the network, where different APIs are managed by different teams responsible for invoking a specific functionality or usability. As an API solution is already very lightweight, its mesh results in improved performance and scalability as per demands.
The different benefits of implementing an API mesh cover:
- Agility and scalability: An API mesh allows you to modify and update individual APIs without impacting the frontend performance or backend systems. This makes it easier to adapt and scale your changing business requirements at a fast pace.
- Improved interoperability: As there are multiple APIs making up the entire mesh, it enables different applications, systems, and microservices to share data with each other, communicate and collaborate seamlessly, and improve shared operations between distributed solutions.
- Decentralization and autonomy: Each API within the mesh is developed and managed independently, allowing different teams to work autonomously, and embark changes without disrupting other functionalities.
- Simplified integration: With an API mesh, you don’t have to worry or indulge with the complexity surrounding individual APIs, and yet provide a simplified and consistent interface to integrate tools and deliver superior shopping experiences.
- Security & governance: It is easier to implement governance and security policies within the API mesh, ensuring consistent authentication, access controls, and data protection across all nodes.
How API mesh with Adobe Commerce can help your eCommerce store?
API Mesh is an advanced API orchestration layer designed to facilitate seamless integration between private and third-party applications and various software interfaces with Adobe Cloud tools like Adobe Commerce, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Marketo Engage, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, and Adobe Campaign. Leveraging API Mesh gains the ability to consolidate multiple data sources into a unified GraphQL interface, streamlining data access and retrieval processes.
For Adobe Commerce users, API Mesh is a valuable solution for integrating additional APIs into storefront management APIs, enabling efficient and robust communication across different departments within the organization. Overall, API Mesh provides a flexible and scalable integration framework that enhances collaboration, data management, and overall operational efficiency. Let’s discuss how API mesh crafts delightful experiences for your eCommerce store:
#1. Personalized shopping experiences
- Adobe Commerce acts as the frontend for personalized experiences and provides opportunities to drive revenue through conversions to deliver next-gen shopping experiences.
- To deliver engaging experiences, Adobe Commerce, with the implementation of AI, gain insights into customer interests, product recommendations, search behavior, emails, geo-locations, discount code, and personalized web pages.
- Adobe Commerce can easily share storefront browser events with Adobe Experience Cloud solutions to build rich customer profiles and personalize marketing campaigns and commerce experiences.
- Live Search, powered by Adobe Sensei, is one of the capabilities. It is an API functionality built for headless commerce sites.
- Adobe Commerce has updated its catalog service connected with API Mesh with a multi-tenant SaaS service that gives you faster catalog data retrieval for exceptional storefront shopping experience.
#2. Cloud-native extensibility
- Adobe Commerce enables brands to build single-page applications and customizations on the globally distributed, auto-scaled via Adobe Developer App Builder infrastructure.
- The cloud-native extensibility architecture of API mesh provides scalability and availability to deliver exceptional commerce experiences while supporting multiple websites, currencies, and global regions.
- The Adobe Commerce infrastructure is built to support high traffic, maintain steady performance and offer consistently responsive shopping experiences, which are designed for scale and performance. It streamlines ways for developers to interact with core Adobe Services and automate processes.
- The Adobe Developer App Builder allows a react-based UI framework for creating experiences that feel native alongside Adobe Cloud.
- Adobe Commerce allows a range of services for running, managing, triggering, and optimizing custom digital experiences.
- The developer tools of Adobe Commerce User experience, IDE plugins and other tools aid in debugging, testing, and deploying custom experiences.
- Adobe Cloud services have a serverless framework for running third-party custom code on Adobe’s infrastructure.
#3. Powerful framework
- Using the set of events available directly in Adobe Developer App Builder, Adobe Commerce allows you to build real-time integrations with ERP, third-party applications, CRM etc.
- The Adobe App Builder provides a framework built on Adobe’s infrastructure to extend Adobe capabilities and business logic wherever you need them. This allows us to build a specialized creative pipeline.
- The Adobe Commerce extensibility allows you to extend middleware, core service as well as user experiences, providing secure, hosted infrastructure to enable your developers to build those essential extensions without provisioning infrastructure overhead.
- With easy asset migration of large amounts of assets from an external DAM into Adobe Experience Manager Assets on AEM, allows brands to use event-based triggers when an asset is modified.
#4. Storefront management
- API Mesh enables merchants to easily implement new functionalities like payments, shipping, order fulfillment, live search, catalog service, quick checkout, inventory management etc.
- The Adobe Commerce marketplace enables extensions like curbside pickup or buys online, pickup in-store (BOPIS) customer experience. These store fulfillment features maximize the productivity of store employees.
- With API Mesh, storefront developers connecting and authenticating with all the services needed for shopping experiences becomes easy as they simply send the query to API Mesh, and it takes care of retrieving data from the appropriate service. To deliver fast responses it cache APIs.
- Adobe Commerce store users can consider the API Mesh a way to integrate other APIs to storefront management APIs for strong communication across departments.
#5. Rich extension marketplace
- Adobe Commerce store has thousands of free and premium third-party extensions and themes to boost the capabilities of your store and enhance shopping experiences.
- With API Mesh, you can implement custom-built extensions just a click away.
- Adobe Marketplace connects to the API mesh and allows your data to unify at the frontend without making changes at the backend.
#6. Powerful middleware
- Adobe Commerce allows you to connect all your systems using middleware and a suite of app connectors built on Adobe I/O.
- Adobe I/O events enable enterprises to build reactive, event-driven applications based on events originating from various Adobe services, such as Creative Cloud, Adobe Experience Manager, and Adobe Analytics.
- API mesh connects external systems with Adobe applications building custom connectors or leverages a suite of pre-built integrations.
- You can enhance core application capabilities with API mesh by extending the default behavior with custom features and business logic by building serverless services that run on Adobe I/O runtime.
- API mesh acts as a robust middleware and extends core experience support to business requirements to build specific digital properties, storefronts and back-office applications.
Leverage the power of Adobe API Mesh with Ranosys
Adobe API mesh offers significant functionality for personalization with agility and scalability. As an award winning Adobe Solution Partner, Ranosys can assist you in implementing Adobe API mesh and leverage its capabilities to the fullest. Also, we can help you uncover the right tools and configure them to your online store to deliver delightful experiences.
