Microservices-based Architecture in E-commerce: Revolutionizing Your Business

Definition

Microservices-based architecture in e-commerce aims to build and manage online e-commerce platforms by dividing the operating system into many functions with independent and separate services. Each microservice will be responsible for operating a branch in the e-commerce ecosystem, such as order processing, confirming users are not robots, inventory management or payment gateway integration.

Microservices ensure mutual understanding and smooth and efficient ecommerce business operations through clearly defined and built APIs. This is the basic foundation for this type to be flexible in expansion and increase resilience in all cases. In addition, microservices can also decouple components and apply distributed architecture, helping businesses as an e-commerce solution to create personalized customer experiences and scale comprehensively and effectively at every step of business development in the e-commerce market.

Differentiation between Microservices vs Headless eCommerce

Both aim to improve flexibility and scalability for businesses in the competitive e-commerce landscape, however, there are many differences between microservices and headless e-commerce in terms of integration and approaching modularity. Understanding this, you will be able to choose a more effective and suitable way of operating for your business.

Some differences are mentioned in the comparison table below:

API Gateway

API Gateway is the central access point to help client applications easily interact with different microservices when your business is operating on e-commerce platforms. The way it works can be surprising, even a little confusing, as it acts as a facade, unifying the interface and making the complexity of microservices architectures clearer.

The role of API Gateway is to balance load times and volumes, authentication, aggregating responses across e-commerce platforms, routing requests, etc. Instead of splitting too many APIs into many different commands, aggregating them into a separate port and targeting a single request – a single response simplifies the integration process at the client, while controlling the number exit – entry turns on the platform and speed limits, thereby contributing to enhancing the security quality of business activities.

Microservices

Intriguing many beginners right from the name, microservices-based architecture in e-commerce are a collection of building blocks, in which each piece will be responsible for a specific, separate capability or function. It’s all tied together tightly and consistently, but still leaves “breathing room” for teams to have the opportunity to deploy and develop independently on security and compliance across all platforms.

This is also a core factor for businesses to be able to operate flexibly and quickly adapt to market changes by dividing the monolithic architecture into separate and easily managed parts.

User Authentication and Authorization Service

This service represents the responsibility for user identity management and access control in the ecommerce business operations system. It will handle tasks such as automating user registration and authentication depending on each business’s requirements, while also controlling access as a session manager.

Process optimization ensures consistency, especially safety and security, across all operating platforms. It will link with other services, forming an independent entity to jointly enforce special policies for businesses on e-commerce platforms, ensuring users can only access resources or perform restricted actions once authenticated.

Database

When it comes to e-commerce, we cannot ignore the storage and management of important data to serve research, expansion and business scale development activities. This is also known as a database, which includes a detailed listing of e-commerce activities at a certain time, product information, customer order history details, transaction records, etc. 

With microservices-based architecture in e-commerce, each microservice will own its own database system, or, share the database with other services. Some popular types of databases commonly used in the ecommerce world include:

• Relational databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL
• NoSQL databases: Cassandra, MongoDB
• Specialized databases are used for caching or simple search purposes

By choosing microservices-based architecture and a suitable database system, businesses can completely build consistency and efficient operation of the database, maximally supporting e-commerce activities of business.

Flexible expansion, growth and development

Microservices-based architecture in e-commerce possesses separate functions encapsulated in each microservice, harmoniously combined and unified with each other. If you want to expand your business in terms of operations and operating methods, you just need to separate each microservice and expand its custom functionality based on the unique needs of each part.

This allows you and your business to optimize costs, without needing too much staffing, while speeding up progress and still ensuring performance in the context of increasing customer demand.

Fault recovery and isolation

Using microservices-based architecture in e-commerce, you will understand that errors that occur in a microservice will be isolated from other parts (of course, because they are not a unified whole), so there will be no error that severely affects the performance of the overall system. For example, when the order processing system has a slight error, it does not mean that the user authentication part will also be affected.

This intelligent process ensures e-commerce operations can recover quickly, while easily isolating errors and quickly dealing with unexpected disruptions. From there, the customer experience will always be guaranteed throughout and complete.

Accelerate time to market and development

The e-commerce market grows and changes every second, you and we both know that. And by using microservices-based architecture in e-commerce, your business can accelerate agility and innovation by continuously deploying and iterating services independently. With smaller teams, the development cycle is even shorter and businesses can quickly bring new updated features of the product or platform to market. This allows business owners to stay ahead of competitors in the market, quickly react to new trends and not miss “golden” opportunities for the development and expansion of your own e-commerce business. 

The modular nature of microservices also facilitates continuous delivery and integration, optimizing the development process and reducing the time to value for new innovations.

Diversity in choosing technology stacks

Unlike a monolithic structure, where it all comes together as a separate, unified entity by all having to use the same technology stack, microservices-based architecture in e-commerce allows businesses to diversify their tooling adoption programming language, technology or framework, because it operates smoothly for separate purposes according to each microservice.

In this way, businesses can choose the most suitable solution for each microservice, with each individual operating goal, thereby optimizing performance, scalability and operational efficiency. At the same time, the latest technologies can also be quickly integrated into the business thanks to the heterogeneous technology architecture, helping the customer experience always reach “Wow” level and win their loyalty.

Personalized and innovative customer experience

E-commerce businesses always need to promote customer experience, and of course, the trend of personalizing customer experience is no longer just a passing game. Using a microservices architecture, you have the ability to leverage dedicated microservices for recommendations, personalized marketing, or dynamic algorithmic pricing, ensuring easy customization of your customer experience and shopping behavior.

Working as a microservices-based architecture in e-commerce team also allows you to test new ideas, positive trends in customer experience building, iterate quickly and continuously improve. From there, the difference in how to treat customers will lift businesses to a new level and win long-term support from consumers – something valuable in the complex competitive context of the digital world.

Comply with the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)

You need to ensure that the business is focusing on each specific business capability or function, by clearly separating the relationships and tasks of each microservice. Understanding its operating mechanism, you have the opportunity to become a winner, quickly expand and test scale independently without affecting other microservices in the system.

Leverage Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) for asynchronous communication

Applying EDA is the next piece of advice e-commerce experts give you, to separate producers and consumers into separate conversation cycles (especially important with message brokers like Kafka or RabbitMQ). This allows for expanded interaction on e-commerce platforms, supports real-time data processing, and improves system responsiveness, flexibility, and professionalism.

Use containerization technologies

Containerization technologies, such as Docker, provide a way to package and run applications and their dependencies in isolated environments called containers.

By containerizing microservices, for example leveraging Docker packaging technology to make microservices more lightweight and portable, or using container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes – providing the ability by automatically managing containerized applications, you can ensure consistency for your digital enterprise development environment while streamlining your deployment process, increasing your ability to scale your business.

Looking for partners to consult and operate microservices-based architecture

If the process of applying microservices-based architecture in e-commerce is still too complicated and full of confusing terms, what you need to do is consider collaborating with an ecommerce consulting company with experience in operating microservices services as well as optimizing operations of businesses on e-commerce platforms.

Surely, you are not daring enough to bring your business into a risky experience tool on a giant competitive platform like ecommerce. Therefore, you should research and learn about outsourcing services such as consulting, monitoring, maintenance, operations and optimization from strong partners in e-commerce and technology, to speed up creation value and maximize ROI.