As the ecommerce industry evolves, companies need to adopt new technology infrastructures. One of the most important considerations for retailers is the choice of framework. Reactive frameworks offer many benefits for modern ecommerce solutions. It enables real-time, scalable, and responsive applications that meet the expectations of current consumers. It is important to make sure that customers do not face poor website performance or slow responses during their shopping process.
With the growing industry, there are always questions surrounding the best technologies and implementation strategies. This blog explores the key features and benefits of reactive frameworks for ecommerce.
What is a Reactive Framework?
A Reactive framework is software development architecture emphasizing the reactive programming paradigm for building scalable, resilient, and responsive applications. Reactive programming is an approach that deals with data streams and the transmission of change. In standard programming, the process is usually top to bottom or left to right, and it has been that way for a while. For example, you add an array of numbers and use that in a function later. You can hence perform functions on that array. However, with a reactive framework, the streams carry out the functionality, which is reactive in nature. Excel spreadsheets are one of the best examples of reactive programming. You can save a formula in a column, and by adding values to the formula, you get a result.
Look at the figure below for a reactive programming graph:
Figure 1: Reactive Programming Architecture Flow Graph
It simply means that, unlike standard programming practices, reactive programming reacts to the changes, and these changes usually occur asynchronously. The reason for having them asynchronously is that you get a faster response time. A reactive approach is simple in nature. Everyone has, knowingly or unknowingly, used it somewhere. Now the agenda of this blog is to discuss the benefits of reactive programming in ecommerce.
Read our detailed blog on using headless ecommerce to meet all your customer’s needs through your ecommerce platform.
Benefits of Reactive Framework
One of the main benefits of reactive programming in ecommerce platforms is making the customer experience easy and having a speedy experience with as few clicks as possible. Additionally, ecommerce platforms need to be stable for customers to avoid crashes, so the second goal is reliability. The third goal is simply to have a flexible and scalable commerce system. The relation between a reactive framework and ecommerce is the achievement of these goals. Let us look at each goal individually:
Faster Response Time
A reactive approach works with streams asynchronously, thus providing a faster response time. Responsiveness is the key feature of your ecommerce platform. For example, imagine yourself shopping for a laptop or phone online, you go through the entire process of selecting and buying a product, and as soon as you reach the payment section, the product goes out of stock.
To avoid this from happening, you should have a faster response time on your ecommerce website. The reactive approach updates source elements based on the reactive elements, which will produce a quicker response. For example, a stream of products will be updated when a product is out of stock, making the process smoother for your customers.
Reliability
We all are familiar with a thing called “single point of failure.” There used to be one heavy server in trivial systems responsible for all the dirty work, and everything was based on that one single cell, be it a server or a machine. With technological trends changing, scalability has become one of the major plus points when dealing with such issues. Scaling up means instead of having one large machine do a particular job, you make a bunch of smaller machines do that same job. This technique helps enormously, and you will not lose any data since there is no “single point of failure.”
In addition, you can distribute your data on multiple machines, and that will give you a massive speed boost. How? Let us suppose you have an ecommerce site, and all the products are residing on a single server. If the customer wants to look up a specific product, they will need to go through the same single server to search for the product. With a scalable product in hand, you can distribute multiple products on multiple platforms. That method would result in giving you a speedy search result giving you a higher performance.
Resilient Systems
Resilient systems are systems that have a suitable coping mechanism to deal with failures. It is well formed to deal with a loss so that if a single component fails, the other components remain unaffected. Reactive frameworks help you fix a single failure without needing to update the other minor components involved in the system. For example, the recovery of one system should not affect the recovery of another. Resilient systems make sure that your system has no bottlenecks and is cost-effective.
Conclusion
A reactive approach is used in ecommerce systems for faster response time, reliability and resilience. It is a message-driven system that ensures loose coupling between multiple components and makes sure that your system is tolerant of failures. You can scale your system easily and monitor the components. Building your whole system using reactive systems helps you achieve all the primary benefits of your commerce platform.
UpStart Commerce uses this approach and provides you services in a similar manner. You get high performance and better delivery with our highly scalable platform. It gives you the efficiency you are looking for without any bottlenecks. Start your free trial with UpStart Commerce today!
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