MACH for Modern Retail: How Microservices Help Brands Test and Learn
Posted by Amanda McLaughlin on Feb 7, 2022
Deliver modern, mobile-first shopping experiences that delight your customers. Drive ROI back to your business across all customer touchpoints—in-store, online, and on mobile. Book a time with our team to learn how we can help transform your business with our omnichannel solutions.
*Privacy Notice: By hitting "Submit," I acknowledge receipt of the NewStore Privacy Policy.
This is part 1 of our MACH series where we discuss how to encourage an internal culture of experimentation with microservices. Check out the other articles on APIs, cloud technology, and headless commerce.
More connected and more personal customer experiences are point of order for retail brands. They need microservices architecture to create such personalized, relevant experiences at a speed that matches shifting customer expectations.
Savvy businesses are choosing microservices for their remarkable flexibility. This enables them to update or add to their offering to suit customer needs. It’s thanks to microservices that they’re also able to nurture an internal culture of experimentation. Something that is so vital to modern commerce.
If you’re trying to pin down the definitive ‘best’ experience for your customers, you’re going to need to test and learn to see what they like. That’s precisely what microservices help businesses do.
Microservices are business capabilities that are developed, deployed, and managed independently. By keeping every system separate, applications can be updated and augmented without affecting the rest of your system.
Microservices benefit physical retail in a number of ways – like giving retailers the ability to customize more, with simple integrations. This helps businesses create a tech stack that is designed around customers, instead of struggling to mold existing systems into something that delivers passable experiences to customers. Ultimately, this helps improve customer loyalty, sales, and revenue.
Most importantly, microservices give you the opportunity to try out new things at a fast clip. The true focus of omnichannel experiences is to enhance the user experience above all else. Thus, a microservices application is the perfect route to experiment with confidence.
To focus on the customer experience, retailers must be able to select the best technology for the job. Microservices architecture lets your developers – whether part of a big or small team – build each service in a different programming language using different technologies. Freedom to develop in this manner lets you chop and change the specific things that work based on customer feedback.
That means your developers can work the way they want, using the coding language they want. So, more productive and happier developers, and a stronger code base for you.
Because your developers can experiment with new tech in low-risk services, you can quickly, efficiently, and confidently try out new things without risk of impacting the rest of your system.
Then with future deployments, you simply update and redeploy the particular microservice, instead of the whole monolithic application. The same simplicity applies to rollbacks and replacements, too. This also means that should a failure occur, it won’t cascade into other areas of your system. Provided your architecture is solid.
Microservices benefit retailers many ways. From addressing “people problems,” hastening innovation through reduced risk of tech adoption, or easing scalability and deployment.
You can swap services customers like or dislike in and out as needed and scale each service up and down based on usage. Microservices make creating unique experiences a breeze. As importantly, they give development teams the freedom and momentum to test and deploy more easily.
Want to learn more about microservices or how you can accelerate innovation with MACH technology? The MACH Alliance is a great resource, or reach out to one of our experts.
