Some challenges of being the editor of a software intended to be integrated

Essentially, Front-Commerce is a software meant to be integrated by developers so that a merchant can sell products to its customers in its own online store and even without having to completely change an existing e-commerce stack. While this is probably the simplest definition of Front-Commerce (more or less the one I use to describe my job to my family and friends 😉), it hides some challenges we face every day.

Three targets: developers, merchants and customers

The first challenge is not really technical. As stated in the introduction, we try to address three main personas:

• the developers integrating our solution to create an online store for…
• a merchant willing to sell something to…
• a customer seeking a product.

Anybody having at least a small experience as a software editor knows that properly addressing one persona can already be challenging, so you can guess what it is like with three, even if they don’t necessarily want opposing features, more targets mean more constraints.

Let’s take a deliberately extreme example 😃 They all want a performant store.

The customer:

I want a performant and great shopping experience even in the middle of nowhere with a low to average 3G connection.

The merchant:

Can I have a great shopping experience for my customers? And also, I want to put very high quality photos and videos online. In addition, I want my pages to be always highly up to date with customer specific and very dynamic content. And next Friday is Black Friday! The website needs to scale, it’s the biggest selling event of the year.

The developers:

The merchant wants a performant and scalable website. Is your software doing that out of the box or can it be done by turning on a setting?

I guess you get the idea, each target adds a set of constraints. It’s no surprise that pleasing everyone is difficult but it’s also a stimulating challenge.

Extensibility

As a software meant to be integrated by developers, Front-Commerce needs to be extensible so that it can serve different use cases. The most obvious reason is that each merchant wants its own customized store implementing a dedicated shopping experience.

In addition, each project needs a specific set of features and while we try to support as many as possible out of the box, having an extensible architecture allows the developers to fill the gaps. As far as I’m concerned, it’s always a pleasure to see very unexpected or specific features nicely implemented even if I would never have imagined it could exist.

It’s also worth mentioning that in the world of composable architectures and headless commerce, extensibility is a key feature.

Backwards compatibility and upgradability

Being able to implement a project is nice but that’s only the very beginning of the story. At some point, new features and fixes for bugs will be needed. The challenge here is to be able to deliver those without breaking anything.

On a practical level, that means we try to follow semantic versioning by regularly providing patch releases containing only bug fixes and every six weeks, we release a minor version with new features. Those minor versions always have a migration guide to make the upgrade process as frictionless as possible. And what about a major version? In the last couple of years, we have not released any, but I’ve heard that something is cooking 😇

In the code, this has a quite deep impact. When changing code, we have to keep in mind both existing projects using our software and new ones. We also have to think about how APIs are being used before we can make any changes to them. This forces us to carefully encapsulate our API’s to reduce their surface as much as possible. This has a tendency to limit the extensibility and the versatility so as usual when it comes to code, the key is to find the right trade-off.

Anything else?

Oh yeah, I could have approached the support, the documentation, the developer experience or the dependency management to name a few. This will probably be the subject of another post…

In any case, all this is a part of the context in which we build Front-Commerce and where we try find the best solutions or trade-off. As usual when it comes to our product, we are always seeking feedback, so don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any remarks or comments. This can only make the product better.