Retail & E-commerce// topic
Storefront architecture and platform choice
In short
How the storefront itself is built — headless versus themed, rendering strategy, framework choice — and what each of those decisions costs you later in performance and in maintenance.
8 pages
definitions
- Four caches sit between your product page and the shopperBuild output, the edge, the browser and the in-page store. You can purge the first two on demand and only expire the other two — which is the rule every caching decision follows.definition7 min
- The cart token: the one object a storefront can never serve from cacheThe cart token carries identity, not contents. Once you see it that way, cached cart fragments and merge rules that silently discard items stop being surprises.definition7 min
- The public storefront token: what a shopper-side key can readA storefront credential is safe because of its scope, not its secrecy. It ships to the browser by design — so the only question that matters is what it can return.definition7 min
diagnostics
- Shoppers land on the wrong country's storefront, and the redirect loopsA market redirect that loops is not a geolocation accuracy problem. It is two systems asserting a market at two different layers, with no agreed order between them.diagnostic11 min
- The page says in stock and the cart refuses: a rendering faultA badge that disagrees with the cart is usually a staleness problem in how the page was rendered, not a wrong number in the inventory system. One request tells you which, before anyone opens the ERP.diagnostic9 min
- The price in the cart does not match the price on the product pageComparing the page against the cart tells you a mismatch exists and nothing else. The third number — what the commerce API returns in the same context — is the one that names the fault.diagnostic10 min
- The storefront got slower and nobody on your team shipped any codeNothing was deployed and the product page lost half a second. The scripts a marketing team can install without a release are the first place to look, and a request-level diff names the one responsible.diagnostic9 min
- Your product page's largest element arrives last on mobileHalf the time the largest element on a product page is not the product shot at all. Identify it first, then the fix is either an image-pipeline change or a script-order change.diagnostic9 min
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