Modern PIM architecture for the new era of e-commerce
E-commerce is evolving year by year, and in the post-Covid era, we will be buying even more than before. These changes have implications for the needs of systems architecture to support digital transformation.
To better understand today’s needs, let’s take a look at what product catalog management looked like in the early days of e-commerce.
1. The early beginning of product catalog management
The beginnings of product information management were inherently connected with ERP systems, where the product was registered as a record linked to numerous manufacturing or logistic-warehouse processes. Product information was, therefore, simply reduced to data related to the above-mentioned processes (often only SKU/EAN and dimensions, weight, and price). There was limited data, and information about where the product was actually sold was distributed among various other systems (not even electronic, but often hand-held).
With the first e-commerce systems that were checkout add-ons to ERP systems, the product data management situation began to get complicated because ERP systems were not designed for online sales. While they were great at inventory management and order picking, preparing an enhanced product sheet for an online storefront was a challenge. Often in ERP, there was no way to include more than a single product photo, attributes were limited to a few. Content could not be enriched with Rich-Media elements. With the growing e-commerce channel, this kind of management model was a serious limitation and bottleneck.
2. Commerce standalone platforms era
Following the growth of e-commerce, the first platforms that comprehensively take over the management of all online sales processes began to appear on the market. The market was still in its early stages of evolution, so open-source solutions quickly began to gain fans. With relatively low costs, they guaranteed the possibility of fast onboarding and testing a given solution (in terms of functions and stability). Players such as Magento, PrestaShop, and WooCommerce have quickly become leaders in the global market. The first e-commerce SaaS solutions also appeared, which further lowered the entry threshold for online sales.
In all these systems, product catalog management is integrated with other sales mechanisms (pricing, inventory, order management, customer relationship management) and guarantees a fairly efficient manual capability to publish products on the Internet. However, for companies with hundreds of thousands of products, very often the monolithic system architecture proved to be an Achilles heel. Without a very large investment in performance optimization, it was impossible to work efficiently and consequently to sell. Additionally, unexpected sales peaks often generated a significant performance load and blocked other business processes (such as effective work on content in the administration panel), apart from the critical ones related to order registration.
3. Composable commerce era
The Covid-19 pandemic caused the entire e-commerce market to be redefined and bounced back 10 years in just a few months. Efficient online selling has helped more than a few companies survive in the market. This, in turn, has led to significant investment in all business solutions that can assist in the effective management of successful online selling. In 2021 e-commerce is not just one channel, it’s a whole marketing-mix on steroids: numerous marketplaces, social shopping (Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok), own online store, click&collect models in stationery stores (POS), or interactive product catalogs.
Monolithic e-commerce platforms with built-in mechanisms to handle all business processes are proving to be unreliable and inefficient. Growing online sales means increasing the number of people and specialization of processes related to Internet sales. Thus, specialized teams are created for e-commerce marketing and sales, customer service, product catalog management, risk management, and many others. This is no longer the domain of a single e-commerce department, but the entire organization focused on online sales.
What up to now was the domain of the biggest global players — that is implementation of dedicated solutions streamlining work in so many areas (Customer Relationship Management, Order Management, Product Information Management, Sales Management, Risk Management, Cashflow Management) — touched also SMB and mid-market.
However, in the case of Ergonode PIM we went a step forward, instead of building a monolithic solution like most of the open-source PIM solutions available on the market, we’ve designed a microservices architecture that will allow for even greater decomposition of the entire ecosystem of e-commerce tools.
Modern open-source PIM architecture
Ergonode architecture consists of two fully modular applications that are open for additional extensions.
Ergonode PIM database application is based on the most popular and quality Symfony PHP framework combined with PostgreSQL database.
The administration panel is a fully autonomous application based on Vue.js/Nuxt.js framework. Additionally, the application uses our own solution which allows adding modules as smaller applications (so-called micro-frontends).
This approach to architecture allows flexible preparation of PIM solution implementation for very different needs and business scenarios.
Case #1: PIM with external suppliers
Many companies have extensive business structures in multiple markets. These may be various types of divisions that manage a product catalog within a single global corporate structure. Or they may be suppliers or partner companies that add specific product categories to a central database.
Different business requirements mean that there is often a need to design a completely different admin panel interface for selected customer groups. At Ergonode, this is possible. Based on our admin panel UI design system, you can design completely different admin panels in terms of UX/UI, which as external applications will use Ergonode’s global API.
You can design different dedicated solutions for branches in different markets, as well as adding completely different ones for suppliers, and everything will be connected to a global single back-end database of the Ergonode PIM platform.
Case #2: PIM without admin panel
One of our customers uses the Ergonode platform as an automated central system for exchanging product data between other platforms. All data exchange algorithms are programmed for the organization’s processes and updated on a regular basis.
Ergonode PIM architecture was used in an unusual way, because the solution does not have an administration panel, and the whole ecosystem of product data exchange is realized by the back-end of the platform.
Case #3: Central product information hub in e-commerce ecosystem
In a case where product catalog management is also associated with the processing of data with high dynamics of movement, Ergonode allows you to extend the application with a model of specialized microservices, which will properly calculate and prepare the data for display or further processing without having to overload the main database application.
The data from the microservices can be retrieved and displayed in the administration panel directly through the headless application modules. The flexibility of this approach allows us to respond to the most complex business challenges.
Case #4: Putting data to frontend from external platforms
In Ergonode, it is possible to build modules in the headless application layer of the administration panel. This means that you can display data directly from other systems without having to overload the database system.
An example of such a solution is a module that would download and display data related to conversion from popular analytical solutions such as Google Analytics, Hotjar, or Mouseflow. The data would be displayed in real-time and downloaded after entering a dedicated tab on the product card of Ergonode admin panel.
Future
At Ergonode we will strive to decompose the architecture of the entire system even more strongly to ensure that enterprise customers can run our solution as a Cloud-Prem native service, that will have the benefits of both cloud and on-premise solutions. For SMB and mid-market customers, we will have flexible cloud plans that will make it easy to scale and customize product information management.
Want to know more? Visit our website: www.ergonode.com and book a demo to see how Ergonode can boost your business: www.ergonode.com/book-a-demo
