Author Archives: alankent
Do all these cloud services make designing e-commerce platforms easier?
Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure… its never been easier to spin up a new server. Then comes the raft of managed services: databases, message queues, scheduling, and more. And this is before you get to Kubernetes orchestration and automatic restarts or serverless programming models. But using these tools is it easier to build an […]
Google Spot and existing e-commerce sites
Google Spot “enables merchants to create branded commercial experiences that bridge the offline and online worlds”. The Google Pay team recently announced opening their early access program to the broader community. This blog post is intended for e-commerce platforms or merchant developers to give them a bit more information to decide if they should look […]
Web Components for e-Commerce
TL;DR: In previous posts I described common web storefront performance issues and provided a quick introduction to web components. This post continues the series by exploring applying web components to the field of web e-commerce. So what are some of the benefits of using web components on an e-commerce site? (Many of these benefits are […]
Web Custom Elements for Content Markup
TL;DR: Custom elements (a web standard for extending the set of HTML tag names) provide an interesting way to support rich content markup while decoupling presentation from content, but still have challenges in search engine support. Custom Elements (a key technology underpinning web components) allow developers to extend HTML with their own set of tags […]
The Case for Web Components
TL;DR: This blog provides a quick introduction to web components. A later blog will show how web components can be used on e-commerce sites, including how to address common web storefront performance issues. Web components allow frontend developers to extend the set of available HTML tags a browser understands. For example, a <pinch-zoom-img> web component […]
Common Web Storefront Performance Problems
TL;DR: This this the first in a series of blog posts related to improving the performance of e-commerce web storefronts. This post runs through some of the more common performance problems sites experience, laying the groundwork for later posts. A recent Think With Google article rated retail websites as the slowest category of all web […]
The Value of A/B Testing
5 years ago I wrote a blog on “You Can’t Improve what you Can’t Measure”. While the use of “can’t” may have been a little strong, making changes to your website can deliver results you did not expect. If you want to make sure the changes make your site better, you need to have some […]
