Author Archives: alankent
Extending Your Web Presence with Structured Data
Structured data helps computers understand your web content more easily and accurately, enabling automated consumers of data (such as Google’s search engine) to create new engaging experiences for users. For example, if you have put your Grandma’s favorite apple pie recipe up on the web and then annotate it with structured data, Google search has […]
When Will We See Serverless Open Source e-Commerce Platforms?
Please note, this is a personal opinion piece. Serverless computing offers multiple appealing benefits: You only pay for the compute you use, which is appealing to both small (low budget) and large (cost efficient) merchants It takes away much of the pain of autoscaling and high availability Developers can focus more on business logic, less […]
Serverless Programming for Large Scale Systems – how useful is it really?
Serverless programming is a model where you write code without having to think about what servers you are running it on. You just deploy the code, and the serverless provider worries about how many servers to spin up for you based on load. The provider also performs automatic restart of servers that fail. AWS Lambda […]
Web Commerce vs Internet Commerce
What is “the web” these days? And what is “the internet”? Wikipedia has a clear definition: “The World Wide Web (WWW), also called the Web, is an information space where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs), interlinked by hypertext links, and accessible via the Internet.” For example, HTTP is a web […]
Following Your Customers with Google Trends
Businesses from small to large need to satisfy their customers. So how does a business keep up with customer needs and desires? What is in trend or going out of trend? Google provides free access to search term trends at google.com/trends. This can be a useful tool to understand what trends are happening in terms […]
Server Side Caching Strategies for Modern Web Applications
Modern web application design patterns bring exciting new opportunities for faster and better user experiences. Client Side Rendering (CSR) allows web pages to be more interactive in the browser; Server Side Rendering (SSR), for the first page of a CSR site, can improve indexability and first page load times; Progressive Web Applications can support push […]
Increasing Online Security by Reducing Passwords
Anyone who has been online for a while most likely has numerous online accounts. It’s just a fact of online life. For example e-commerce sites may ask you to register so you can come back later to track the status of an order you have placed. The problem with this is many sites still ask […]
PoS Selection for e-Commerce
You have your own brick and mortar store from which you run your business. You have it listed in Google My Business, maybe you have your own website, but you don’t sell online… yet. What decisions regarding your physical store may affect moving online later? Your Point of Sale (PoS) system is one of them. […]
My Google I/O 2018: G-Pay and Identity
Using Google Pay on your web site can improve your e-commerce conversion rates. Shoppers are not required to re-enter credit card or shipping details on new sites, greatly streamlining the checkout flow (especially on mobile devices). In this blog I continue with my Google I/O 2018 summary. Part 1 in this series focused on Google […]
Google Indexing and JavaScript Rendering
This blog post is a summary of the “Deliver search-friendly JavaScript-powered websites” session at Google I/O 2018, with an e-commerce lens applied plus few personal opinions thrown in. This talk is so important, I thought it was worth its own blog post. This presentation describes about how Google crawls and indexes sites, including how it […]
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