Event driven eCommerce Orchestration for a JAMStack Frontend

JAMStack is a popular strategy for delivering super fast eCommerce experiences. The strategy basically means that you generate the pages on build time and are updated when content changes. Of course you want to make sure that all pages are 100% up to date with the latest marketing content and product information status like stock. You do not want to sell inventory that you do not have in stock - that is not good for customer experience. Event driven orchestration enables a fully coherent JAMStack frontend. Fast and always up to date.

In a world where site pages are generated on demand you end up on an architecture that quickly gets bottlenecks when scaling. Caching is often used to combat this with its own set of issues when backend services do not scale. However if you turn this paradigm upside down and make sure all your edges are updated on every event change you have dramatically changed the game. Much easier to scale, globally superlow latency and using significantly less computing power. 

The result is 100% updated edge delivery with several benefits:

• Refresh upstream on state change like stock status
• Refresh upstream on content change like product description
• Global horizontal scaling with super low latency globally
• Great uptime with a headless distributed frontend
• High quality frontend with quality checks on build time - you can easily introduce CI on page level

eCommerce is a different beast than purely authored content like in a blog. With eCommerce you have states that are updated based on import feeds, marketing content updates and of course transaction based updates. When you are selling products the stock is updated and you want the frontend to reflect this.

Pulling the stock information dynamically from the frontend might not seem like a big deal. But today the requirements for site speed due to the introduction of core web vitals you should limit the number of backend requests during runtime if you are designing for site speed. 

If you have an event driven system you can update upstream any time a title, price, picture or stock information is updated. With Crystallize webhooks trigger change in products and rich marketing content as well as order states. Useful to keep the frontend fully updated and make sure you do not sell out an inventory that you do not have.

Simply put: no more batch processing updating everything. Just update what is changed. Accuracy.