We have already stated that we’re not satisfied with current eCommerce solutions, so we’d like to introduce you to STAR Commerce project properly.
What is STAR Commerce
Best way to describe it is to say that it’s front end implementation of eCommerce platform, that’s optimized for speed and scalability.
There will be more in-depth explanations in sections below, but high level explanation is that once you choose your eCommerce platform, you can set everything up for it, and install STAR Commerce front end application on top of it. It will give you everything you have with your setup, but it will also give you an enormous advantage over standard installation. It will perform well even on mobile phones, you’ll have out of the box scalable solution and most important, easy and free upgrades at your palm.
An example scenario is that you have Magento web shop set up, you’re used to all great things that you got with it such as powerful administration tools, strong community, its extendability to support all your wishes, but it’s either costly to host, or it doesn’t perform well (especially on mobile phones) – not to mention development cost if you wan’t to just update system version to get that better reporting you always wanted.
In this scenario, you can still keep all the good, but you’ll get fast frontend, that you can scale together with your business, but on top of that, you’ll be able to update both front end and administration without frustration and without development hours involved.
What can STAR Commerce improve
There are many things that can be improved on. We probably won’t tackle all of them, but instead we’ll tackle just the ones that we think are the most important to end user while keeping things simple for commerce owners.
We’re not huge on just listing items, but seems appropriate to do it here, as there’s actually a decent amount of improvements:
- Overall system speed
- Hosting cost – both in time and price
- Scalable solution
- Maintenance simplicity
- Flexibility in choosing eCommerce solution
Now, that we have actionable items listed, let’s go a bit into depth for each of them.
Overall system speed
We plan to implement solution that will work on mobile as fast on desktop – meaning there won’t be a ton of JavaScript libraries that will decrease performance – we’re going to focus on mobile first development.
This doesn’t mean you’re going to get just plain text with some CSS, it just means that system won’t be bloated with anything – you’ll be able to control what features you want without having to load all of the optional functionalities.
Also, won’t pre load things that are not needed – this gives you faster initial page load time, and that directly affects your customers.
Aimed page load time for entire site load is less than 750 ms for first time visitor – meaning he needs to download all things to his browser for the first time (JS files, CSS files, images,…).
Aimed page load time with cached static files is no more than 250 ms.
Oh yeah, one more thing – aimed values above are for internet speed of 5 Mbit download and 0.5 Mbit upload with latency of 50 ms per request.
Hosting cost – both in time and price
We all know that running modern eCommerce platform isn’t cheap to host if you plan to have your site perform well. For example, default setting for installation of Magento 2 platform implies 768 MB of RAM for single PHP request only. Ok that’s less than 1 GB of RAM, no big deal? Well not really, as if you have 10 customers, that’s maximum of 768×10 MB…
What we aim for is that you can serve 30 concurrent connections while having everything hosted on same machine with total of not more than 4 GB of RAM – with optimized server configuration that is.
That should be noticeable difference in cost of running a performant web shop while keeping all of the functionality of your chosen eCommerce platform.
As for the time cost, we did make a presumption here – you have someone who’s maintaining your hosting. If that’s the case, the math is simple – less servers are needed for same performance of system, and that directly reduces amount of time needed to set things up.
Scalable solution
We know that main angle in scaling current eCommerce systems for small and medium traffic stores is to scale vertically – this usually means just transfer everything to more powerful server, and you’re ready for more customers.
Entire implementation of STAR Commerce will be configurable enough to be able to scale horizontally but still simple enough to reduce time needed to set things up – just add more of mid end web servers and you’re “indefinitely” scalable. When we say “indefinitely” we mean exactly that – as eventually you’re going to hit limit of database writes per second. Although that will be a different issue than what we’re trying to solve here, you’re going to have everything in place to just scale out database as well unlike situation where you where just scaling out vertically.
Maintenance simplicity
This is something that people will say is gray area as maintenance is never really simple, especially if you’re upgrading system to newer version, or if you’re trying to migrate of or on to different platform – and that’s true.
What we can offer here is compatibility between versions as we move on with development. On top of that semi automatic updates to the system if you want to keep everything up to date – and you should.
Basically what we’re saying here is that there will be no headache around something minor as with current systems where you need to plan for quite expensive development hours even if you simply want to upgrade minor version of the system so that you get better sales reporting or faster page load time.
Flexibility in choosing eCommerce solution
Regardless if your current choice of eCommerce system – you’ll have full control over your data, and easy migration tool from and to STAR Commerce.
If it’s Magento, PrestaShop or any other self hosted eCommerce solution, is it maybe LemonStand or Bigcommerce of hosted solutions – we don’t and won’t care – ever.
Of course, this is presuming that you will be or are using some of existing solutions that has API for importing and exporting data, and we have data mapper implemented, but more on that below.
Let’s plan for all of this
How do we plan to do it? Well, there are few things we’re going to tackle. Since development will be a huge amount of work, and given we’re using SCRUM methodology to organize development, it only makes sense to plan the project in epics.
We’ve split the entire development to two main epics, of which all of them will have sub-epics:
- Front end epic
- Data mappers epic
Front end epic:
- Caching system
- Front end application
- Front end administration
- API Glue
Data mappers epic
- Investigate options give API constraints
- Magento 2 data mapper *
* Magento 2 is chosen as it represents high end open source solution that follows latest trends in development, integration is possible out of the box. Others will be considered and implemented after entire project is released
Development roadmap
We’re starting with development planning this week, after which we should have some idea when will alpha release be available.
As soon as roadmap is in place, it will be published here.