Development for e-commerce

Headless e-commerce is a hot topic in the media and industry events. Business owners who learn more about headless eCommerce (usually called “headless commerce”) start feeling uncomfortable, not understanding whether it is sufficiently important to implement it or not. No one wants to stay behind with technology, but retailers do not have money left for unnecessary toys either. Let's have a look for possible benefits and pitfalls.

With 2.7 million apps available in Google Play Store and 1.84 Million apps in Apple’s app store, it is clear that mobile app development has become an urgent need of the hour for businesses of all domains.

Did you know!

According to developer stats, it is predicted that there will be 7 billion million users by 2021 all across the globe.

An eCommerce platform empowers startups, SMEs, and large enterprises to manage multiple online business processes such as website, marketing, sales, and operations.

The top eCommerce platforms handle online business tasks efficiently, and this finally helps enterprises in expanding their productivity.

E-commerce today has become so frequent that it has become almost a standard chain of stores, where most people make purchases. But even online stores are trying to save money by becoming drop shippers and more working on additional implementations, rather than on the maintenance and payment of huge storage spaces.

PIM software or product information management represents a solution for e-commerce businesses where they can consolidate all of their product information into a single place.

PIM software implementations generally provide support for challenges related to:

• Handling multi-language data
• Multiple geographic locations
• Modification of product information within a product catalog
• Managing product information to be scattered throughout business processes

While PIM software handles most of the e-commerce challenges, it also works as an efficient tool that powers – omnichannel experience, product expansion to new markets, increased conversion rates, superior customer experiences, decreasing the number of product returns, and faster time-to-market.

In general, product information management or PIM software is a set of business applications focused on managing product information for use across an e-commerce business from the supply chain to managing customers, product presentation, data handling, and catalog management.

Web development trends seem to be heading more towards server-side scripting languages over client-side scripting languages. And it can be difficult to decide where to start and what to choose.

This year W3techs.com, a web technology survey portal, released a list of the five most in-demand server-side programming languages for web development.

Here is the list:

Are you looking for the best eCommerce platform for your store? Well, this is such an important and big decision as this decides the future of your business. There are various eCommerce platforms and Prestashop is also one of them.

If you are aware of Prestashop and want to switch to other options then this blog is going to help you with good alternatives. Before you jump to other eCommerce platforms, let’s have a look at the market popularity of the Prestashop. Have a look at the below-given graph by Similar Tech which shows the market popularity of the Prestashop.



Without stretching too much time, let’s move towards the best alternatives. Let’s have a look at them:

Considering ever-rising e-commerce sales, which hit $29 trillion last year, companies can no longer neglect online presence. Many of them have already changed the way they work and transformed from simple online stores to marketplaces bringing more sales and opportunities.

Those who’ve chosen the path of transformation or want to build a marketplace are probably seeking for experienced service providers to get some help.

Since there are hundreds of development companies all over the world, I decided to research the market and narrow down the circle of providers you might want to consider for partnership.

To compile this list the following factors were considered:

• Overall number of customer reviews on such reputable platforms as Clutch, Upwork, GoodFirms, App Futura, Extract.co, IT Firms.
• Overall score of those reviews.
• Presence of Fortune 500 clients in the public domain.
• Presence of industry awards in the public domain (e.g. Global Sourcing Award, Top B2B Global Leaders, Best of the Global Outsourcing 100).
• Team size (bigger companies come first).
• Year of fundation (mature companies have more trust).
• Number of offices (more is better).
• Number of brand mentions over the web (only companies with 1,500+ mentions are listed).

No matter how cool your search solution is, without a reliable way of testing it you will not be able to do any improvement without breaking something valuable.

Even a tiny increase in overall search result quality might have a noticeable effect on conversion rate. Naturally, you can use exit-rate to judge if your search needs improvements and do required adjustments, but will you be able to make sure those changes are safe? What if improved relevancy for a specific category breaks search for several other categories?



Moreover, high exit-rate means no matter what you are going to do, the problem has taken place, so dozens of customers already didn’t manage to find what they were up to. Basically, the only way to proceed is to have a reliable search quality validation approach.

Zero-knowledge proofs/arguments are an emerging cryptographic technology that promises to bring us closer to the Holy Grail of blockchain: providing data privacy and auditability.

Potential applications for zero-knowledge include, but are not limited to:

• Inter-bank transfer systems (see a research paper by Narula et al.)
• Privacy-focused management of digital assets (see a proof of concept by J.P. Morgan and zCash)
• KYC (see a proof of concept by ING)
• Self-sovereign identity (see an attribute-based credentials EU project)
• Voting (see a proxy voting prototype by Russian National Security Depository)

Another application for zero-knowledge proofs is helping blockchains scale. ZKPs allow for the “compressing” of computations for blockchain transactions without sacrificing security.

In this article, we describe how zero-knowledge (specifically, Bulletproofs) can be applied to build a privacy-focused service using Bitfury’s Exonum platform.