Introduction

Enterprise E-Commerce by Blazity is a open source enterprise-grade template of a Next.js project using Shopify as the e-commerce platform (product data, categories) and Algolia as the middle layer (data fetching, searching, faceting and recommendations).

This documentation serves purpose of explaining our architectural decisions, containing in-details features descriptions and read-worthy guidelines. Everything with focus on the business values and theirs impact on the implementations.

Philosophy & motivation

Building e-commerce platform is a tough topic. Creating one that has all the features that enterprise companies want is hard, way harder than implementing Headless CMS. There are bunch of templates out there that struggle with couple areas, while they may be a great choice for a small or medium-sized businesses, the huge needs for e.g. crawling budget optimization, SEO, excellent browsing journey, simplicity of the implementation are way more than can be expected from other projects.

The browsing journey

A monolithic commerce platform will never beat the speed of a fast-lookup system like Algolia, Constructor, or other enterprise search systems. What if you cache your platform's responses? Even still, the combinatorics of search terms, filters, and sort options create endless unique queries. A fast source-of-truth is table-stakes for speedy browsing UX.

Architecture diagram

Simple, winning e-commerce architecture. Take a closer look at the arrow colors as they represent the times between high-level user's browsing journey interactions and network latencies in the lower level.

Features