Replatforming and Adaptability Features of Virto Commerce Platform for Developers

In this article, I’ll talk about development-related topics like replatforming and adaptability in the Virto Commerce platform. First, why should CIOs focus on replatforming their ecommerce system? The answer is simple:  ecommerce in many companies followed the organic path of initially creating an online store for B2C customers as the most developed market niche. Later, the idea came to expand the online business to the B2B segment, but it turned out to be not so easy to do.

For the B2B niche, the starting situation was greatly different. Until 2020, when selling to B2B customers, companies acted according to the old-fashioned offline way with personal meetings and negotiations around an office table. With the onset of the pandemic, it became clear that the transition of B2B commerce to online was suddenly a priority.

When starting to implement B2B ecommerce, many companies found their existing B2C ecommerce software did not allow extending from a B2C solution to a full-fledged B2B ecommerce portal. This is because of significant differences in B2C and B2B portals, as organization accounts include many roles for buyers, restrictions on catalogs, contract pricing, and other B2B specifics. Therefore, replatforming is a forced but urgent task for such companies to trade in the online B2B market.

Next, we come to the term adaptability. An adaptive digital commerce platform is designed to allow continuous changes for an arbitrarily long time. For example, in relation to B2B, the task is to adapt an existing online store to new niche marketplaces. Recent ecommerce trends indicate the growing interest of B2B market participants in creating online marketplaces as platforms that will increase sales and attract more customers.

Again, the problem is that the ecommerce software your company currently uses may not support marketplace functionality. The good news is that, in this case, it is not necessary to completely replace your ecommerce software. To create a marketplace, adaptability comes to the front. With Virto Marketplace working as an add-on, you can turn your existing ecommerce website into a marketplace solution.

Recent trends in software development highlight the benefits of modularity and composability in complex application architectures for developers. Many ecommerce vendors mention supporting these architecture features on their web pages. However, you should understand that modularity can also mean a very chaotic set of modules that are difficult for developers to work with. So, developers need clean and logically ordered modularity to work in an effective way.

The same can be said about composability. If there are no clear logical rules for how different components fit together, it will be difficult for developers to understand the software application architecture. In every case when a new module needs to be added to the application ecosystem, especially from a third party, it will require clear rules on how to make the integration; otherwise, there will be trouble.

Until now, among ecommerce vendors, no one except Virto has offered partners’ and clients’ development teams such a harmonious and logically understandable architecture as Virto Atomic Architecture™.

An example is microservices, which are small but fully-functional modules that are combined into a whole software application.

Virto Atomic Architecture™ is the logical, simple-to-use, and easily understandable structure with nested components to build a unique solution. It provides a set of best-in-class benefits aimed at increasing the performance, usability, and business value of online stores, marketplaces, and vendor portals. The key to success is in reusing and recomposing software as well as in cooperative work of the IT teams of three parties – Virto as the vendor, the implementation partner, and the customer.

The core concept behind Virto Atomic Architecture™ is to think about an ecommerce application as a nested-structure universe where the smallest components (atoms) are included inside bigger elements (cells), and finally, they are included into large, fully functional apps which we call "organisms".

The organisms represent ecommerce applications that are ready to deploy in the cloud (Azure, Amazon, or other). With traceable instances of the components at any level, Virto Atomic Architecture™ brings many benefits that allow companies to significantly reduce the cost of platform ownership throughout its lifecycle.

You can read about Virto Atomic Architecture™ in detail in our blog posts:

• What Is Virto Atomic Architecture™?
• Reusing and Recomposing as Key Benefits of Virto Atomic Architecture™

Especially for developers, we provide info on Virto's technical support website:

• Virto Commerce Atomic Architecture In Action
• What Are the Skills Required for VC Developer?

Summing up, Virto Atomic Architecture™ is a multi-team workspace in which different developer groups can make changes as well as reuse and recompose different components while working together on the same project.

Virto Commerce offers a vast number of scenarios for B2B and B2C ecommerce related to digital catalog management, product information, prices, online transactions, cart, order, quotes, etc. These are all parts of our composable ecommerce platform consisting of different modules.

Virto Commerce is a multi-tiered ecommerce software for dealing with complex B2B accounts. This means you can create and manage different organization structures, manage permissions and user roles, etc. Supporting these important features in the B2B world is vital because management of the organizational account structure is a complicated thing compared to a personal account in B2C.

A development team working on B2B ecommerce solution customization brings additional value to their customer when they can define who their clients are to their ecommerce portal. We at Virto provide productivity tools that are especially tuned for B2B. So what does that mean?

When we are talking about B2C ecommerce solutions, it's better to keep a consumer on the web as long as possible for spontaneous purchases. But for B2B, the order logic has to be built to work as fast as possible because your B2B portal is a working space for corporate buyers.

The next important info for developers is that Virto Commerce software platform has headless architecture. It is designed to support multi-channel commerce so you can connect the different applications and different front ends to Virto Commerce.

All business logic and all services are available through the API. This is a front-end connection to back-end and third-party applications that are viable with REST or GraphQL. Using API is a way to easily integrate the Virto Commerce-based solution to any storefront application.

Virto Commerce allows you to decrease your development costs. For our partner's developers, we provide all the required support. Headless and modularity bring the ability to switch technologies, for example, to Google from Microsoft, and so on.

Because front-end technologies are changing every three to five years, developers working with Virto Commerce can switch technologies easily. They can use Angular or React or whatever they are proficient in for storefront development.

Regarding integrations, we prepared a series of posts on how to integrate corporate information systems of various types with the Virto Commerce platform:

• How to Integrate a Customer's ERP into the Virto Commerce Platform
• How to Integrate a Customer - Owned CRM into Virto Commerce Platform
• How to Integrate a Customer's PIM with the Virto Commerce Platform
• How to Integrate an External CMS to the Virto Commerce Platform
• Benefits of Integrating a Loyalty System in B2B eCommerce with the Virto Commerce Platform

At Virto, we focus on helping the development team concentrate on the implementation of business features so they don't have to worry about Clean Architecture.

— WhatIs.com definition

Also, we understand that Virto Commerce is just one element of a customer's ecommerce applications ecosystem and we are ready to seamlessly integrate Virto Commerce into it. We build Virto Commerce by using the latest technologies and keeping it up to date.

Our partners and professional services successfully implemented integration with hundreds of enterprise systems and ecommerce providers. It's efficient and intuitive to build integration between Virto and any other system. Also, we think about developer productivity, how to decrease the cost of implementation and then operations, so we are checking and offering productivity tools as well.

We built Virto Commerce with Atomic Architecture, which focuses on a flexible ecommerce architecture that is fully adaptable to business challenges.

Here are the five top principles:

• First, an Open Ecosystem – Your development team can create their own elements and use our source code as the knowledge base.
• Composability – It begins at the smallest component level and combines those to create larger components.
• Support Evolution – Components can be updated and improved
• Performance / Scalability – Supports the ability to increase and decrease the load on the commerce platform to control the cost and scale the business as it grows
• Excellence of multi-team development – An implementation partner's team can create their own custom-designed components, at the level of a molecule/cell/organism, to implement the specifics of the client's business.

Virto is the only vendor in the ecommerce software market for mid-sized and enterprise companies that provides logically understandable architecture for multi-team development and cooperation called Virto Atomic Architecture™. This architecture brings a fast way to scale ecommerce innovations both in B2B and B2C.

The teams can easily adopt the Virto approach and create new solutions using and assembling preexisting modules, building your own modules, or integrating best-in-breed third-party apps to own the most effective ecommerce solution on the market.