How Dell Is Using Micro Frontends to Improve Its Ecommerce Experience
The massive rise in ecommerce sales recently is causing many brands to rethink how they present themselves and serve their customers online.
Of course, the trend away from the high street and towards online shopping preceded the COVID-19 crisis by quite a few years - but there can be little doubt that the onset of the coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the situation. And this pattern is likely to continue. Some experts predict global online sales will hit $4.2 trillion this year - with ecommerce sales in the US accounting for a quarter of this figure.
How, then, can brands make the shopping experience more attractive to potential online customers and better stand out in the swirling melee of the digital marketplace? Well, computer giant Dell, believes the answer lies in micro frontends.
Micro Frontends
For the uninitiated, the term "micro frontends" refers to a type of digital architecture where functionality is extended to the frontend of a website - in this case, the digital storefront. When compared to a traditional architecture, micro frontends allow for advantages such as deployment independence, easier testing of features, and more.
When viewing an online shopping platform, a customer will experience various features when trying to purchase a product - let's use an item of clothing as an example here. One feature will be a variant selector, which allows them to choose different sizes, fits, and colors. Another will be the buy button, which adds the item, complete with variants, to the cart. The cart itself is another feature - clicking on it begins the checkout process.
With micro frontends, each feature becomes a separate application - and these are then aggregated into the complete frontend experience and can be operated on and maintained by separate teams with appropriate experience in their respective area.
"[Micro frontends] will allow each team to build components with a single responsibility," explains Senior Manager Software Engineer for AWS Solutions, Rany ElHousieny, Ph.D, in a LinkedIn in a blog post. "The hosting team can focus on analytics and performance and each feature team can focus on customers. Both teams can work 100% on their particular areas. The host page team can focus 100% on creating a great host page. Each micro frontend team will focus 100% on the functionality of their micro frontend."
It is for this reason they are particularly suited to large businesses and organizations which have the resources to assign different teams to the various features and manage standards across all of them.
Dell
One brand which definitely has the size and resources to work with micro frontends is Dell - and the computer legend has been doing just that to improve the ecommerce experience for its online customers.
The implementation of micro frontends started as an experiment to see if Dell's IT teams could work faster and with greater agility to support the brand's ecommerce efforts. However, the endeavor proved so successful that micro frontends has revolutionized not just Dell's global ecommerce delivery, but improved website architecture across the entire company.
"We are using micro frontends to break up webpage components into smaller building blocks that can be plugged into a page, or unplugged, to quickly construct the customer experiences we want," said Dell Technologies in a blog post. "Like building blocks, these micro frontends are made to fit in any webpage design model and offer a consistent look and feel to customers across all ecommerce pages and functions."
Dell found that deploying micro frontends, not only improved the user experience for its customers, but also fostered a greater sense of the experience within the company and its development teams as well. People had to start thinking beyond their own needs and those of their immediate peers and extending that thinking to build platforms which were compatible with what other teams were developing and working with.
"Like most transformations, the micro frontend strategy did require us to make people, process, and technology changes," continues Dell Technologies. "From a people standpoint, our teams had to start thinking beyond building a single experience to instead building an experience that other teams could use as well - more of a platform approach. It required a mindset change that their team was now responsible for many experiences, not just their own team's experience."
Final Thoughts
Micro frontends are a fantastic way for larger businesses to improve the customer experience for their ecommerce platforms. With independent units working seamlessly together, ecommerce brands can become more innovative, agile, and effective than would be possible with traditional architecture.
You can hear Dell, Inc's Head of Online Marketing and Ecommerce Robert Elzner speak at eTail Palm Springs 2022, taking place February 28 to March 02 in Palm Springs, CA.
Download the agenda today for more information and insights.