EP100 Fixing Performance Pain - Magento & Adobe Commerce B2B Composable Commerce
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[00:00:06] DARIN NEWBOLD: welcome everyone to Commerce Today and excited to announce this is our 100th episode.

[00:00:11] JOSHUA WARREN: Woohoo!

[00:00:12] DARIN NEWBOLD: Yay. My name is Darin. As always, Josh is here with me and we're excited to share Commerce today with you. And we're going to be talking about performance. Gotta love it. We want to be able to fix performance problems specifically around Magento and Adobe Commerce, B2B, Composable Commerce.

[00:00:27] DARIN NEWBOLD: So let's get started. Josh, take us

[00:00:30] JOSHUA WARREN: All right, you just threw a whole lot of buzzwords at them, Darin. So, yeah, it's all about those of you out there selling in the B2B space, running on Magento, Open Source, or Adobe Commerce. having that performance pain and performance pain can mean a couple of different things.

[00:00:46] JOSHUA WARREN: It can be your site is slow, meaning it's just a slow experience to browse the site. It can mean the user experience itself is slow, like it just it's a lot of steps to add things to the cart. It could mean that your site [00:01:00] crashes a lot. Sadly, see that a lot too. and that is really kind of what I wanted to talk about today.

[00:01:06] JOSHUA WARREN: just I've seen a lot of those frustrations lately and it's funny, you go talk to a composable platform out there and there's some great ones and they're going to tell you, Oh, you have to move away from Magento or Adobe commerce, move to a truly composable solution to solve those problems. What I'm here to tell you today and explain to you today is that you can stay with Adobe Commerce and have that composable solution and solve these problems that you're 

[00:01:30] DARIN NEWBOLD: problems. Well, why are we facing these problems, Josh?

[00:01:40] JOSHUA WARREN: Yeah. So performance issues. a lot of it comes from the history of Magento and Adobe Commerce. and that's a whole other episode, both the corporate history and the code and technical history. really the background of both of those platforms, they share a common base [00:02:00] is a monolithic architecture.

[00:02:02] JOSHUA WARREN: and monolith has become almost this bad word the last few years in software engineering, but all monolith really means is. All your code is in one application. You have one big application that does everything. So Magento open source, you can go out on GitHub, you can look at it, you can see all those beautiful PHP files and all of those files.

[00:02:23] JOSHUA WARREN: You have to have all of those files, the one big monolith. To run Magento to have your Magento site. So even though there's been so much added to Magento since the early days when it was built as that monolith and even the transition of Magento 2 kind of opened up the API, really started moving it towards more headless solutions.

[00:02:45] JOSHUA WARREN: So many people that are experienced with Magento and Adobe Commerce will Operate from that monolithic mindset. and I think that's going to be my new buzzword, monolithic mindset. what I mean by that is they build [00:03:00] everything like a monolith. So we talked in the PIM episode about how some people will integrate their PIM with their ERP and their e commerce platform with their ERP by going out and buying an extension for that monolithic e commerce platform.

[00:03:14] JOSHUA WARREN: And that's basically just. Putting even more into your monolith. and that's a mindset, that monolithic mindset. You got to move past that, but we'll talk about that in the next segment. also going back to the history of Magento and Adobe commerce, it's based on some. Some of the best, most cutting edge front end technologies of 2015.

[00:03:34] JOSHUA WARREN: That is kind of where if you do what, you know, the vast majority of Magento and Adobe commerce sites do, and you build a theme based on Luma, you are using Very advanced cutting edge technology that was released in 2015. so that just, your site's going to be slower. It's going to be less mobile responsiveness, things like that.

[00:03:56] JOSHUA WARREN: but again, like there's a lot of platforms out there that point to that and say, See, this [00:04:00] is why you need to switch to our platform. When actually it's not a Magento or Adobe Commerce problem. It's a mindset and it's a design problem where there are plenty of sites now deploying other front end technologies with Magento and Adobe Commerce that aren't having those challenges.

[00:04:15] DARIN NEWBOLD: Guys, Josh, you kind of caught me off there. I was all excited about the, latest and greatest technology, but I've had friends tell me that I'm still dressing as if it's the latest and greatest in 2015. So maybe I need a little bit of get out of the monolith, but back to our problems that we're, that we're facing around these performance issues in this, Magento environment, Magento or Adobe environment, beyond performance, there's also integration challenges.

[00:04:41] DARIN NEWBOLD: Tell us about that.

[00:04:43] JOSHUA WARREN: Yeah. So again, monolithic mindset. every B2B site out there has an ERP integration. Like in the B2B world, you have to have that. And they'll Best state of the art 2015 ERP integrations, so many of those are third party extensions that are running [00:05:00] encrypted code that is embedded into your Adobe Commerce instance.

[00:05:05] JOSHUA WARREN: That is not the way to do it anymore. and that basically means that anytime there is a major Magento or Adobe Commerce update, you can't look at that extensions code because it's encrypted. You have to depend on that extension vendor to keep it up to date. So that creates a single point of failure.

[00:05:22] JOSHUA WARREN: Lots of times just costs a lot of money. Those extension authors, they encrypt them because they're charging you a lot of money for them. and I see a lot of downtime coming from that, from just that approach to integrations.

[00:05:34] DARIN NEWBOLD: interesting. reminds me of kind of all the updates back in the good old early windows days of everything that needed to be updated. So again, back to our performance problems. The other thing we need to look at is just the, what you had talked about at the start site uptime and, possible crashing.

[00:05:51] DARIN NEWBOLD: So

[00:05:51] JOSHUA WARREN: Yeah, so again, monolithic mindset, and I think that's actually what we should have called

[00:05:56] DARIN NEWBOLD: we should called. Yeah.

[00:05:59] JOSHUA WARREN: everything is [00:06:00] so tightly coupled.

[00:06:01] JOSHUA WARREN: Like, if you have that extension that's in your monolithic code base that is integrating with that other system and something happens there, and that extension crashes, it can take your whole site down. also The way of modifying Magento and Adobe Commerce, is great and better than what there was before.

[00:06:19] JOSHUA WARREN: Kind of that 2015 state of the art, you're writing code modules within the Magento or Adobe Commerce code base to do your customizations. If there's an error in one of those can take the whole site down. And so that's where updating that mindset and moving as we'll see in a little bit into a different mindset, can definitely help avoid that, those crashing and uptime issues.

[00:06:42] DARIN NEWBOLD: And the last on our list here is, maintenance costs. Just how do you keep this up?

[00:06:46] DARIN NEWBOLD: And I'm betting you're going to say monolithic mindset.

[00:06:49] JOSHUA WARREN: Yeah. that's definitely a big part of it. when everything is connected into one code base changing one thing. affects everything. And so, and [00:07:00] that's what, you know, unfortunately as an agency, so often we have to explain to people, especially if your site was built somewhere else and you brought it to us, they'll say, well, why does it, why is that taking four hours?

[00:07:10] JOSHUA WARREN: Why can't you just, you know, isn't that just a 15 minute change? Well, yeah, the change is 15 minutes, but there are 200, lines of code. In your monolith, any one of those lines now might break. We need to do some pretty thorough testing. And so when everything is built into that one box, you kind of have to test the whole thing every time you change anything.

[00:07:31] JOSHUA WARREN: And it just drives your maintenance costs up.

[00:07:34] DARIN NEWBOLD: Well, we talked about these problems. We kind of beat the monolithic mindset to death here. how can we fix these problems? And I'm guessing composable commerce is a piece of that for sure.

[00:07:42] JOSHUA WARREN: Definitely. So shifting to a composable mindset, which I need to come up with a better term for that since I have monolithic mindset, but having a composable mindset, and really looking at things through a composable commerce lens. So first thing we talked about performance issues. Well, [00:08:00] With a composable mindset, you really ought to look at headless front end solutions.

[00:08:04] JOSHUA WARREN: And there are many, headless front end solutions. And that basically decouples or breaks kind of the front end out of the monolith, puts it into its own separate little box.

[00:08:16] JOSHUA WARREN: And we actually, there's, like I said, a lot of options at Creatuity. What we did is we built a headless accelerator that allows you to Put that on top of Magento or Adobe Commerce.

[00:08:26] JOSHUA WARREN: You don't have to subscribe to another service. You don't have to buy another thing. You don't have to replatform. We can completely change your front end, bring it up to even 2025 standards instead of 2015 standards. and we've really built a lot of features and functionality around that B2B space and just flexibility to where, for instance, I was talking to a merchant recently that, They have, medical products they're selling that have lot numbers, and these lot numbers have to be tracked and traceable, and there's just a lot of customization that needs to be done there.

[00:08:57] JOSHUA WARREN: The old monolithic mindset, that gets complicated and [00:09:00] expensive pretty fast. The headless mindset, it's a lot simpler, building that.

[00:09:04] DARIN NEWBOLD: Sounds like having the, the headless accelerator is a key, piece to, the solutions here. Next up seamless, ERP integrations using the, and I know we talked about this way early on, we'd have to go back a few episodes, the mock principles or the M A C

[00:09:22] JOSHUA WARREN: yeah, that might even be all the way back to like episode 50 out of our hundreds. So it's been a while. so yeah, mock principles and that's, microservices, headless and composable and API first or API driven. That is the A, which ironically enough, that's what we're talking about with the ERP integrations.

[00:09:40] JOSHUA WARREN: You can tell how often I rattle off mock. so ERP integrations coming from a composable lens or a composable mindset.

[00:09:48] JOSHUA WARREN: Stop buying those extensions you plug into your monolith. Sign up with a service like ipass. com that provides basically composable middleware. So with that service, then you [00:10:00] just point iPass at your ERP.

[00:10:02] JOSHUA WARREN: You point it at your e commerce platform. Now you are updating potentially as fast as real time with your inventory, your pricing, your orders. And that's all a separate piece. It's separately managed. You don't have to worry about, Oh, is there going to be an extension update or a platform update that breaks this integration?

[00:10:20] JOSHUA WARREN: Because it is just completely decoupled from your Magento and Adobe commerce code base.

[00:10:24] DARIN NEWBOLD: That is awesome. love it. So, how about kind of continuing on the microservices side of it? How do we get better uptime?

[00:10:33] JOSHUA WARREN: Yeah. So bringing things, separating them out through microservices, and I'm not going to name names or go into too many details here cause I don't embarrass anyone, but we actually long, ago had a client we worked with and then we had a current client that we're working with that are very similar industries, very similar, products and projects.

[00:10:53] JOSHUA WARREN: But the biggest difference is we're using more of a headless and microservice approach with our current client. [00:11:00] The previous client really was a believer in the monolith. And what happened was the integration between all their systems going through that monolith on really peak days, so like Black Friday, when they had a lot of transactions going through, if they tried to run a report, if they tried to update a product, anything else they tried to do, It would actually crash the site.

[00:11:21] JOSHUA WARREN: It would, it was instead of just serving customers and serving the carts and the sessions, it was serving everything. Bringing that over to microservices now with this newer client we're working with, if they need to go run a report, that system is a completely different system. It's very lightweight and only does what it needs to do.

[00:11:41] JOSHUA WARREN: And in no way is it going to block or impact their Magento or actually in their case, Adobe commerce cloud instance.

[00:11:47] DARIN NEWBOLD: Wow, that's fantastic. Well, we talked about all these cool things and how to solve 'em, but how do we transition really to this composable commerce

[00:11:55] JOSHUA WARREN: Hey, you actually skipped over my favorite part of composable commerce.[00:12:00] 

[00:12:00] JOSHUA WARREN: Everyone thinks I'm trying to sell them something that costs more. I think that's the, agency owner hat that I wear. Everyone assumes agency owners are just trying to increase their billable hours, but actually when you move to this composable approach for Magento or Adobe Commerce, Your maintenance costs drop and you actually will save money through this modular architecture and module modular approach.

[00:12:23] JOSHUA WARREN: again, we have a client where they have a kind of composable OMS that we built for them that is completely separate from, but connected to the rest of their e commerce stack when we need to make a change in how the OMS works. We update a couple of lines of code in this very small service that runs the OMS and we're done.

[00:12:43] JOSHUA WARREN: And we're not having to go back and check every feature, every functionality with an Adobe Commerce. So it really does lower your maintenance

[00:12:50] DARIN NEWBOLD: That is awesome. Well, glad we got that. Don't want to forget that.

[00:12:54] DARIN NEWBOLD: Now, back to how do we transition to this Composable Commerce?

[00:12:59] JOSHUA WARREN: thing [00:13:00] I recommend you do is diagnose your pain points.

[00:13:03] JOSHUA WARREN: You hopefully don't have all of the pain points that I listed in this episode that we've talked about. I'm hoping you just have a few of them. lots of times, the ERP integration can be a big one. So maybe look and see how happy you are with how that works. so you might know, Hey, we have a specific.

[00:13:20] JOSHUA WARREN: front end performance issue we want to resolve but really look through those pain points make a list and that'll help you decide what order to tackle things in or you might even decide hey some of this isn't bad enough we're going to leave that part in the monolith still

[00:13:33] DARIN NEWBOLD: All right. And you, mentioned it, or you started to mention it a little bit with about the front end. And it seems like that's a place to at least consider starting at. 

[00:13:41] JOSHUA WARREN: unless your ERP integration is where your biggest pain is, where I usually see people start to shift in this direction is starting with the front end.

[00:13:49] JOSHUA WARREN: So, replace the Adobe Commerce front end with our headless accelerator, or something like Hoover. Hoover has a very, very nice, [00:14:00] front end that to me kind of sits between, The way Magento currently does things and a full headless or mock approach. So if you want to kind of really just dip your toe in, then I think Hoover is a good intermediate step.

[00:14:13] JOSHUA WARREN: Or if you're like, all right, we know our front end just needs to be ripped out, replaced. We, are all in on headless. Maybe you have a mandate from your CIO or CTO of, you know, all new technologies need to be composable. That's when our headless accelerator can replace the whole front end. Save you a lot of time and money in that transition, and then also just give you a much more performance site.

[00:14:35] DARIN NEWBOLD: side. Alright, and then you mentioned several times the ERP. Is there a way to reimagine that integration?

[00:14:42] JOSHUA WARREN: Yeah, and that's where, basically, cancel your contract with that extension provider, switch over to iPaaS. Probably not just that simple. Hopefully it is probably not. there's usually a little bit of work that needs to be done, but I, said in our show notes, re imagine the ERP integration, [00:15:00] because that's really the biggest step is wrapping your head around the fact that you don't need code written within your e commerce platform to integrate with your ERP, that you can Almost like outsource that piece to iPass and move it out into their platform.

[00:15:14] JOSHUA WARREN: And sometimes some people like having control over that code and like having that. But I think when you look at, especially if you're having a lot of pain with your ERP integration, you look at how brittle that integration is, then moving to something like iPass. com makes total sense.

[00:15:31] DARIN NEWBOLD: then what about critical functions? Can we adopt composable services there as well?

[00:15:36] JOSHUA WARREN: For sure. And this is where, I didn't go into a lot of details in this episode, maybe a future episode, but the real power of composable is then if you need a service and you have moved towards this composable mindset. And you can pick and choose from kind of the best services out there that also have this composable mindset.

[00:15:57] JOSHUA WARREN: What I mean by that is, you know, there's a [00:16:00] system like Algolia that can replace your search. There's dot digital that can do pretty much all of your marketing needs. Ship station, like different pieces of saying, okay, I want to find, here are the needs and pain points I've identified. I want to find the very best solution to solve that exact thing.

[00:16:16] JOSHUA WARREN: And once you've moved into this composable world, it doesn't really matter what. e commerce platform you're on. All that matters is, okay, I'm thinking in this composable mindset. I've architected my Adobe commerce installation in a composable way. This service has something that can connect to that. Done.

[00:16:35] JOSHUA WARREN: And it's so much simpler than the old fashioned ways.

[00:16:39] DARIN NEWBOLD: I can only imagine. It sounds awesome. There's one other one here, and I really like this one as well. It's kind of that iterative deployment. How can that help us out?

[00:16:49] JOSHUA WARREN: Yeah, so don't, and I'm talking to a merchant right now that has basically said, we want to go from the monolith to everything composable all at once in the [00:17:00] first phase. I really don't recommend that. I really, don't recommend that. I would. Start a pilot, start an MVP, look at your lowest risk segment and implement there and then scale it out from there. don't change your ERP integration on the same day that you change your front end on the same day that you change your shipping provider.

[00:17:24] JOSHUA WARREN: Like, just don't do that.

[00:17:25] DARIN NEWBOLD: And one week before Black Friday.

[00:17:27] JOSHUA WARREN: Exactly.

[00:17:28] JOSHUA WARREN: And that's where, especially in the B2B space, I think that Moving to our headless accelerator or moving to a headless solution for your front end is a great low risk way to start moving in this direction. Get some really good early wins, but not put too much risk into the project.

[00:17:48] JOSHUA WARREN: Well,

[00:17:48] DARIN NEWBOLD: Gotcha. Well, guys, we've, we've really hit on all of the key pieces around this composable commerce can solve your performance problems, increase uptime, basically [00:18:00] simplify the integration and reduce those challenges, reduce maintenance costs.

[00:18:04] DARIN NEWBOLD: How key is that? Everybody loves that. So it's so important that, That you really take this and there's a solution that we have with our headless accelerator as well as others who was out there. What else would you say, Josh, just as kind of closing this out or in summary that you want people to walk away with?

[00:18:22] JOSHUA WARREN: This is a big shift and it's first and foremost a mindset shift for you, the e commerce director, and then for whomever you're reporting to. So I have, 30 minute free e commerce problem solving session. You can book with me on my LinkedIn page, go grab one of those and let's just talk through it.

[00:18:39] JOSHUA WARREN: Because I think once you talk through it with someone, you will start to see how it applies to your business, how much it can really, give you more of a piece of mind about your e commerce operations than you have right now. I think if you look at a list of this is how you make your site composable, or this is how you move to a headless architecture, you can very quickly get overwhelmed.

[00:18:59] JOSHUA WARREN: So [00:19:00] start with that conversation first.

[00:19:02] DARIN NEWBOLD: That's the place to start. definitely check out Josh. It's Joshua Warren on LinkedIn with the yellow background. So definitely grab, grab Josh there and, set up a 30 minute, e commerce questioning Q& A, if you will. So with that, as always, we appreciate you being here. Definitely send us your, your thoughts, your experiences.

[00:19:22] DARIN NEWBOLD: We always want to hear that. And as always, we want to thank you. This has been a fantastic 100th episode of Commerce Today, and we're happy to have you here until next time. 

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