Adapting to ever-changing customer requirements and expectations is challenging for a modern ecommerce business. This task becomes even more difficult without the right software architecture that would provide advanced flexibility and scalability.

To avoid these and other industry challenges, decision-makers can consider adopting the MACH architecture in their commerce tech stacks. The acronym MACH stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless.

One of the reasons to implement MACH is that the architecture delivers new services and features quickly, helping enterprises rapidly adapt to the changes in customer needs. According to MACH Global Research 2023 by MACH Alliance, 87% of enterprises that have increased their MACH investments have become more responsive and competitive.

This article covers the MACH concept in more detail and provides five business cases where MACH adoption can be helpful.

Case 1: Building a more future-proof commerce architecture

According to MACH Alliance, 85% of enterprises have increased the percentage of their MACH infrastructure in the past 12 months. One of the reasons why increasingly more enterprises are turning to MACH is that the legacy monolithic architecture is not flexible and scalable enough to support sustainable business growth.

Any changes to a monolithic solution require significant system redeployment. In addition, even a small update poses a risk of affecting the health of the entire solution. Such limitations make enterprises less responsive in terms of meeting customer requirements and, as a result, less competitive.

Also, if a monolithic solution is hosted on physical dedicated servers, it can be even less flexible and scalable. In that case, if an enterprise aims to increase its computing power (for example, to serve more customers), it will have to spend resources on purchasing additional expensive servers.

Fortunately, MACH allows enterprises to mitigate the scalability risk. Instead of the legacy monolithic development approach, engineers using MACH can deploy software as a set of microservices. Although these services are connected, they operate independently, meaning they can be upgraded and replaced without affecting the whole system.

So, if the developers aim to expand the functionality of their software solution, they can do it by deploying an additional microservice. This capability makes a MACH-based digital solution much more flexible.

In addition, using the MACH principles, the developers can host a software system in the cloud environment. Thus, an enterprise can scale its commerce system both horizontally and vertically on demand.

Case 2: Accelerating technology innovation

In the modern ecommerce industry, competitiveness is highly dependent on such parameters as the speed of innovation. By implementing new tech tools continuously, an enterprise can improve operational effectiveness and service quality faster than less technologically advanced competitors.

Today, an enterprise can significantly accelerate innovation speed and, as a result, competitiveness by implementing MACH in its tech stack. According to the Enterprise MACHified 2022 report, those enterprises that are increasing MACH elements in their architectures (nearly four-fifths of all the surveyed ones) state they are significantly ahead of competitors.

The thing is that MACH helps enterprises continuously implement best-of-breed technologies available on the software market due to its flexibility and modularity. Moreover, an enterprise can quickly implement technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning for workflow optimization, leading to better service.

Case 3: Deploying multiple third-party integrations

Developing software integrations is one of the best ways to quickly expand a solution's functionality by connecting third-party services and tools with required features. With MACH, enterprises can deploy new integrations more smoothly.

In particular, developers can utilize the capabilities of the API-first approach (one of the concepts behind MACH). By developing and deploying API interfaces, developers can quickly build integrations with any web service. In addition, the process of API creation can also be automated, enabling even faster and more efficient integration.

Case 4: Speeding up development and deployment

You can also consider adopting the MACH architecture to accelerate software development speed and reduce time-to-market.

First, MACH implies using microservices. By designing software as a network of connected microservices, enterprises can allocate a specific team to each service. Developers can work faster and more productively by focusing on a single service (instead of working with an entire software system).

Second, MACH allows developers to implement continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) practices. This way, developers can automate testing and deployment, which also helps streamline and dramatically speed up the development process.

Finally, the MACH architecture implies decoupling the solution's front end from its back end. By using the headless approach, development teams can work on both software levels at the same time, conducting rapid UI updates without the risk of interrupting back-end functionality.

Case 5: Improving customer experience across all channels

Last but not least, MACH can become extremely valuable for a business that wants to enhance its customer experience, mainly due to the headless development approach.

In particular, with MACH, designers, marketers, and UI specialists can work at the presentation layer without involving software engineers. In practice, they can easily tailor content to specific customer segments and digital channels, enabling them to enhance the customer experience without much effort.

Final thoughts

Market conditions are changing rapidly, and so is consumer demand. Therefore, ecommerce enterprises should be flexible enough to adapt to the new market environment, and the MACH concept can come in handy here.

With MACH, enterprises can build a more future-proof architecture, speed up technological innovation, and streamline third-party integrations. Moreover, MACH can help an enterprise speed up development and enhance customer experience, enhancing competitiveness.