N Brown, a large mostly pure-play fashion retailer in Manchester, England have made very significant improvement to their eCommerce experience by moving their website front-end to a Single Page App (SPA) architecture that is starting to be catch-on due to the significant improvements in the site experience this switch provides and the significant cost savings that can also be made.
Those used to working with modern apps like Google products such as Google Maps, Google Docs will have been using this underlying technology approach for a long time – finally the eCommerce market has cottoned on.
As eCommerce practitioners know, moving the needle even by a few percent on site speed directly correlates to higher conversion especially on mobile phone networks where signal is often patchy.
The added benefit JD Williams will see is being able to develop the website totally unconstrained and improve the site much faster internally by adopting what the techies in the industry call ‘Headless’. This also gives JD Williams total control over every part of the site experience which before will have been slow to develop and frustrating for those internal teams to build on.
Steve Johnson, CEO at N Brown, said: “The new websites remain the cornerstone in transforming our customer experience and we’re seeing impressive results for site performance and user experience. Not only that, the new JD Williams site represents the fastest roll out to date, with the faster delivery benefiting from our commitment to agile ways of working.”
Next Gen Platform Vendors
We’re now starting to see a new generation of eCommerce platforms like SCAYLE & commercetools make this approach the norm. All eCommerce sites delivered by these two vendors have been built using this approach whilst older technologies from the likes of Shopify, Salesforce and SAP try to catch-up.