Tim Bucciarelli: Thanks for joining us again on Shaping eCommerce with IronPlane. Today, I’m pleased to have Christian Lelaidier from Front-Commerce with us to talk about all things composable commerce. Christian, thank you very much for joining us today.
Christian Lelaidier: Thanks for having me, Tim, and thanks for the invitation. I’m excited to have this chat about this subject.
Tim Bucciarelli: Yeah! So, give us a little bit of your personal background – how you landed at Front-Commerce, what your interest in eCommerce is, in general.
Christian Lelaidier:
Sure. I’m a sales professional from the SaaS industry. I’ve held roles from SDR to head of sales, head of partnerships more recently. I’m actually driven by innovation and passionate about technology ruptures, which is one of the themes we’re going to go through with Front-Commerce. But that’s probably the main reason why I joined Front-Commerce – the technological part. And my role at Front-Commerce is Partner Manager, so I’m in charge of partnerships with leading digital agencies that are willing to provide the best and most modern customer experience online with our technology. I also nurture relationships with technological partners in order to connect our solution and proposed best-of-breed bundles for eCommerce needs.
Tim Bucciarelli: Okay. That’s a great intro to you. Now, what many people will be asking is “What is Front-Commerce?” Because I think that one of the things that I recognize is that – and tell me if I’m wrong – it’s a relatively small company that’s been growing organically and very effectively because it hits a very specific market and right now that market is exploding. So, your region of influence primarily has been EMEA if I’m not mistaken. But give me a little bit more about “What is Front-Commerce?”
Christian Lelaidier: Sure. Front-Commerce is what we call a frontend as a service for eCommerce. So this is where technological rupture comes into action. To give a bit of context on when Front-Commerce was created and why it was created, we can go back a few years to 2015. At that time, our actual CTO Pierre was working in an agency as a developer, and he was building frontends for Magento customers.
At that time, he was getting kind of bored of developing on PHP storefronts for Magento. It was the emergence of maturity in APIs, and he also identified new languages such as ReactJS, GraphQL – but I’m not going to go too technical on all these. Anyway, the time seemed right to try something new when developing a frontend for Magento because at that time you only had two solutions. Either you took a template of Magento that you’d customize a little but you had limitations, or you build a custom frontend from scratch on Magento.
And this is where the third option comes in, which is the frontend as a service. His vision was to develop foundations that were able to communicate with the backend, and these foundations were foundations to accelerate frontend developments, whatever the backend. That’s how it started.
So it was built by technical people – Pierre and his team – and they benefited from the product internally as an agency and when also working on new features for the frontend for the customer, so that’s more related to time to market.
The product was delivered to the first customer in 2016, it grew until 2020, and in 2020 the technology Front-Commerce was taken out of the agency and the company was built. So, in 2020 we had around eight, nine customers at that time. In 2021, we doubled the number of customers, and we’re pursuing that trend ever since.
I arrived one year ago, just when they started employing people that were actually known tech people. And today, on that part we have a marketing department now, and a partner department, that I represent.
One specific thing about us is that we only work with agencies. We’re a software editor for frontend technology, so our expertise is in web performance and on foundations for building incredible frontends. That is where we have our expertise today.
Tim Bucciarelli: Yeah, it feels like kind of a perfect alignment of various elements. So, in our own experience as a Magento agency, IronPlane has worked with Magento for many, many years, and one of the recurring themes is an element of frustration from the marketing teams who want to do very creative things with the frontend of the website and with their content pages and their landing pages.
Marketing isn’t something that can wait around for a developer to make a change to the site. It’s something that has to be done in very rapid time to achieve the impact that you’re looking for. And so that frustration has been happening for many, many years and Adobe addressed it a little bit recently with what they call Page Builder. I think it came out in Commerce 2.3.2 and it is now in Open Source 2.4.4 (those are version numbers).
But even with that, my impression is that that frontend is quite limited. And so this concept of headless has just really blossomed over the years to tap into that as a solution to alleviate those pain points. Front-Commerce, I think, does exactly that. And what’s interesting to us is that it was born out of an agency that was a Magento agency. So your familiarity with the Magento platform – not that you’re limited to the Magento platform, I’m not saying that – but your familiarity, for us, is very compelling.
I’d like to learn a little bit more about the components of the Front-Commerce engine and the distinction there. But maybe one of the ways that we can illustrate that is to talk, maybe something about some of the customers that you’ve provided solutions for and it might help people see it visually – if they look them up online. We can include the links in the notes. That might be a good way to start.
Christian Lelaidier: Sure. There are a lot of different points now, in what you’re saying, that we witness too. If we talk about the business / marketing part – definitely – I mean, business and marketing teams want to adapt quickly to customer demands. They want to surprise customers online, also. So they want to iterate, test, learn. And it’s often been a real pain for them for the past years along the past technologies, not being able to see these changes being made on the frontend in the timeline that they were expecting, and there’s nothing more frustrating.
I think the best example of that is, during the pandemic we had brands that wanted to put in place a “click and collect” feature on their website and they could not achieve it because, even on technical aspects, it was too complicated. We even saw brands here in Europe that actually developed new websites just to have the click and collect feature, because putting it on the old website wasn’t even possible with all the links that the frontend had in the backend.
And this is where headless comes into the game. Because we were saying – and that’s kind of what legacy solutions look like, or monoliths, we also call them monolith solutions, these solutions that are a suite of solutions that include the frontend aspects – everything is going to be very linked together.
So if we take an example which was one of our customers on Magento. There was a frontend on Magento. Our customer wanted to change the place of the cart and put it in another place on the page. So he asked his development team and he had to wait like around two or three months. It would take four days of development. That is not possible, especially in the world we are living in right now. And this is increasing in 2023.
In the world uncertainty that we’re in right now, you need to be able to test and learn quickly on business aspects, and this is often a real pain on these all-included solutions. One way of achieving it is what we call headless. And what is headless? It’s actually separating the frontend from the backend.
What we call the “head” is actually the frontend – it’s all the customer experience, whatever the channels you have. It can be a frontend, it can be solutions in store, it can be – these are actually all the channels.
Tim Bucciarelli: So, it can be like a kiosk in a store, or it could be your mobile device, it could be a tablet, your television even, or your desktop or laptop. So those are all the – let’s say the “heads,” right? Well, those are the viewports I guess, where the people are interacting with your frontend.
Christian Lelaidier: Absolutely. So this is going to group all the customer experience, so this is actually the head of the backend solution. And the fact of separating both subjects allows you to work on each subject independently. And when I say “separate,” I mean separate the languages between the frontend and the backend, separating the resources – they can be specialized on the frontend and don’t know so much about the backend but that doesn’t really matter.
You can separate the timelines of your project – you can have teams working on the frontend while your other teams work on the backend – because when you have a real headless conofiguration, you have a backend that is linked to the frontend with API communication and that changes everything in the eComm space when it comes to time to market. I think it’s Gartner or Forrester that mentioned going headless will give you +80% time to market. That isn’t a small figure.
Business and marketing teams of course are very interested in that aspect. If we go back to the Page Builder part – page builders are great; the only thing is they won’t allow developers to really build totally personalized or hyper-personalized websites. So there’s a limitation. There are great page builders out there that are headless, but they’re page builders.
And on the other side, you have open source solutions which bring a lot of pros and cons. We’re kind of in the middle of this landscape. We don’t provide a page builder. We deliver all the code of our solution to the agencies with whom we work, and the developers at the agency can capitalize on our foundations that have a native theme which is built with React components. And these React components can be surcharged (I don’t know if the word is correct in English) with code in order to bring personalization that is expected by major brands – in order to bring hyper-personalization and guarantee brand authenticity online. And that is a really key marketing point in business.
Tim Bucciarelli: In the world of Magento, I’m used to – you know, the concept of you have the Magento monolith and a component of that monolith is the frontend, and that frontend is what’s called the theme – Magento theme.
So, in order for us to fully understand this, we’re maintaining the backend of that monolith – the commerce engine, let’s call it – and we’re removing the user interface which was the theme. That theme goes away. You’re no longer working with a Magento theme. You’re plugging in, via APIs, the Front-Commerce frontend layer. And you have, via the API and because of your relationship with Magento, a pretty robust connectivity there.
So, all of the functionality within the Magento eCommerce engine is available to the Front-Commerce frontend, which is very important because there’s a great deal of functionality within Magento – it’s very important that that frontend has the APIs to be able to take advantage of that. So I think that’s very important, from what I understand.
The thing that I also want to dig into just a little bit if you don’t mind is – okay, so the theme from Magento is gone – what’s the level of work required for the agency to set their client up on Front-Commerce. So, is it literally like a blank slate that we’re coming in that we’re developing and designing, or is it like you have your own themes, Front-Commerce themes, that are pre-built and ready to go? If you could give us a little bit of insight there.
Christian Lelaidier: Sure. Just as you were saying, yes – the backend – there is a Magento theme, and as I’m French, we’re French, so we like chopping heads (laughing), so we’re going to chop the head of the Magento, take out the theme, and bring Front-Commerce in.
What is Front-Commerce? It’s a native theme built in React, as mentioned, where you can change the components. We also have what we call “middleware” which is a GraphQL layer in the backend for frontend. So all this is our solution – native theme, GraphQL layer that will connect an API, and this native theme will include stuff for developers that will allow them to accelerate the frontend development.
And to be very precise on this, our partners that had been using Magento before and now are using Front-Commerce – they spend 30% time less than when they were building Magento theme frontends. So there’s a gain of 30% of their workload and it brings them much more fun when they’re actually coding because they’re coding on modern languages, and it’s important to us because we actually have three types of customers in our vision – three types of users – that are developers, obviously, e-merchants, and online customers.
Online customers – we’re going to guarantee frictionless experiences. We’re very dedicated to web performance, so it’s page speed, bounce rate, traffic increase – all these figures.
And for the e-merchants – they want also a solution that has a lifetime that is very important. Because our frontend as a service, as it’s agnostic (and we might dig into this use case a bit further on because we see it coming up more and more on the market right now) – you can start by chopping the head, putting a new head on, and then decommission your Magento backend on a few features, where you want to bring best-of-breed features – might be CMS, might be search – and then you bring this best-of-breed solution on our API layer.
So, we also accelerate the path to composable. And at the end of this life cycle of decreasing and decommissioning the backend features, you can eventually go for another solution in the backend – maybe BigCommerce – and in that case, you don’t have to change so much of the frontend that you developed in the beginning on your Magento. There will be a bit of work, but it won’t be the same as if you started from scratch, with our solution.
This is what we call “progressive migration,” and we’re seeing it more and more versus total replatforming and putting all your eCommerce stack in the dust bin, going for an 18-25 months project and paying thousands and thousands of dollars for this project.
One thing I wanted to point out also is that in our value proposal, you were mentioning that we cover all the features of Magento in the backend. What we say is that we actually cover all the features that are exposed in API in the backend, meaning that when we started a few features didn’t actually exist in API in Magento. So our teams had to develop them – we developed them for the first customer because this is our value proposal. And once Magento put in mature APIs on these features we took out our APIs and put in the native ones of Magento.
But it’s an important point on this market because we know our partners will not discover that a feature is missing and have to redevelop it or maybe lose time on their projects with their customers. So it’s an important point for us in our offering – absolutely.
Tim Bucciarelli: Yeah, and the way that you describe the progression from headless into multi-part composable is very much in line with what I see as a recommendation to clients of ours, because in any scenario the more moving pieces, the more complexity. Yes, it may give you ultimately more flexibility, but as you deconstruct the monolith into composable elements there is added complexity.
So this phased approach makes so much sense to me because at each stage you can evaluate – okay, is this starting to get too complex for us? So, as you describe it, maintain the eCommerce engine, okay? You’re familiar with it, you know how to administer that in the backend. You take on the Front-Commerce frontend solution, frontend as a service, and stay with that and see how it goes. That’s not substantial complexity and it gives you a great deal of flexibility. Okay, that’s great. That’s working well.
Now, to your point, search is a great example, or let’s say search / personalization. Algolia is a perfect example where you can take the native search elements from Magento, you can decommission those, and you can connect to Algolia. Many companies do that today and they don’t even consider it being composable. It’s just a very natural element of their business.
And then, maybe your payment processing. Maybe you want to decommission the native payment processing and go with something else.
So these are just step-by-step elements that you can undertake as a merchant that make a lot of sense to me rather than saying “We’re going composable and we’re going to get rid of these ten different elements of the Magento monolith and break them out.” That’s quite an undertaking. Maybe you can do it if you’re a major enterprise and you’ve got two years time to make it all work. But I really like the progressive approach that you described.
Christian Lelaidier: Yeah, we’re definitely seeing this more and more. As you mentioned, it’s also less stressful for the teams, it’s also less of a risk because you’re treating subject-by-subject, and it’s also a change and a shift of mindset in this market because that’s not how things used to be done. You generally had an eCommerce platform, five to seven years you were developing maybe a lot of stuff on your frontend, so very specific developments. Maybe at the end of that time you had a lot of “technical depth,” and this technical depth brought you to a step – well maybe it was better to just put everything in a dust bin and build it back again.
Times have changed. With the maturity of APIs and specific best-of-breed solutions, you can now build your “best-of-needs” stack for your customers online, indeed, and we believe in that. We also think that in 2023 e-merchants are going to be very serious about investing in new products or new things, so there’s going to be looking for a proven ROI. And typically, if you change your frontend and bring in a faster frontend, it’s going to impact your web performance, it’s going to impact your conversion rate directly, and this is measurable. And it’s done in three to four months. In three to four months, you have a new frontend on your eCommerce stack. And we’ve seen great improvement in conversion rate for our customers.
So you can do that a few months, and then go for a new solution of virtual search. And, as you mentioned, Algolia, where you also have conversion rates improve. And when you add all these micro-service best-of-breeds, well, your business is going to be impacted in the year, and then you can eventually go for other solutions and maybe start studying . . . I was going to say metaverse or NFTs or blockchain, but I’m just joking (laughter).
Tim Bucciarelli: Yeah, sure – well, it might work for some people! And it’s still very new, so who knows, you know? It’s always fun to dip your toe in and see if it works for you, but, you know . . . (big smile).
Christian Lelaidier: I was just thinking our solution is maybe seen as like “less sexy” than these subjects. And of course there are use cases for those subjects also. But we believe in 2023 B2B and B2C are going to be focusing on these “ROI-oriented” new solutions.
Tim Bucciarelli: Absolutely. Yeah. So, okay, we understand the product quite well, the platform quite well now. Who do you think is the best suited customer to take advantage of Front-Commerce? From our point of view, they have to be willing to invest in eCommerce. So let’s assume that they’re willing to invest in eCommerce. What type of customers do you find the greatest success with?
Christian Lelaidier: Our customers are company organizations that are generally in the mid-market to the enterprise level. They have to have a minimum of online business going on – when we’re talking about B2C, maybe starting at $5-10 million online GMV because that means they are ready to take kind of the extra step on the frontend part to reach these improvements in conversion and time to market.
For B2B, it’s not so simple because we’re seeing a lot of B2B industries that have not yet invested in the eComm space. They’re going for it right now, so they’re choosing, well, the best solutions out there. So they can be potential customers for us.
Then we have the sectors. We’ve seen traction in the luxury sector, in the retail sector, but also in the homing sector.
Tim Bucciarelli: So, that’s an interesting point. It seems like maybe, just broadly speaking, companies that really do require that kind of flexibility and time to market of design elements, where they need to have that design impact because it’s so important for their brand, that seems like that might be a very appropriate fit for this solution.
Christian Lelaidier: Yes, definitely. But also in B2B because we bring in technologies in our frontend as a service. Today, these technologies are named PWA or SBA; tomorrow they’ll have maybe something else. But we’re always going to the best technologies out there on our subjects and, for example, the technology on PWA would allow you to go through a catalog of products even if you’re offline, and that is a key feature in B2B when you see sales going around in regions for example.
Tim Bucciarelli: That’s right.
Christian Lelaidier: So, they can be also searching for that part but what we hear most right now is sincerely that progressive migration approach. People are reaching out to us saying “I have a monolith solution,” be it SFCC, SIP, “and it’s not flexible enough on the frontend part, and the license is a bit expensive.” We’re have more and more of these kinds of demands right now.
It’s hard for me to say we have like one typical customer because today we’re seeing all these kind of organizations curious on the subject, thinking about composable, and we’re still also educating a part of market saying “Okay, great. You want to go for composable. Well, before going for composable there’s a first step which is called going headless. And to go headless, you have two options – either the replatforming “big bang” we were mentioning, and you get an eComm platform that is “headless ready,” be it BigCommerce for the down size of the market and mid-market and like Commercetools for the enterprise. So that is a path.
But there’s also an alternative, which is called “chop the head” and bring in a frontend as a service on top. Did I answer your question?
Tim Bucciarelli: You did, yes. But I still have more. So, our audience is primarily merchants and as a former merchant I always have the same questions that they have, I think. And one of them is, so I’m considering headless, I’m considering adjusting my technology stack, and I see a lot of companies out there that I could be talking to, that I could be evaluating. What are the other platforms that are most commonly considered in competition or in consideration with Front-Commerce? There are a lot of them, so I’m just curious to hear what the distinctions are and what the other platforms are.
Christian Lelaidier: Sure. We have direct competitors and more indirect competitors. A direct competitor for us is going to be a company that provides a frontend as a service that is totally agnostic of the backend solution. So on this part, we’re going to have – maybe the best example is Vue Storefront. Vue Storefront is a Vue-based language solution. They started in open source. But they are a competitor today of Front-Commerce.
Then we have indirect competitors, which will be solutions – we were talking about Magento, so there would be PWA Studio for Magento. It can sometimes be seen as a competitor of Front-Commerce, but it’s actually not am agnostic frontend for eCommerce. It’s only linked to Magento. So is this really headless? We could discuss this?
Tim Bucciarelli: You can’t change the backend eCommerce engine if you’re on PWA Studio.
Christian Lelaidier: So that’s why for us it’s an indirect competitor. But sometimes people say “We saw you were a PWA technology – I’m comparing you to PWA Studio.” So, there we try to educate our contact on the subject so just for him to understand.
I could take the same example with Salesforce Commerce Cloud with the solution they bought, Mobify – I’m not sure what it’s called now, but it’s the same subject. They are bringing in technologies in the frontend part like PWA, but it’s still linked to the backend, so it’s not really a frontend as a service headless.
And that’s why I was mentioning technological rupture, because we believe that our solution that is agnostic and independent is really a new way of seeing frontend developments.
Tim Bucciarelli: I know that you’re focused on the marketing and the partnerships, but can you help us understand just a little bit of the distinction between Vue and React, or at least broadly speaking any of the differences that merchants should be aware of between a platform like Vue Storefront and Front-Commerce. And it’s not necessarily that one is better than the other. It’s just to say that there are maybe some differences worth noting.
Christian Lelaidier: Oh yeah. I couldn’t dig into technical aspects between the language React and Vue – I think this is too technical for me. It’s like comparing two major brands of cars, you know? Some like one and others like the other one. So that I could not do.
Then, regarding maybe the economic model of Front-Commerce and what we include in our license, because we have an annual license that we invoice to customers. We include the hosting of our solution. We have a specific architecture for hosting our solution that is dedicated to eCommerce needs. We’re going to bring in auto-scaling, for example, to guarantee that there is no problem if there is too much traffic. We’re going to bring in CDNs when necessary. We have also partner solutions that we can plug in easily on that part.
So all the hosting part is on our side, which allows us to have a competitive advantage on one specific subject in this composable world. I have to explain this. In the composable world, e-merchants might be thinking “Okay, before I had my Magento I had one provider. So if something was wrong it was kind of easy to find somebody responsible and reach out to him and find a solution.” In the composable space, if you see the vision of having micro-service and best-of-breed solutions all around the place, and something’s wrong on the website, doesn’t work, well who’s responsible? Is it the CMS, is it the search solution, or why is it down?”
So we actually worked on a specific monitoring and dashboard on this aspect. Today, it’s offered to our partners – agencies, and we’re marketing it a bit more, and features, because we have the aim of proposing it to our merchants – customers. What does this dashboard do? As we’re actually centralizing all the data from the backend and getting it to the front and bringing information from the front to the back, we actually processing all the information. So we can monitor the response time of the backend micro-service solution, be it Algolia for example, or Prismic or Contentful, and if we see that the response time to get back the data – well, something’s wrong – we know where it comes from and we can dig into the subject and find the solution with our partner.
That’s an interesting point tackling that kind of theme for the e-merchant that will have a composable stack for his eCommerce platform.
Tim Bucciarelli: That’s available to your agency partners so that they can monitor these aspects on behalf of their clients and diagnose problems as they come up – that seems like a very useful tool.
Christian Lelaidier: It’s a spoiler because it’s actually quite new, but that’s one thing we’re doing. So, the hosting. We also, of course, taking charge of all the maintenance and if there’s upgrades of the backend from the provider of the backend we will ensure that the features that are also updated will also connect correctly with our solution. We provide support, of course, to our partners.
So that’s the model we have in comparison also to other competitors and other solutions.
Tim Bucciarelli: So let’s say a merchant has been listening and they’re excited to consider Front-Commerce. What would you recommend their first use steps would be to learn more and maybe reach out and connect with you?
Christian Lelaidier: I think headless and composable – it’s great, but it isn’t really for everybody and you have to dig in really, as an e-merchant, to what you want to achieve, where are you heading to, why is headless a subject for you? That’s the first question to find an answer for.
And then, of course, I would advise to take advice from a professional leading digital agency on the subject and see what they have to say about it. We work with agencies that don’t have a specific religion for products they offer to their customers; they’re not exclusive on one product. So, advice on the way to take this path is important. It sounds obvious, but I mean it is important.
And the best advice, I would say, when you’re approaching a new subject like this – which is a shift of mindset, sincerely – it does change the way you build your projects in eComm – but I think it’s the most secure way to go baby steps. So, I’d definitely be an advocate for baby steps and concentrating on one subject after the other.
It’s a bit what happened in the IT world, you know, with Agile method of doing sprints and mini projects so this is kind of applying to the eComm. So yes, step-by-step, not too much of a big bang, would be my advice.
Tim Bucciarelli: I like that comparison – the moving from Waterfall to Agile was really a major shift in mindset for many, many companies, especially enterprises who depended on those specifications and definitions way up front. And the whole world of contracts had to change, you know – it was no more like “Here’s everything you need to know how to build this.” And it was more like “Well, here’s the idea – let’s start building.” Very different. So I like that shift in mindset that’s going to be similar to the shift to composable.
So we will include, like I said, in the show notes, a couple of links to a couple of your clients because I think that visual “case study” . . . there are some nice graphics there that I think will be interesting for people to see and grasp what we’re talking about a little bit better.
Two last questions. One is what type of pricing information is available, or is it just like contact an agency and they’ll be able to tell you? And then, just maybe a little bit about the future of Front-Commerce – where are you headed?
Christian Lelaidier: Yeah. Regarding pricing, I can that we have a starting license at $20K per year. And indeed to have a specific quotation reach out to us or reach out to a partner that can build the proper quotes.
And regarding the future, I did spoil on that dashboard part, but it’s being delivered. And we have another interesting and exciting news coming out, but I can’t spoil on this one. We’re going to work more on web performance. There’s a review from John Williams who is CTO at Amplience. He did a video on us because he was studying different frontends as a service. I invite the audience to go on YouTube and check his channel “Going Headless with John.”
He actually did a study on the web performance of each provider and we have an improvement gap there, and we’re going to leave everybody very astonished with the results we’re going to achieve in the next review regarding Lighthouse – which is a solution to study web performance in websites – regarding Lighthouse’s perception of our technology. And it’s quite fun, actually, when you compare Lighthouse scoring and human sensation on the website because sometimes it’s not so much linked, especially on mobile. But we could go on for hours on this subject.
Tim Bucciarelli: And is there a timeframe? Are we talking six months out, within 2023, or . . . ?
Christian Lelaidier: Within 2023. Hopefully by the end of ??, but we can’t know – I don’t know how you say it in English.
Tim Bucciarelli: Well, we will certainly keep in touch and pay attention to your LinkedIn channel and wait to hear the exciting launch. So we look forward to that.
So, this has been very helpful for me to learn more about your platform as a service – frontend as a service – and also more about headless and composable, and I just want to say thank you for joining us on Shaping eCommerce. And any of our clients who are interested in it – I look forward to speaking with them and yeah – I look forward to working with you in the future.
Christian Lelaidier: Thanks, Tim. I had a great time. Thanks for the invitation. Anytime, to do it again. I’m very happy also of our partnership and if you have any customers interested or are just curious and want to talk about this and understand this a bit more, it will be my pleasure.
Tim Bucciarelli: Great. Lots of questions about headless, so we’ll look forward to introducing you to some folks who have those questions. Thank you again.
Christian Lelaidier: Thank you.
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