Best Technology Stack For eCommerce Website: Complete Guide

A website is the heart of an eCommerce business; it is how a customer purchases a particular item, or a seller/retailer sells it. Naturally, having a good website is an absolute necessity.

In this guide, we’ll share the complete tech stack for eCommerce website.

Let’s dive into the list.

????In this guide, we’ve covered:

• What Do You Need for An eCommerce Website?
• Understanding Technology Stack
• 6 Factors For Choosing the Right Tech Stack
• Best Technology Stack For Your eCommerce Website
• Final Words

What Do You Need for An eCommerce Website?

The primary purpose of a website is to facilitate seamless interaction with a customer. Hence, the first thing to keep in mind is the design of the website. What we are looking for is a clean, elegant, and intuitive design that allows a user – a potential customer to easily find what they are looking for.

A website should also load quickly, so users do not feel compelled to leave due to lagging. Both the desktop and mobile versions should be equally efficient and fully optimized with their respective form factors.

There are essentially two sides of any website – the first, which the user sees and interacts with, known as the client-side or front-end; the second, which a user can’t directly interact with like the server, database, and other logic related entities, known as the server-side or back-end. These two sides must work hand in hand for an admirable user interface.

If you are planning to build an eCommerce website, there are a heap of technologies you can choose from. And which among these would be most suitable for you largely depends on what your requirements are, and what you expect your website to be able to do.

Based on this, you can take your pick of technologies which includes software development toolkits, databases, programming languages, and frameworks — commonly referred to as the tech stack.

Relevant read: Definitive Guide to Boosting eCommerce Sales with a Chatbot

Understanding Technology Stack

A technology stack is also known as a solution stack, technology infrastructure, or a data ecosystem. They all refer to the list of technologies and services used to run a particular website or application.

A tech stack is influential in conveying a lot of information about how a website works. This includes the programming languages, frameworks, and other tools that a developer would need in the development process to allow users to interact with the website.

Every technology, language, or toolkit has its strengths and weaknesses. Facebook’s tech stack, for example, is known to comprise frameworks and languages like JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, and ReactJS.

There are a lot of things to be kept in mind before choosing the best tech stack and it can’t be a daunting task picking one from the wide range of options available.

Hence, let us first go through the major factors involved in making the right decision.

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6 Factors to Keep In Mind While Choosing the Correct Tech Stack

Every development technology has its specific advantages and disadvantages. While some are for creating simple websites with limited functions, others are for extensively complex functions which may or may not have a practical purpose on your eCommerce website

1. Define your project

What are the various functions you need your website to perform? How much expense can you incur? Who would be part of your development team?

These are a few of the questions you need to contemplate before you zero in on a technology stack for your eCommerce website. The higher the functionality, the more complex will be the framework. It would also mean spending more time and money.

One other thing you need to keep in mind is the potential target group of your website. This determines the design and usability of your website and hence, should be a factor in deciding your tech stack.

2. Scalability

What are your future plans for the website? Are you looking to enhance its functionality and include more features? Would you extend its usability across various platforms?

You need to choose technologies that cater to your expansion plans.

Basically, there are two ways in which you can scale your website – vertically and horizontally. Vertical scalability refers to including more features and elements to your website to enhance interactivity whereas horizontal scalability refers to the capability of expanding across different devices.

Making the right choice at the initial stage can significantly cut down your costs in the future and ensure ease in development.

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3. Security

Regardless of how feature-rich and user-friendly your website is, if you are unable to store data securely, your eCommerce business cannot flourish.

Since you are building an eCommerce website, you will most probably incorporate some kind of transaction and payment method. Hence, in order to secure user information, you must choose a tech stack that guarantees excellent security.

4. Time

Time is a crucial factor in choosing a stack. It is recommended to get yourself online as soon as possible. As you start selling, you will generate enough revenue to spend on developing a better website.

5. Mind the trends

In the tech world, trends are something to consistently watch out for. There is a reason why JavaScript remains a widely used language by developers and PHP is waning in popularity.

A technology in trend is bound to have the backing of a large community and enjoy tremendous support. This is especially important for new developers since they have plenty of resources to rely on in case tech issues arise.

6. Availability of skills

A widely popular technology is typically easier to use, which is why it is popular in the first place. This also means that you can put together a development team relatively easily and the development process becomes comparatively cheaper.

However, with lesser-known technologies, it may be difficult to find skilled professionals. What’s more, they are also positioned to quote higher fees.

Choosing The Best Technology Stack For Your eCommerce Website

Now that you understand the requirements of choosing a tech stack, you can use this knowledge to guide yourself in choosing the best tech stack for your eCommerce website.

If you are developing your first eCommerce website, it’s recommended that you begin with the most popular stacks, rather than building your own stack from scratch.

Having worked with a wide range of technologies, skilled developers around the world now rely on some highly functional, secure, and stable tech stacks.

Here are some of the most popular stacks used by tech professionals.

1. LAMP

Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl – LAMP is one of the fastest tech stacks for web development. Some popular applications based on LAMP are WordPress and Larvae.

Pros

• It is the ready-made stack most suitable in cases of time constraints where you need to build your website as soon as possible.
• LAMP has an enormous support community.
• It offers a secure and stable infrastructure.

Cons

• It is relatively less productive and efficient when compared to other stacks.
• It is not as scalable, and with time, causes your website’s speed to decrease.

2. MEAN

Mongo DB, Express, Angular, and Node.js – MEAN is another popular tech stack that is extensively used for eCommerce websites. It covers all the sought-after elements that an eCommerce website needs.

Pros

• It is simple and clean.
• It requires only one programming language for both front and back end development, which is JavaScript.
• It can work over various operating systems.

Cons

• It is a rather new tech stack and does not yet have a huge community. However, as its popularity and usage is increasing, its community is growing larger by the day.
• MEAN may not be supported by many web hosts and CMS.

3. Python & Django

This is another widely used tech stack, paired with Apache and MySQL. However, Django is a very complex framework and is not exactly efficient to use for developing an eCommerce website.

Pros

• It has a huge community ready to serve all your needs.
• It is also highly scalable and productive.
• Python has established itself as one of the most powerful languages for web development. Almost every top company like Facebook, Slack, Wikipedia, and Lyft uses PHP.
• Django also provides high security.

Cons

• Django is hard to learn and hence, you will not find as many tech professionals who are skilled Django developers.
• It is old-fashioned, highly complex, and cannot produce powerful results for an eCommerce website.

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4. .NET

.NET stack is another powerful framework widely used in building complex web applications. It basically uses the ASP.NET framework, Microsoft SQL web server, and C# and/or JavaScript.

Pros

• It is based on Object-Oriented Programming.
• It supports cross-platform web development.
• It enjoys the support of a huge community.

Cons

• As it is offered by Microsoft, any changes in their company policy and procedure manual will affect all the projects based on this framework.
• It can get pretty costly as you add new features to the .NET bundle.
• New releases can be unstable.

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Final Words

Well, that should narrow down your search for an efficient technology stack that is powerful and provides quick results. Companies like Airbnb, SpaceX, and Slack have technology stacks based on languages like JavaScript, Ruby, and Python. Google, on the other hand, uses the likes of C, C++, Java, Go, Python, and Node for its back-end development.

Regardless of which tech stack you use, you are bound to generate desired results. However, with clearly defined goals with respect to your requirements, budget, time, development team, team size, and availability, you can zero in on the best technology stack for your eCommerce website.