VTEX is a complete and scalable cloud e-commerce (SaaS) platform for companies looking to sell online, generating advanced B2C, B2B and Marketplace commerce experiences.
For some years, technology has been revolutionizing and boosting the world of commerce, bringing to the table the possibility of discovering new markets and generating growth opportunities for companies that are willing to jump on the boat of digital transformation. However, it is important to keep in mind that in addition to opportunities, there are also challenges to overcome, both at the technological and business levels. This is where the different e-commerce platforms come into play, which seek to solve the technological side, allowing companies to focus on business growth and operation. This time we will focus on VTEX.
Some of its advantages are:
Nowadays, transparency in service is very important, offering an omnichannel experience is a great market differentiator; when we make things easier for buyers with omnichannel strategies, such as the option to buy online and pick up in store or to buy online and take it home, our conversion rate increases.
With VTEX we can achieve a complete and true omnichannel experience, integrating the different sales channels, synchronizing inventory and customer data, offering our buyers a consistent brand experience regardless of the channel they use, in addition to collecting data in the process that may be relevant to improving our subsequent operation, as mentioned by our KAM and BI Manager Ignacio Santangelo in his article How to take advantage of data in eCommerce and make better decisions
Thanks to its microservice-based and headless architecture, store performance is not affected by traffic peaks, as the checkout, webstore, administrative and internal modules can be scaled individually.
With this, VTEX introduces us to commerce. composable a modern approach that allows us to assemble diverse commerce solutions and use them to meet specific business requirements, achieving a high level of integration and flexibility, giving rise to another of the strengths of working with VTEX.
In addition, another favorable advantage of VTEX is that with its platform VTEX IO we have a number of native components for the front of our store, accelerating time-to-market, but, with the possibility of adding a layer of custom functionality that we would not be able to generate otherwise. However, it is important to mention that to develop this custom layer we will most likely need a team trained in the implementation of VTEX IO. (Balloon Group is among VTEX's outstanding partners in 2022)
The basis of scalability is good infrastructure and here VTEX has amply demonstrated that it really focuses on technology so that companies focus on the business, since the platform is cloud native and self-scaling, in other words, you don't have to worry about the number of visits your site receives, since VTEX is responsible for providing you with the necessary resources for the volume of traffic.
For this reason, we established this functionality as an advantage in VTEX, considering that this functionality is especially useful on days such as: The Day Without VAT, Hot Sale, Buen Fin, Black Friday and Cyber Monday, where there is usually a much higher volume of traffic than usual. On the other hand, with their multi-tenant SaaS architecture, they make headless micro-services available to their partners, which, together with low-code development in VTEX IO, can generate highly scalable development experiences.
VTEX then demonstrates how security is an advantage, since it has a program dedicated exclusively to the safety of its products, which “is oriented to the ISO IEC 27001 standard, frameworks with best security practices, data protection laws and other obligations applicable to the VTEX context” as mentioned in their document VTEX security posture where you can find more information relevant to the practices and measures they take in this area.
As we mentioned before, at VTEX we can create highly customizable online commerce experiences, because only when we start we have at our disposal the store framework based on VTEX IO and React, in this framework we can find all the native e-commerce components such as: storefronts, featured products, search bar, menus, product page, among many others that provide us with the necessary basis to build any type of online store.
In addition to this benefit, being open source components, we have the possibility to extend their functionalities through react and achieve customizations that would be an odyssey on other platforms.
If we get a little technical, we find that, despite being a low-code platform, it leaves the door open for us to carry out customized developments and consume its APIs at will, either from the frontend with React and Javascript/Typescript or from the Backend with Node and GraphQL.
We have already addressed some advantages that help us understand why VTEX is one of the best-positioned platforms in Latin America, now it's time to mention some points of care if you decide to develop your ecommerce on this technology.
All the advantages described above are summarized in one word: reversal. Although VTEX makes the task easier and considerably reduces the time and costs of implementing an eCommerce project from scratch, a business that is not ready to take the leap and expand its operation will probably face more difficult barriers to overcome.
As it is such a robust platform with so many possibilities, its learning curve is a little slower, since you require a team trained in technologies such as React, Node, GraphQL and VTEX IO, so it is necessary to accompany an authorized partner with the support of VTEX, a reason that can be considered a disadvantage.
Remember that Balloon Group a FastForward.ai company has the necessary expertise to make the most of the platform, demonstrated in the award awarded by VTEX as: “Best Performance of the Year in the VTEX AGILE category”.
In conclusion, we can say that VTEX, with its advantages and disadvantages, is a complete trading platform capable of boost B2C, B2B and Marketplace operations with advanced features focused on offering a unified shopping experience across all sales channels (online and offline), taking care of the infrastructure and its dynamic scalability, without a doubt an excellent alternative to boost the growth of your business.
Learn more about our service of eCommerce.
By Daniel Acosta, VTEX manager at Balloon Group
