In my previous article from this series I shared the logical view of the business optimisation use case for retail stores.
The process was laid out how I’ve approached the use case and how portfolio solutions are the base for researching a generic architectural blueprint.
This article starts the real journey at the very top, with a generic architecture from which we’ll discuss the common architectural elements one by one.
As mentioned before, the architectural details covered here are base on real solutions using open source technologies. The example scenario presented here is a generic common blueprint that was uncovered researching those solutions. It’s my intent to provide a blueprint that provides guidance and not deep technical details.
This article covers Apache Camel Integration with Kafka.
Kafka Setup
Editor’s note: This interview with Amancio Bouza was recorded for Coding Over Cocktails — a podcast by TORO Cloud.
Digital transformation allows organizations to adjust to new technologies and take advantage of their benefits in order to build business value. However, the road to digital transformation requires not only a technological change but a cultural one as well.
The very nature of big data integration requires an organization to become more flexible in some ways; particularly when gathering input and metrics from such varied sources as mobile apps, browser heuristics, A / V input, software logs, and more. The number of different methodologies, protocols, and formats that your organization needs to ingest while complying with both internal and government-mandated standards can be staggering.
Is there a clean and discreet way to achieve fast data integration and still reap all of the benefits of big data analytics?
When you think of installing analytics, you probably reach for Google Analytics. And you wouldn’t be alone. The platform’s tight integration with SEO and the implication that using Google products is beneficial to ranking means that Google Analytics is the most commonly installed analytics solution globally.
Google Analytics isn’t a bad choice: it’s free, it’s fairly comprehensive, and it does indeed tie most SEO efforts up with a nice bow.
But Google Analytics is also slow, extremely bad for privacy — both yours and your users’ — and for many people, it’s too unwieldy, having grown organically over the years into a relatively complex UI.
Some alternatives are fast, privacy-friendly, and geared towards different specialisms. Today we’re rounding up the best…
Heap is an event-based analytics platform. That means you can tell not just how many people visited your site but what actions they took when they were there. This isn’t a unique proposition, but Heap is one of the best implementations.
Heap offers an auto-track tool, which is ideal for new installations because you can get up and running immediately and fine-tune the details later. That makes it great for startups, although it’s also the choice of major corporations like Microsoft.
Heap’s free plan includes 60k sessions per year and 12 months of data history, but when you outgrow that, the business plans start at $12,000/year.
ChartMogul is geared towards SaaS that offer subscription plans, staking a claim as the world’s first subscription data platform.
Services like Buffer and Webflow use ChartMogul to monitor their revenue and analyze the ROI of changes to their features, design, and user experience.
Ideally suited for startups, ChartMogul pricing is based on monthly recurring revenue; it has a free plan for up to $10,000 MMR; after that, pricing starts at $100/month.
Fathom is an awesome, privacy-first analytics solution. It offers a simple dashboard and is ideal for anyone looking for simple analytics information to verify business decisions.
Fathom is ideally suited to freelancers, or entrepreneurs with multiple projects, as it allows you to run multiple domains from a single account. Fathom is entirely cookieless, meaning you can ditch that annoying cookie notice. It’s GDPR, ePrivacy, PECR, CCPA, and COPPA compliant.
There’s a seven-day free trial; after that, Fathom starts at $14/month.
FullStory is designed to help you develop engaging online products with an emphasis on user experience.
FullStory is a set of tools, making it ideal for large in-house teams or in-house teams working with outside agencies or freelancers. It pitches itself as a single source of truth from which everyone from the marketing department to the database engineers can draw their insights, helping digital teams rapidly iterate by keeping everyone in the same loop.
FullStory uses AI to track and interpret unexpected events, from rage clicks to traffic spikes, and breaks those events down to a dollar-cost, so you can instantly see where your interventions will have the most impact.
There’s a free plan for up to 1k sessions per month; once you outgrow that, you need to talk to the sales team for a quote.
Amplitude has one of the most user-friendly dashboards on this list, with tons of power behind it. For project managers trying to make science-based decisions about future development, it’s a godsend.
The downside with Amplitude is that to make the most of its powerful data connections, you need to pump a lot of data in. For that reason, Amplitude is best suited to sites that already have a substantial volume of traffic — among those customers are Cisco and PayPal.
Amplitude provides a free plan, with its core analytics and up to 10m tracked actions per month. For premium plans, you have to contact their sales team for a quote.
Mixpanel is a little bit more than an analytics program, aiming to be a whole suite of web tools it has ventured into split testing and notifications.
Mixpanel is laser-focused on maximizing your sales funnel. One look at the dashboard, and you can see that Mixpanel, while very well designed, has too many features to present them simply; Mixpanel is ideally suited to agencies and in-house development teams with time to invest — you probably want to keep the CEO away from this one.
Mixpanel has a generous free plan for up to 100k monthly users, with its business plans starting at $25/month.
Mode is a serious enterprise-level solution for product intelligence and decision making.
Ideally suited to in-house teams, Mode allows you to monitor financial flow and output the results in investor-friendly reports. You can monitor your entire tech stack and, of course, understand how users are interacting with your product. Wondering who handles the analytics for Shopify? That would be Mode.
Mode has a free plan aimed at individuals, but this tool’s scope is really beyond freelancers, and the free plan’s only likely to appeal to high-price consultants and tech trouble-shooters. For the full business plan, you need to contact Mode’s sales team for a quote.
Microanalytics is a relatively new analytics program with a lightweight, privacy-focused approach.
Microanalytics provides a simple dashboard with acquisitions, user location, technology, and the all-important event tracking to monitor user behavior. Microanalytics is compliant with the web’s most stringent privacy laws, including GDPR, PECR, and CCPA. The tracking code is just 1kb in size, meaning that you’ll hardly notice its footprint in your stats.
Microanalytics is free for up to 10k pageviews/month; after that, the monthly plan starts at $9.
GoSquared is another suite of tools, this time aimed at SaaS. Its primary product is its analytics, but it also includes live chat, marketing tools, and a team inbox.
If you’re tired of comparing multiple tools to help make the most of your startup, GoSquared kills several birds with one stone. Perhaps most importantly, if you’re beginning to build a team and don’t have any engineers onboard yet, GoSquared has an award-winning support team and an idiot-proof setup process.
GoSquared has a free plan that’s fine for evaluating the suite and integrating data from day one. As you begin to grow, paid plans start at $40/month.
Segment is a little different from the other analytics tools on this list; Segment is a layer that sits between your site and your analytics. It integrates with many of the tools on this list.
There are several benefits to this approach. The main one is that different teams within your enterprise can access analytics data in a form that suits them — designers can access complex data, and management can stick to revenue flow. It also means that you can switch analytics programs with a single setting in Segment and even migrate historical data into new apps. If you’re an enterprise that wants to future-proof its customer intelligence gathering, Segment is worth considering.
Segment is trusted by some of the web’s best-known names, from IBM to Levis, and…ahem…Google.
Segment is free for up to 1k visitors per month, and after that, the team plan starts at $120/month.
The post 10 Best Alternatives to Google Analytics in 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Cloud computing has come a long, long way from the early days of mainframe timesharing technology and virtualization. Over the past decade alone, we’ve seen cloud computing experience tremendous growth, providing ubiquitous solutions for both consumers and enterprises. This trend is expected to continue with the rise of cloud-based services for machine learning, artificial intelligence, and edge computing.
However, the transformation to cloud computing remains a very challenging prospect for many enterprises. Enterprises need to consider factors such as cost, security, legacy and on-premise technologies, and the value of using cloud-native vs cloud-agnostic services.
It’s never been easier to set up an ecommerce store and start selling. There are a dizzying array of ecommerce solutions available in 2021, and most are feature-rich and competitively priced.
Ecommerce sites are notoriously difficult to migrate from platform to platform, so more often than not, you’ll be committed to your chosen solution for years. The key when choosing an ecommerce solution to maximize your return on investment, is to consider not just what your business needs today but what it will need tomorrow.
There are two basic approaches to ecommerce. The first is a dedicated platform that handles everything. The second is a plugin that adds ecommerce features to an existing CMS. Both approaches have benefits and drawbacks.
Shopify is a well-known, well-liked, and reliable dedicated ecommerce platform. As a system for getting a business off the ground and selling fast, it is peerless.
Shopify jealously guards developer access, with templates and plugins pre-vetted. Unlike some marketplaces, you can be confident that there are no hidden surprises in your shiny new store.
And because Shopify has passed the point of market saturation, it’s worthwhile for big players to provide their own plugins; credit services like Klarna and shipping companies like netParcel can be integrated with a few clicks.
The admin panel is a touch complex, as Shopify is designed to allow a single account to be linked to multiple stores. But once you’re set up and familiar with where to find everything, it’s a slick, streamlined business management system.
Whenever a client says, “we want to start selling online.” My first thought is, “Shopify.” And for 90% of clients, it’s the right choice.
And that’s where this roundup should end…except there’s still that 10% because Shopify isn’t perfect.
For a start, an all-in-one platform doesn’t suit everyone. If you already have a website you’re happy with, you’ll either need to migrate or lease a dedicated domain for your store.
Shopify’s platform is very secure, which inspires confidence in buyers, but the price of that security is a lack of flexibility in the design.
Then there’s the infamous variant limit. Shopify allows 100 variants on a product. Almost every client runs into that wall at some point. Let’s say you’re selling a T-shirt: male and female cuts are two variants; now add long or short sleeves, that’s four variants; now add seven sizes from XXS to XXL, that’s 28 variants; if you have more than three color options, you’ve passed the 100 variant limit. There are plugins that will allow you to side-step this issue, but they’re a messy hack that hampers UX for both customer and business.
Shopify should certainly be on every new store owner’s shortlist, but there are other options.
If you’re one of the millions of businesses with a pre-existing site built on WordPress, then adapting it with a plugin is the fastest way to get up and running with ecommerce.
WooCommerce is regularly recommended as “Best for WordPress Users,” which is a back-handed compliment that belies the fact that WooCommerce reportedly powers 30% of all ecommerce stores. If running with the crowd appeals to you — and if you’re using WordPress, it presumably does — then you’re in the right place.
WordPress has a gargantuan plugin range. As such, there are other plugins that will allow you to sell through a WordPress site. The principle benefit of WooCommerce is that as the largest provider, most other plugins and themes are thoroughly tested with it for compatibility issues; most professional WordPress add-ons will tell you if they’re compatible with WooCommerce. If your business is benefitting from leveraging WordPress’ unrivaled ecosystem, it can continue to do so with WooCommerce.
The downside to WooCommerce is that you’re working in the same dashboard as the CMS that runs your content. That can quickly become unmanageable.
WooCommerce also struggles as inventories grow — every product added will slow things a little — it’s ideally suited to small stores selling a few items for supplementary income.
BigCommerce is an ecommerce platform similar to Shopify, but whereas Shopify is geared towards newer stores, BigCommerce caters to established businesses with larger turnovers.
The same pros and cons of a dedicated ecommerce solution that applied to Shopify also apply to BigCommerce. One of the considerable downsides is that you have less control over your front-end code. This means that you’re swapping short-term convenience for long-term performance. Templates, themes, and plugins — regardless of the platform they’re tied to — typically take 18 months to catch up with best practices, leaving you trailing behind competitors.
BigCommerce addresses this shortcoming with something Shopify does not: a headless option. A headless ecommerce platform is effectively a dedicated API for your own store.
Enabling a headless approach means that BigCommerce can be integrated anywhere, on any technology stack you prefer. And yes, that includes WordPress. What’s more, being headless means you can easily migrate your frontend without rebuilding your backend.
BigCommerce also provides BigCommerce Essentials, which is aimed at entry-level stores. It’s a good way to get your feet wet, but it’s not BigCommerce’s real strength.
If you have the anticipated turnover to justify BigCommerce, it’s a flexible and robust choice that you won’t have to reconsider for years.
If you have a development team at your disposal and a healthy budget to throw at your new store, then Magento could be the option for you.
You can do almost anything with a Magento store; it excels at custom solutions.
Magento’s main offering is its enterprise-level solution. You’ll have to approach a sales rep for a quote — yep, if you have to ask the price, you probably can’t afford it. Magento has the track-record and the client list to appeal to boards of directors for whom a 15-strong development team is a footnote in their budget.
That’s not to say that a Magento store has to be expensive; Magento even offers a free open source option. But if you’re not heavily investing in a custom solution, you’re not leveraging the platform’s key strengths.
If you’re in the market for a custom solution, and you don’t have the budget for something like Magento, then Craft Commerce is ideally positioned.
Like WooCommerce for WordPress, Craft Commerce is a plugin for Craft CMS that transforms it into an ecommerce store.
Unlike WordPress, Craft CMS doesn’t have a theme feature. Every Craft Commerce store is custom built using a simple templating language called Twig. The main benefit of the approach is that bespoke solutions are fast and relatively cheap to produce, with none of the code bloat of platforms or WordPress.
Because your site is custom coded, you have complete control over your frontend, allowing you to iterate UX and SEO.
You will need a Craft developer to set up Craft Commerce because the learning curve is steeper than a CMS like WordPress. However, once you’re setup, Craft sites are among the simplest to own and manage.
Ecommerce solutions market themselves on different strengths, but the nature of design patterns means they almost all follow a similar customer journey: search for an item, add the item to a cart, review the cart, checkout. Like any business, they want to maximize their market share, which means delivering a solution that caters to the most common business models.
Occasionally a project happens along that doesn’t fit that business model. Perhaps you’re selling a product that’s uniquely priced for each customer. Perhaps you’re selling by auction. Perhaps you don’t want to bill the customer until a certain point in the future.
Whatever your reason, the greatest customization level — breaking out of the standard ecommerce journey — can be managed with direct integration with Stripe.
Stripe is a powerful payment processor that handles the actual financial transaction for numerous ecommerce solutions. Developers love Stripe; its API is excellent, it’s documentation is a joy, it’s a powerful system rendered usable by relentless iteration.
However, this approach is not for the faint-hearted. This is a completely custom build. Nothing is provided except for the financial transaction itself. Every aspect of your site will need to be built from scratch, which means hefty development costs before seeing any return on investment.
The best ecommerce solution is defined by three factors: the size of your store, the anticipated growth, and the degree of custom design and features you want or need.
Shopify is the choice of most successful small stores because you can be selling inside a day. For businesses with an existing presence and a smaller turnover, those on WordPress will be happy with WooCommerce. For larger stores planning long-term growth, BigCommerce’s headless option is ideal. Craft Commerce is a solid performer that marries low costs with flexibility for businesses that need a custom approach.
Featured image via Unsplash.
The post 6 Best Ecommerce Solutions for 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
MuleSoft provides out-of-box policies that can be applied to APIs for enhancing the functionalities of the APIs. These policies include various categories like security, compliance, troubleshooting, transformation, QoS, custom, etc.
MuleSoft also provides the capabilities to implement custom policies and Custom Policies are policies that anyone can develop and apply to their APIs, with the intention of extending existing functionality or defining new ones.
Jumpstart your next design project or speed up a workflow with some of these new tools and resources. With so many new tools being developed all the time, you are almost certain to find something that can help you with projects.
Here’s what new for designers this month.
Everypixel Patterns solves a common design problem: Creating seamless patterns with graphic editors is such a long and exhausting process. That’s why some people choose to get patterns from stock websites but that can be a challenge too (and difficult to search). This tool makes getting patterns less time-consuming. It includes a gallery of well-designed content, which you can customize and edit as needed.
Multiavatar is a free and open-source multicultural avatar maker. Type something in the input field and generate one of 12 billion avatars. (Everything is randomly generated and free to use.)
Lobe is a machine learning app from Microsoft that helps you create and train models. Start by showing the app examples of what you want it to learn and it will train a model for you. The tool is pretty easy to understand and you don’t need or experience or code knowledge to use it and you can train an app for free on your computer.
Laser Cat is a silly and fun Google Chrome extension that adds a cartoon cat to your browser that allows you to zap away anything you want to remove in the browser window. It’s light and fun. Go play!
Pattern Collect is a curated gallery of patterns by various designs and illustrators. You can download patterns for use in projects or submit your own to share with the design community. The library is searchable and you can get new patterns via email if you subscribe.
FarbVelo is a color palette generator that shows a new and random scheme with every refresh. The color choices are fresh and could work for a variety of projects, too.
CSS Clip Path Editor is a cool little pen by Mads Stoumann that puts an image inside of almost any clip path you can imagine. There are presets to choose from or you can adjust the settings and paths to create your own image shape.
Responsive & Configurable SVG Waves is a soothing pen by Jhey. Change the background and wave elements for a simple and cool animation in SVG.
Veed lets you host, edit, and deliver videos in the cloud using a REST API. It works on any browser, device, and bandwidth, and keeps your website light, even when delivering heavy video content.
Overlay is a plugin for Figma or Sketch that transforms components and symbols into clean and reusable React, Vue, or HTML code. The benefit? Use it to create more consistent websites and design systems more quickly and in a pixel-perfect manner.
List.js is a library for adding search, sort, filters, and flexibility to tables, lists, and other HTML elements. It is built so that it will work on existing HTML and be invisible. Plus, it is simple to install and use.
Design tokens are a “hot term” says Andy Bell. So, he wrote an explainer that breaks down what they are and how they might look in a standard data format like JSON. Read the explainer and you’ll be able to identify design tokens and understand them.
SVG Path Editor makes it easy to manipulate paths for any SVG element. The grid – if you choose to use it – helps edits stay symmetrical and easy to manage.
Operator Lookup is a practical and fun tool. Enter a JavaScript operator in the search box to learn more about what it does. (You can also choose from a “keyboard” of options.) Thanks for the tutorial, Josh W. Comeau.
Beacon is a tool designed to help you write, run, and share SQL in Slack. It makes collaboration easy so you can work on and run queries, debug, and resolve issues all in a single platform.
Plaiceholder transforms your images into lightweight placeholders using pure CSS or SVG.
Machine Translation is available as Cloud API, on-premise translation server, and SDK that can be easily integrated into lots of business cases. Both solutions work with 110 languages.
Draggable Blend Generator does just what the name implies. Change the blend mode of a background and foreground using a draggable tool so that you can see the changes in real time. Just enter the URL of a background image or pattern and color swatch and you are ready to go.
Jam Wand is a “magic wand” for making changes on your website, starting with copy. Click on any text, edit it, and submit the change to GitHub to be merged into the code. Copy changes as easy as click, type, and click again. (This tool is still in beta.)
Boost UI Kit is a collection of elements and components that will help you finish website design projects using a bright and airy style. It works with Figma for easy integration.
Romanizer is a fun game that tests your knowledge of Roman numerals. With two modes – a randomizer and a challenge you can participate in – you’ll learn to convert numbers visually in minutes.
Itmeo Market is a new online graphics marketplace with exclusive and ready-to-use templates for a variety of projects. Templates include elements for logos, UI kits, graphic elements, Instagram templates, landing pages, and more. (This is a paid/subscription-based resource.)
Bellmoco Handcola is a beautiful decorative typeface with fun swashes and serifs. The free version is for personal use only.
Bondie is a handmade brush typeface with fills in many of the letterforms. It contains 106 characters and is free for personal use.
Bovino has multiple weights that can work for display or body text. The modern serif is free for personal use.
Estilistica is a thin modern style sans serif with smooth lines and a vertical profile. It is best suited for display use and is free for personal use.
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