Industries all over the world are hopping on the digital transformation bandwagon to keep up with the ever-advancing technologies. The e-commerce industry continues to progress through this transformation as more and more people buy and sell over the internet.
While other industries took a hit during the 2019 pandemic, e-commerce businesses boomed as people were stuck indoors with just their electronic devices. However, this also led to e-commerce market saturation, with businesses struggling to find their competitive advantage.
E-commerce organizations are always finding ways to increase their sales in a cost-effective manner. Low-code and no-code platforms have been handy tools for cost-effectively managing the e-commerce ecosystem. These technologies are increasingly becoming popular in the digital ecosystem. Based on Gartner’s insights, 70% of new applications in 2025 will leverage no-code or low-code solutions.
Before getting into the elements and benefits of low-code technologies, it is important to understand what low-code development entails.
What is Low-Code Development?
Coding has been central to software development for a long time. However, traditional coding development fails to keep up with the increasing user demands. Low-code development takes the hard work out of programming and adopts the smart work route to accelerate the software development process.
Low-code refers to a component-based application development method that uses visual dashboards to drag and drop components into required places. This approach minimizes manual coding to develop mobile and web applications.
Low-code components include templates of coded functionalities that abstract the coding layer behind a visual development environment. A Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress is a working example of an open source low-code solution.
Low-code is an optimized approach to streamline the software development and deployment processes and reduce application delivery times. Businesses use low-code development to quickly build flexible and scalable applications as per their agile business use cases.
Related Reading: The Value of Low-Code Development
Components of All-in-One Low-Code E-commerce Platforms
Low-code e-commerce platforms are becoming increasingly popular for democratizing the development of e-commerce stores. While there are many platforms offering their own set of features to assist e-commerce businesses, the following are some of the common components of all-in-one low-code e-commerce platforms:
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App development
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Data integration
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Headless e-commerce architecture
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One Click Scalable Cloud Deployment
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Process Automation
Let’s discuss them in detail below.
1. App Development
Application development before low-code was a long and tedious process that did not suit the agility requirements of an e-commerce business.
Low-code e-commerce platforms simplify application development for digital businesses. Low-code application development allows developers to create modules or components of generic and repetitive functions.
Moreover, the visual environment of a low-code platform allows developers to drag and drop these components to build web or mobile applications at the speed of business. The application components in low-code are reusable anywhere in the app or even in other applications.
Another important feature of efficient low-code application development is that it does not entirely eliminate coding. There are always going to be online business needs that require custom logic to be written into the application. This approach provides developers with the flexibility to customize applications at both interface and code levels.
The combination of low-code building blocks and custom coding in application development is an essential component of effective low-code e-commerce platforms.
2. Data Integration
E-commerce platforms deal with huge volumes of data coming from diverse technological sources, including IoT, AI, big data, social media, data analytics, and more. All these technologies require to be integrated into e-commerce systems without creating data silos.
In low-code development, these technologies, along with other commonly used app functionalities, are treated as application components. For a smooth application workflow, seamless data integration is a crucial element for these components to function together. In addition to the connection of components, integration also plays a major role in application portability and flexibility.
Low-code e-commerce platforms reduce the development efforts for integration by providing pre-built connectors for popular data sources. The low-code approach not only speeds up the integration process but also allows developers to be in control of their data at all times. Low-code solutions also manage data updates across all components while maintaining data integrity and security.
Low-code e-commerce platforms handle all these processes involved in data integration in the background while developers work with a unified view of all the data in a single interface.
Related Reading: How to Use Data Integration to Your Advantage in Ecommerce
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3. Headless E-commerce Architecture
Architecture is the backbone of any software development strategy. Whatever is developed and presented to a user is based on a development architecture that serves as a blueprint for software developers.
Low-code development platforms are generally based on a modular architecture with reusable application components. Taking this modular approach a step further, a new headless e-commerce approach is the latest talk among online businesses.
Headless e-commerce architecture is an application model that separates the front-end of an application from back-end functionalities. Low-code platforms use a headless architecture to allow developers to visualize the application UI and e-commerce functionalities as separate entities. The communication between these separate components is handled through API calls.
A headless approach to low-code development allows online businesses to create UI designs of their choice and plug the reusable e-commerce component, e.g. checkout functionality, at the back-end. In this way, companies can flexibly develop complete e-commerce platforms that keep up with the rapidly innovating business and technological world.
4. One Click Scalable Cloud Deployment
The cloud has played a crucial role in the digital transformation of industries worldwide. Cloud services have shifted the paradigm of today's modern industries by offering them resources for smart software development.
With the aim to build smart applications, low-code tools leverage the cloud's resources to offer single-click, scalable cloud deployment of e-commerce applications. These applications can be accessed anywhere, at any time.
With the help of low-code platforms, even small e-commerce businesses and startups can enhance their applications by leveraging services offered by cloud service providers like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and more.
The central management of a cloud is especially suitable for low-code platforms to offer abstract and customizable application development in one place.
Low-code platforms allow organizations to build flexible and scalable applications that could not have been built without cloud services.
Related reading: 7 Common Cloud Integration Challenges
5. Process Automation
Low-code development is all about the fast and simple development of modern applications. When talking about speed and simplicity in development, automation is the best solution for minimizing development errors and enhancing efficiency. Automation is the key to keeping up with today's fast-paced digital world and gaining a competitive edge in the market.
Process automation is a critical component of low-code e-commerce platforms. These platforms are equipped with workflow automation features that allow business users to set workflow triggers for data updates and data flow between application components.
End-to-end process automation allows low-code platforms to accelerate the development of e-commerce applications. The pre-built data connectors, API calls, and business process templates offered by a low-code tool also fall under the workflow automation umbrella.
Low-code e-commerce platforms allow developers to point-and-click a process and sit back while process automation quickly takes care of integrations and workflow in the background.
Benefits of a Low-Code Platform
Apart from the obvious time-saving capabilities of low-code, e-commerce businesses can gain the following advantages from low-code platforms:
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Lesser Need For Technical Skills
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Quicker & Democratized Development
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Quicker Time to Market
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Modernize Core Features and Systems
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Better Customer Experiences
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Reducing Expenses
Let’s discuss them in detail below.
1. Lesser Need For Technical Skills
Low-code development tools are meant to reduce the requirement for technical knowledge to develop software. These platforms allow e-commerce entrepreneurs to understand the application development process without needing an IT expert.
With a simple user interface, e-commerce users can execute and visually monitor development processes to add new features to an application. Low-code platforms reduce the requirement of technical skills for assembling an application. This allows all teams of a company to understand and be a part of the app development process.
Additionally, business users no longer have to wait for a professional developer’s opinion or assistance for application management, greatly reducing an application's development time.
2. Quicker & Democratized Development
Programming an application used to be an isolated process performed solely by developers. The lack of involvement of business teams in the development process often leads to unmet business requirements.
An important advantage of low-code solutions is their boundary-less approach to development. With their reduced technical requirements, these platforms create an accessible and collaborative development environment where all business teams can be part of the process.
This kind of democratized development reduces the burden of the development team and introduces innovative ideas that result in accelerated development. Low-code solutions make all employees of a business feel empowered and in control of their application.
3. Quicker Time to Market
Software development has always been a bottleneck in building an online store. The lengthy hard-coding and code testing processes always resulted in delayed application delivery, eventually affecting sales.
According to Forbes, application delivery can be 10x faster with low-code solutions. The ready-to-use components and visual environment of a low-code tool enable increased developer productivity. Decision-making is also taken care of during development, thanks to the collaborative features of these platforms.
All these capabilities enable businesses to build and validate their applications faster than ever. The speedy development iterations result in quicker time-to-market, which can give businesses a competitive advantage over their rivals.
4. Modernize Core Features and Systems
A collaborative development environment provided by low-code technologies benefits a business in multiple ways. With the mundane, repetitive tasks handled by these technologies, developers get a chance to be more productive and creative with their tasks.
In the low-code approach, a huge chunk of work is already taken care of with ready-to-use modules. This allows developers to focus on modernizing the core business features in creative ways, so the application remains aligned with the organization's business processes.
The modernization of core systems ultimately enhances the operational efficiency of a business in accordance with modern digital requirements.
5. Better Customer Experiences
Online digital stores continually strive to entertain and retain customers through engaging web and mobile applications. Customers are always attracted to aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly, and immersive application experiences.
Low-code technologies are very effective in elevating the customer experience of an online business. While these technologies take care of the back-end functionalities, the developers are free to design the view layer of applications. This flexibility allows developers to be creative with the interface design.
Another contributing factor to a better customer experience is the iterative development approach of low-code tools. Iterations allow applications to continuously improve according to customer'’ feedback, resulting in a customer-approved application.
6. Reducing Expenses
The success of a business eventually comes down to increasing its profits and reducing its expenses.
Businesses involving software development invest a lot in employing developers as their business applications depend on them. With the low-code approach, a large team of developers is no longer the requirement for putting together an application. By reducing the number of developers, businesses can save a lot on their overall expenses.
Another cost-effective factor of low-code technologies is the quicker time-to-market, leading to increased sales and revenue.
With the cost cuts and revenue generation, businesses save money overall, and the pricing of a low-code tool eventually pays off when the business value increases over time.
Future of Low-code Solutions in the E-commerce Industry
A cost-benefit analysis heavily favors the benefits of low-code platforms for their assistance in building innovative e-commerce applications at incredibly low costs. There is no doubt that the low-code solutions will only expand in the future, opening gateways for further improvements and opportunities in the e-commerce ecosystem.
Integrate.io offer all the low-code features like drag-and-drop, templates for business processes, data models, pre-built user interfaces, and many more. If you have an e-commerce business and wish to leverage the low-code tools of integrate.io, get in touch with us today and experience our easy-to-use platform.