Most ecommerce applications share 60-80% of their functionality, regardless of geography, touchpoints, or the number of brands.
The foundation for every ecommerce store is always the same: product catalog, cart, checkout, customer profile, etc. However, the most common setup requires constant code duplication across different applications, resulting in losing ability to innovate fast and increased costs of operations
We believe it’s time for a change.
TL;DR: Alokai multistore-first solution is a gamechanger
Alokai provides a robust, multistore-first solution that addresses the unique ecommerce challenges of scaling across multiple dimensions. The more complex your setup—the higher the impact of our solution:
Unified tech stack: Simplified development across all platforms, ensuring consistency and reducing maintenance overhead.
No more code duplication: Re-use the repetitive elements of your ecommerce code across different touchpoints, brands, and geos to speed up the development.
No more API orchestration chaos: Alokai Connect centralizes data across all frontends, eliminating the hassle of managing multiple APIs.
Global distribution made easy: Expand into new geographies without the pain of building separate storefronts for each region. Alokai’s configuration capabilities allow for quick adjustments to local needs.
Reduced technical debt: By centralizing and simplifying your ecommerce infrastructure, Alokai significantly cuts down on the complexities that contribute to technical debt.
Leverage Alokai’s multistore-first solution to scale efficiently, manage complexity, and focus on strategic growth.
But let’s discuss the specifics and see how it works exactly:
Challenges of scaling ecommerce setups
Scaling an ecommerce business across multiple brands, geographies, and touchpoints sounds like a natural next step. But the reality? It’s a logistical and technical minefield.
As companies expand, agility often takes a hit—slowing down innovation, increasing overhead, and complicating operations.
Businesses often start with a single ecommerce platform, designed for a specific market and use case. Later they grow through expansion into new touchpoints (mobile apps, marketplaces, social commerce), new geographies, or acquiring new brands with their own tech stacks.
Over time, what was once a streamlined setup becomes a fragmented compilation of different pieces of code mashed together. This common level of complexity makes agility and scalability difficult and, at times, nearly impossible without a complete overhaul.
Multistore commerce is not a single problem to solve.
Multistore ecommerce comes with a set of challenges where each has to be addressed individually before finding a way for all those solutions to work well together. It is a complicated tedious process that spreads across all the application layers: UI, frontend logic, data, third-party vendors, and internal app’s infrastructure.
It's not easy to find a solution that works for every use case and it's almost impossible to pick ones that will work for multiple projects, often with different goals.
For that, you need an end-to-end solution. A platform that covers all the layers and is specifically built to solve end-to-end problems rather than ones from a specific domain. This is where Alokai comes in.
Alokai multistore: Your end-to-end solution for an end-to-end problem
At Alokai, we've been building universal ecommerce applications for the most tricky B2B and B2C cases since 2017. We've put all of our knowledge about reusability and configuration of ecommerce storefronts into our multistore-first solution so you can leverage it without years of discovering solutions to different problems and their edge cases.
We guarantee that it is the most optimal way to run complex ecommerce setups.
In fact, the more complex your setup is, the more value we can bring to your business! Multiple vendors, technologies, geographies, touchpoints, brands, catalogs, etc. — the more complexity you struggle with now, the more you can gain!
But let’s break it down.
Scale to new touchpoints
Expanding to new touchpoints—mobile apps, marketplaces, in-store kiosks, etc.—comes with unexpected complications that can slow down innovation and increase operational burdens.
The problems:
Inconsistent feature rollouts: Each touchpoint often requires separate development, meaning that new features must be built and deployed multiple times;
Fragmented development and maintenance: Every platform comes with its own technical stack, integration requirements, and release cycles. Maintaining consistency across them requires redundant effort, slowing down iteration and increasing costs;
Challenges with debugging and troubleshooting: Different touchpoints will have a completely different set of bugs each needing to be solved separately rather than solved in one place;
Performance and data synchronization issues: Real-time inventory updates, pricing changes, and user sessions need to be in sync across all touchpoints. Without a centralized approach, discrepancies arise, leading to poor customer experiences.
Without a unified system, businesses struggle with inefficiencies, delayed feature releases, and higher maintenance costs. Instead of focusing on growth and innovation, they get bogged down in managing a fragmented ecosystem of loosely connected storefronts.
Alokai’s solutions:
Unified tech stack and single codebase: This way you only need to write the business logic and major part of the UI logic once, and then re-use it for every touchpoint without repeating the code. All of the touchpoints are maintained by one team.
Rolling out a new touchpoint within days: Simply create a new directory, iherit all the functionalities and override the parts of the UI that differentiate. For mobile apps, you can leverage hybrid solutions like React Native and reuse most of the web storefornt code.
No more API orchestration and federation madness: Alokai Connect will serve as a central source of data shared across all your frontends—whether they're a web storefront, mobile app, kiosk, or anything else.
Expand into new geographies
Expanding into new geographies introduces additional layers of complexity that often force businesses to build separate storefronts per region. The need to accommodate region-specific requirements and operational differences comes with its fair share of challenges.
The problems:
Localized vendors and payment providers: Different regions require different payment gateways, logistics partners, and tax compliance setups. Integrating each separately leads to redundant systems and inefficiencies.
Localized UI and UX adjustments: Languages, currencies, date formats, and even browsing behaviors differ across geographies. Without a flexible system, businesses are forced to create region-specific versions of their applications.
Infrastructure and performance issues: Serving customers in different regions from a single data center leads to slow load times. Without a distributed hosting strategy, performance degrades significantly.
Over time, this lack of centralization makes rolling out global updates slow and expensive, ultimately limiting scalability and agility.
Alokai’s multigeo solutions:
Global distribution: Serve customers from multiple locations simultaneously.
Easily configurable translations, currencies, and store-specific logic: There’s no longer a need to create a separate version of your application for a specific language or region. Simply override what differentiates and inherit the rest!
See how Brompton opened 11 new stores around the world in under 3 months with Alokai
Launch new brands
As companies grow, they often expand their brand portfolio through acquisitions. While this can drive business growth, it also introduces significant technical and operational challenges that impact scalability and efficiency.
The problems:
Diverse ecommerce setups: Each acquired brand often comes with its own ecommerce platform, vendor relationships, and technology stack. Managing multiple independent systems creates redundancies and makes maintenance cumbersome.
Inconsistent vendor and payment systems: Different brands may use different payment gateways, logistics providers, and tax compliance tools, leading to operational inefficiencies and increased costs.
Fragmented teams and workflows: Acquired brands often retain their own development teams, workflows, and release cycles. Without a unified strategy, collaboration becomes difficult, slowing down feature development and increasing technical debt.
Higher infrastructure and maintenance costs: Running multiple separate platforms instead of a centralized system results in duplicated costs for hosting, integrations, and support.
Over time, managing multiple standalone ecommerce platforms reduces business agility and makes global scaling inefficient. Instead of leveraging shared resources and streamlined workflows, companies end up managing disconnected systems that hinder innovation and increase operational complexity.
Alokai’s multibrand solutions:
Unified tech stack and single codebase: Write the business logic UI once, and re-use it for every brand without duplicating the code. This way, each brand only has to maintain the files that differentiate it specifically.
Roll out new features to all brands simultaneously (or not): Our setup is optimized for maximum reusability, which drastically reduces maintenance effort. You can choose whether to implement the update for all the brands at once or select those that need changes.
Unified Data Model: Every brand consumes the same data model, so it can use the same reusable base logic and components.
Learn more about configuring Alokai’s multistore-first solution in the docs
Simplifying complex setups stage-by-stage with Alokai
Scalability is never easy and usually results in a lot of technical debt.
Many companies decide to start from scratch because it's really hard to get out of an already overly complex setup when it reaches a certain scale. A large number of technologies and variations make it almost impossible.
At Alokai, we're experts in breaking complex cases down into simpler, easily achievable steps. This allows you to focus on solving the most pressing problems that will provide ROI and see tangible results within the shortest possible timeframe. Launch faster, scale smarter— get a free Alokai demo today !
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