Some of the Magento Enterprise clients that outgrew their solution started building NodeJS+ReactJS E-Commerce applications in-house. Here is why, explains Delaney, CTO of one of the online book retailers.

“The first decision we made was to drop Magento. As we invested in our commerce experience we found we would need an increasingly customer-centric experience which goes beyond a simple storefront, and even with a great and supportive.

So why NodeJS/React?

• It provides us with server-side rendering, making SEO “just work”;
• It gave us a common skillset (ES2017 Javascript) for server & client development;
• It has great default integration libraries all the 3rd party tools we use, from payment (Braintree) to order management (NetSuite) to marketing/analytics (so many!);
• The event-loop structure of Node gives our servers incredible server volume, cutting hosting costs by >75%;
• Javascript’s functional-first programming model helps us write high-performance web services by default, instead of having to fight for it (ie: PHP);
• React’s model for client development is the best way to model UI we’ve yet found.

Really, if you’re going to build a web app right now from scratch, you should use NodeJS/React.

What’s hard?

• The single greatest challenge of this approach is the required skill level of the development team. Everyone has to be a full-stack expert to make the most of it, and it’s easy to go wrong, so it’s both hard to get started on the team and hard to maintain the required level of quality. We’ve really had to invest in hiring, improve our internal processes and establish quality controls, but in the end, it’s been well worth it.”

If you decided to build an application using Javascript, make sure to check out Reaction Commerce! Why develop from scratch if there is an awesome ready to use, open source E-commerce solution based on Meteor.js?!

Make sure to check out additional resources like this one: 4 Node.js Logging libraries which make sophisticated logging simpler, log analysis and log monitoring by Loggly.

Need help choosing the right solution and building it to fit your needs? Email us at hello@buildateam.io – we are here to help!