Build eCommerce App using NodeJS: Your Roadmap to Success

As the title suggests, we will discuss developing an e-commerce app using NodeJS, but is it worthwhile to do so? Does online shopping have a bright future?

According to Meticulous Research, the total value of the global e-commerce industry will reach $24,265.12 billion by 2025. In addition, the revenue generated by the e-commerce industry is anticipated to reach $71.29 billion in the year 2023, as stated by Statista.

Now, the question arises; Why NodeJS in e-commerce web application development?

Because of the present state of affairs, there is a greater need to create high-speed platforms to win customers’ confidence and loyalty. The leaders in the market are exerting every effort to provide customers with a pleasurable and individualized online shopping experience.

The input provided by customers on their purchasing experiences is highly welcomed since it might lead to updates and future improvements. Because of this, e-commerce back-ends need to be as lightweight as possible while still being able to retain and send data to the user side effectively.

There is no better approach to simplify and improve the usability of your application than by selecting NodeJS. In addition, NodeJS in e-commerce development minimizes the possibility of loss or damage and generates the most exceptional outcomes while ensuring no mistakes.

As a result, we will use this blog to investigate why to build an eCommerce app using NodeJS and how to build a NodeJS e-commerce web application.

What Does eCommerce Exactly Mean?

Electronic commerce, or e-commerce, describes businesses and private transactions that take place online to trade products and services. It works in a variety of market niches.

E-commerce transactions allow for purchasing almost anything or service conceivable, including but not limited to books, music, airline tickets, and other forms of financial services like stock investing and online banking. As a result of this, it is seen as a very disruptive kind of technology.

This is the first time online retail sales worldwide have exceeded $6 trillion, representing more than 20% growth from last year. Despite the moderation in the rate of economic expansion, overall expenditure will soar above $7 trillion by 2025.

Rise of Global eCommerce Marketplace

The continued expansion of retail sales worldwide will lead to a rise in retail market share. eMarketer forecasts that online retail sales will amount to $6.17 trillion by 2023, with e-commerce websites accounting for 22.3% of all sales in the retail industry.

Although the retail sector experienced difficulties in 2020, e-commerce saw double-digit growth in every one of eMarketer’s national markets. The recurring pattern is as follows:

• By 2022, the e-commerce market in the United States will have surpassed $875 billion, slightly exceeding the market in China.
• With a market share of 4.8% of total retail e-commerce sales, the United Kingdom is the third-largest e-commerce market in the world, behind China and the United States. After the United Kingdom (2.5%), South Korea and Japan each own a 3% share.
• E-commerce sales in Latin America increased by 25% from $68 billion in 2020 to $85 billion in 2021, reaching $85 billion.
• By 2025, it is anticipated that India’s e-commerce industry will have increased to $111.4 billion, up from $46.2 billion in 2020.
• By 2027, it is anticipated that there will be 1,090,000 million people participating in the e-commerce sector.
• In 2023, the percentage of users will have penetrated the market at 57.6%, with an anticipated increase to 73.7% in 2027.
• In 2021, around $52.1 billion of retail e-commerce transactions are anticipated to be handled online; this will make China the largest e-commerce market in the world.
• In addition to this, it has 824.5 million digital purchasers all over the globe, which accounts for 38.5% of all customers everywhere.

Let’s examine how your business will be affected by NodeJS in your e-commerce web application.

The Future of eCommerce

According to eMarketer’s research, even though 2020 is shaping up to be a challenging year for the retail industry, online retail sales throughout the globe have increased to a total of $4.280 trillion, representing an increase of approximately 28% for the year.

Statistics from the e-commerce industry indicate that by 2040, more than 95% of all transactions will occur in the online marketplace. At least 17 of the most successful organizations in the world have used NodeJS in e-commerce development as one of the technologies that power their respective business platforms.

These firms include Paypal, IKEA, Shutterstock, Shopify, NASA, eBay, Medium, Citibank, Yahoo, Walmart, IBM, Stripe, AliExpress, Asana, BitBucket, Mercari, and Uber.

Why, therefore, did everyone decide to go with NodeJS? Why build an e-commerce app using NodeJS?

Challenges Faced by the eCommerce Sector

Intense levels of rivalry mark the e-commerce industry. Therefore, to be competitive in the industry, efficiency is necessary. As a result, in addition to being available around the clock, e-commerce sites need to keep their speed high.

Additionally, e-commerce websites must contain payment gateways, logistics and shipment, and other components. Because of this, the online application is challenging to use. Nevertheless, the website’s performance should not be hindered by these components.

Aside from that, it shouldn’t make the activities any slower. The back-end handles dozens of requests at once from all around the globe. A significant number of operations take place in a concise amount of time.

However, the front end will also scatter if the back end cannot effectively manage complexity. As a result, if you ignore efficiency, many things might go wrong in a short amount of time.

• Front-end performance is often where people pay attention. Nevertheless, the slow loading time of the back-end is not something that should be ignored.
• The user will see a white screen if the back-end is too sluggish. This is due to the inability to manage greater loads efficiently and the system’s instability.
• Inadequate back-end performance may also affect the ranking in search engines.
• It’s possible that programming languages don’t have enough plugins. The online application will become more challenging to use as a result of this.
• In addition, it is possible that it does not support the streaming of data or media. On the other hand, the back-end and front-end performance may not be supported effectively by the same programming language simultaneously.
• The sluggish nature causes the loading to be complicated. A back-end load time of less than 200 milliseconds must always be maintained.

Therefore, for e-commerce to exist, a sophisticated infrastructure and trustworthy technology are required, which must ensure that all constituent parts work in tandem.

In recent years, the e-commerce industry has been confronted with a more significant number of obstacles than it has ever faced before. This is primarily due to the intense rivalry between gigantic and tiny companies.

A NodeJS development company may provide a solution that works well. But before we go into it, let’s thoroughly examine the difficulties that justify the need for an eCommerce app using NodeJS.

Here is the summary of the challenges:

• Most platforms for doing business online are notoriously slow, mainly attributable to the complicated back-ends of websites. The back-end load time shouldn’t account for more than twenty percent of the entire load time, which shouldn’t be more than two hundred milliseconds. This is a decent strategy.
• Most of these languages suffer from a severe lack of plugins, which makes their functioning intolerable.
• Building a scalable and complicated e-commerce interface is more complex than ever in this day and age due to the global chaos that exists everywhere.
• It is exceedingly challenging and significantly more complicated to maintain excellent performance and availability 24 hours a day, seven days a week, when an organization crucially relies on features such as payment gateways, logistics, suppliers, and shipping, among other things.
• Because of the scrambling, development has been more complex, and the firm’s scalability has grown more challenging due to the same factor.
• Again, due to the chaos, no influential community can assist developers with particular problems.
• Indeed, most languages cannot even stream media or data, which are both extremely important.
• These languages are cumbersome because there has been an extreme lack of sufficient development, which causes business platforms to be sluggish and difficult to load.
• These days, nothing uses an open-source model. It isn’t easy to locate someone with the appropriate abilities who is not affiliated with any organization. This is because every company is now shutting its doors to others.

Benefits of eCommerce NodeJS Framework

Building e-commerce apps using NodeJS has the crucial feature of asynchronous nature. This reduces the disproportionate burden on either the back or front end. The asynchronous design also facilitates the creation of apps that run on several platforms. According to studies, asynchronous programming has significantly lowered the back-end load time.

A web app for selling things online will offer a massive selection. Therefore, managing multiple users simultaneously is a crucial benefit of asynchronous programming and having NodeJS in e-commerce development.

There are many advantages of using NodeJS in e-commerce development. This section outlines some of the benefits in detail.

1. It is Highly Scalable

Web apps have the benefit of being able to dynamically scale up or down in response to changes in user demand. This is especially true for e-commerce apps that must handle a more extensive customer base and a higher volume of transactions. Therefore, it is crucial to use NodeJS when developing e-commerce apps.

NodeJS’s modularity, non-blocking I/O paradigm, and single-threaded event loop make it suitable for large-scale applications. The system can be scaled by adding additional servers, dividing the tasks, and giving each server more resources.

The capacity of a single NodeJS server may be increased by adding more resources, or additional servers can be deployed to deal with higher traffic volumes.

2. You Can Get Help from Large Community

There is a sizable group of NodeJS programmers out there who are happy to provide a helping hand. These can be used to create shopping cart applications. NodeJS provides developers with a growing collection of packages and modules, allowing them to build dependable and efficient e-commerce apps.

When information is more readily available and understandable, solving problems and keeping up to date becomes less complicated.

The following are avenues to join various NodeJS communities:

• Twitter
• Slack

3. It Provides Efficient Performance and Speed

The fast performance of NodeJS may be attributed to the V8 engine upon which it is based. JavaScript code is compiled into machine code by the V8 engine, making it quicker to execute than interpreted languages.

NodeJS’s event-driven, non-blocking I/O approach allows it to manage many simultaneous requests. As a result, NodeJS is a good option for e-commerce apps due to its ability to maintain fast response times even in high-traffic environments.

4. It is Highly Compatible with Other Technologies & Easy to Integrate

NodeJS is compatible with various technologies. NodeJS may be used with other software, including front-end frameworks, databases, and other languages.

This benefit simplifies developing e-commerce apps that work with other essential back-end infrastructure. Services like payment processing, integration with other systems, etc., are examples of this category.

NodeJS offers some critical advantages for e-commerce applications. Using NodeJS’s strengths, you can build e-commerce systems that are reliable, productive, and scalable to satisfy the demands of both your company and your consumers.

5. It works On a Modular Approach

E-commerce apps process large volumes of data, and managing that data with time is harder. However, NodeJS programmers build these programs in a modular fashion.

NodeJS’s modular framework facilitates the separation of concerns inherent in software development. It makes building, maintaining, and testing code easier.

Why Should You Opt With NodeJS for Your eCommerce App?

In the world of e-commerce, NodeJS may help speed up website loading times.

Google found that 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load, and a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

When your website slows down, you risk losing many potential customers. Indeed, it has been made abundantly clear when running an online store, EVERY SECOND COUNTS.

How PayPal switched from Java to NodeJS and saw a 100% gain in business availability despite a massive load is a fantastic tale in and of itself. PayPal saw a 35% drop in average page response time and a 200ms reduction in startup time after using NodeJS in its back-end.

Here’s a visual depiction that emphasizes both statistics and the effects Paypal has seen since switching to NodeJS:

Building A NodeJS eCommerce App with MEAN/MERN Stack

When building an e-commerce website, the MEAN/MERN stack is the best option. This is because technological advancements allow for rapid adaptation to spikes in demand.

You may wonder how the MEAN/MERN stack performs so well under stress. The solution may be found in the features offered by the various parts of the MEAN stack.

What Makes MEAN/MERN a Viable Choice?

The MEAN/MERN stack delivers as advertised. It is, without question, the best option for any e-commerce web project in its early stages. What sets it apart is its lightning-fast reaction time to traffic spikes.

Many companies today hire MERN stack developers to create cutting-edge e-commerce web apps because of the potential development solutions offered by the MEAN/MERN stack, which puts the best technologies to use.

MongoDB

NoSQL is the foundation of this database, and it is responsible for both the execution and the interchange of data storage. Because of this, the NodeJS e-commerce software will function faultlessly and have no server issues.

NodeJS

Because it is based on Chrome’s V8 JS engine, it is both lightweight and efficient. In addition, to keep its efficiency, it uses an input-output architecture that is event-driven and non-blocking.

ExpressJS

It is the back-end web-based framework, and its primary function is to assist in developing web applications by delivering seamless user interfaces.

AngularJS/ReactJS

The primary objective of the AngularJS framework is to provide automated view synchronization throughout developing websites.

Building A NodeJS eCommerce App with Microservice Architecture

Regarding the visual appeal of your e-commerce web app, microservices are your best choice. For the web app to interface with the back-end service, it is made available to clients using REST APIs.

Since NodeJS is compatible with various frameworks, including SenecaJS, it is a natural fit for use with microservices. A NodeJS e-commerce web software is modular because it separates its features into independent suites.

Several benefits for e-commerce businesses to implement the micro-service architecture pattern. This architectural pattern offers the chance to create services written in any language or database.

Additionally, it reduces operational expenses and eliminates the need to commit to a specific technology stack permanently.

The following diagram exemplifies a microservices architecture for an online store’s back-end.

The e-commerce subscription platform Cadenza has switched its NodeJS app from the MEAN stack to a microservices design. They utilized the MEAN stack and had trouble keeping track of 125 separate APIs for product administration, user management, payment processing, etc.

Even worse, issues like frequent application breakdowns and high expenditures ate away at their e-commerce revenue.

Using the microservice architectural paradigm, they could write code for their services without worrying about the underlying database or programming language.

Because of this, there is no need to commit to a particular technological stack. In addition, it allowed them to reduce operational expenses significantly.

While Cadenza is one example of an e-commerce company that has adopted a microservices architecture, that company is just one of many.

Using microservices architecture, the popular online marketplace eBay expanded to serve more than a billion customers. A simple infrastructure can’t support such a large volume of transactions for an online store.

Steps To Build an eCommerce App using NodeJS

This section will show how to create an e-commerce app using NodeJS:

1. Development Using Agile Methodology

It is strongly suggested and necessary to constantly update and improve the e-commerce applications. However, the Agile Methodology is the one that is recommended the most highly to carry out such a complicated action.

The Agile technique is a means of managing projects that involves dividing them into several different stages. As soon as they get started, teams immediately go into a process that involves planning, carrying out, and reviewing their work.

2. Hire NodeJS Developers & Project Team With Skills & Expertise

When hiring NodeJS developers, you must require a group of experts working on specific segments. These kinds of activities are not simple and call for the assistance of specialists with excellent training and expertise.

In this situation, we need the expertise of specialists in the following fields:

• A project manager
• Analysts of businesses
• UI/UX designers
• Node JS e-commerce developers
• Testers

Using a Platform as a Service (PaaS) provider eliminates the need for infrastructure or cloud platform architects.

3. Do Plan to Utilize Heroku PaaS

Heroku is the PaaS service that is often suggested and is essential since it was just said previously that this is a must. It has advantages over other things in several essential respects.

The following are examples of some of them:

• It can also manage and scale applications in addition to launching them.
• Excellent as a platform for the building of web applications.
• The development team can prioritize the code because of this.
• In addition, it manages significant facets such as the operating system, third-party API integration, and servers, amongst others.

4. Time for Installation

Follow these instructions to ensure a successful download and installation:

• Search the Forjs website, where you can locate the platform-specific installers.
• Install using Node Package Manager.
• Visit the website of the js package manager for further information on the installation of NodeJS on the platform.

5. Choosing A Node JS eCommerce Framework

It is recommended that only popular frameworks be used in the execution of the e-commerce development project. Although many exist, the ones listed below see the most frequent application:

Reaction

Using the Meteor JS framework, it is the first open-source platform. JavaScript, NodeJS, and MongoDB are just a few of the technologies that are a part of this.

Have a look at its features:

• It offers an organized, easy-to-use, and effective user interface.
• Additionally, it can manage products and stock without a hitch, easily handle orders, maintain customer profiles, process checkouts, and manage emails.
• The fact that it is an open-source project with unrestricted access to the code base contributes to its adaptability.
• It provides product searches, user authentication, interaction with payment gateways, and other features.
• Facilitates the payment process, provides savings, and streamlines shipping procedures.

KoaJS

It is a framework that may assist in building web applications for use in online business platforms. Take a look at some of its distinguishing characteristics:

They have documentation that is the only one of its type. It covers everything, including many different ‘How-to’ suggestions.

They also give a comprehensive tutorial demonstrating how to construct web apps for online business platforms using KoaJS. This might be useful to the development team.

Schema.io

Schema.io is another e-commerce framework platform built on top of NodeJS, and it provides the following advantages over similar platforms:

• Delivers an exceptional level of performance.
• It allows consumers to customize the online shop through the admin dashboard whenever and as they see fit.
• Robust API functionalities are offered.
• Increases the website’s responsiveness, making it suitable for mobile devices.
• It provides the ability to personalize the shop according to any preference.

TotalJS

TotalJS provides access to the framework, which may be used in various contexts. The following is a listing of its characteristics:

• Scalability is improved as a result.
• There is also documentation of a high-quality made accessible.
• Provides access to the builder’s extensive library of tutorials.
• Not only is it practical, fluid, and quick, but it also offers a comprehensive set of functions.
• Provides the ability to build high-performance web applications for e-commerce use.
• It is equipped with NoSQL databases. This is quite important for commercial platforms that are conducted online.
• Offers valuable services for online business platforms, like media streaming, location services, etc.

6. Heroku DevOps

Heroku is an example of an iterative software development project in app creation.

In several contexts, it facilitates development, testing, and deployment. However, proper and accurate build management, test automation, and deployment management tools are essential.

Because of this, they may add specifics about their pipelines, CI, Integration, etc.

They use their DevOps procedures and approaches in conjunction with their technologies to create a very effective CI process.

How Can Moon Technolabs Help You?

At Moon Technolabs, our team is highly skilled in developing NodeJS apps using the MEAN stack. We have found that the MEAN stack is the most practical and straightforward to understand and implement.

However, we also suggest microservices to our customers who have already built monoliths but require increased application scalability. When you want to design scalable things, you need complete control over each service you create. Microservice architecture provides our developers with this crucial level of control.

In this post, we have emphasized why building an e-commerce app using NodeJS is the need of the hour and the methods that can be used to develop such an app.