8 ms·

Great work. When I loaded the page I even thought to myself, oh shit this is fast. One huge problem, with most large platforms for e-commerce stores, they are

Great work. When I loaded the page I even thought to myself, oh shit this is fast. One huge problem, with most large platforms for e-commerce stores, they are terrible at speed optimization! For example, I have a store on Shopify and it's basically impossible to do most of what you explained. With Shopify, you can customize HTML / SCSS files with dynamic content. All of which gets compiled on their back-end. You have no access to the final compiled HTML and markup. You're sadly limited in what you can do. It seems you need to have a custom store to really be able to optimize this hard-core.

merb 10y ago
they could do even better. I mean something is really bad here, since their uncached css from frankfurt to my house should not take over 100ms. and they also serve images, css and js from the same domain. and they download the text's as a extra request. and somehow http2 doesn't kick in.
hbrundage 10y ago
This is largely incorrect. All the front end customizations that this article describes are possible with Shopify because you have complete control over the HTML, JS, and CSS that the platform spits out. While true that you can't "access" the final compiled HTML to edit it, the templates that power your theme are very close to that output, and not hard to change if you're familiar with HTML/CSS. The Javascript optimizations are all completely possible as well but you either have to pick a theme that has been optimized or implement them yourself in your own theme. Shopify also supports AMP and responsive themes (because it's just HTML). It is true that with Shopify or similar platforms you aren't able to make backend choices or implement caching like the article has described, and yes it's true that all the themes in the theme store aren't perfectly optimized for page load time -- but the question really is do you want to do any of this stuff yourself? Shopify has invested years in their platform to make your website as fast as possible for as little money as possible. The themes that Shopify publishes in the theme store undergo huge amounts of performance testing to ensure that you aren't losing money from latency. The platform comprises a world class CDN, and Shopify doesn't charge for bytes through it. The platform uses many layers of backend caching at the data access, logic, and rendering layers to make your shop as responsive as possible if anyone has been to it before. Shopify powers some of the biggest sales on the internet that truly dwarf Good Morning America. The platform is also geographically redundant such that an entire datacenter can fail with only a moment of visible impact to you and your customers. If what I'm saying is true and you don't actually sacrifice that much flexibility on the Shopify platform, why would you choose to have to implement all the above? Another angle is operations: How many people do you think they have monitoring it and ready to respond to any incidents? Shopify serves an order of magnitude more traffic than Baquend saw at the very peak of this occurrence every single minute of the day with a better response time on average. The Shopify platform took an army of engineers 10 years to build so it would seem unlikely that Baquend has all the same features and stability. How much do you think Baquend charged Thinks to build this? Is it more than $29 / month? Source: work at Shopify and built many of these systems.
- kilroy123 10y ago
  I never said Shopify isn't good. I pay for it and use it. I'm just saying there are limitations by using a third party service and not having complete control of the stack. Plus you haven't rolled out AMP just yet. https://engineering.shopify.com/225104708-shopify-merchants-will-soon-get-ampd https://engineering.shopify.com/225104708-shopify-merchants-...
- thirdsun 10y ago
  Plus, you could always use Shopify's JavaScript SDK if you need more control. We use it with a static Middleman site hosted on Netlify, which is a great combination: You get a performant backend, easy to use e-commerce administration and all the freedom to create your own site. Another option would be Snipcart, which looks very strong as well but lacked advanced inventory and product management when we had to decide between Shopify and Snipcart.
- DivineTraube 10y ago
  > It is true that with Shopify or similar platforms you aren't able to make backend choices or implement caching like the article has described, and yes it's true that all the themes in the theme store aren't perfectly optimized for page load time -- but the question really is do you want to do any of this stuff yourself? You're right, that is surely a thing you do not want to do yourself. This is why Baqend does all the browser and CDN caching, TTL estimation, query invalidations and so on automatically. In terms of the frontend if you do not want to rely on a stock theme - and many larger ecommerce site won't - then you will have to do these optimizations yourself. Fortunately with good tooling available as outlined in the article. I think Shopify is in fact a great improvement over systems like Magento. But if Shopify is well-enginneered (which I'm convinced of), how do you handle sudden load spikes in the database? Do you reshard and migrate data in real-time? How does Shopify scale the application tier? How can tenants run scalable custom backend code? What happens if a database or server node crashes? The advantage of Baqend is that its inner workings are published in research papers and blog posts, so people can judge the performance and scalability not only through benchmarks and real-world examples like Thinks but also by looking at the design. In contrast to Shopify, Baqend is backend-as-a-service which means customers have full freedom on how they design their site or shop. They do not have to live with a server-generated HTML that they cannot change - they can for exmaple easily build a React/Angular single page applications, run server-side JavaScript code, do custom queries, build a native app around the same business logic and APIs, subscribe to websocket-based change streams etc. While I respect that it took you 10 years to build Shopify, this is usually not an indicator for scalability and a low-latency design. Often such projects end up with solutions like MySQL sharded at application-level, intermingled technology stacks and legacy systems. Disclaimer: I'm the Baqend CEO and its caching approach is my PhD thesis.

merb 10y ago

they could do even better. I mean something is really bad here, since their uncached css from frankfurt to my house should not take over 100ms. and they also serve images, css and js from the same domain. and they download the text's as a extra request. and somehow http2 doesn't kick in.

hbrundage 10y ago

This is largely incorrect. All the front end customizations that this article describes are possible with Shopify because you have complete control over the HTML, JS, and CSS that the platform spits out. While true that you can't "access" the final compiled HTML to edit it, the templates that power your theme are very close to that output, and not hard to change if you're familiar with HTML/CSS. The Javascript optimizations are all completely possible as well but you either have to pick a theme that has been optimized or implement them yourself in your own theme. Shopify also supports AMP and responsive themes (because it's just HTML). It is true that with Shopify or similar platforms you aren't able to make backend choices or implement caching like the article has described, and yes it's true that all the themes in the theme store aren't perfectly optimized for page load time -- but the question really is do you want to do any of this stuff yourself? Shopify has invested years in their platform to make your website as fast as possible for as little money as possible. The themes that Shopify publishes in the theme store undergo huge amounts of performance testing to ensure that you aren't losing money from latency. The platform comprises a world class CDN, and Shopify doesn't charge for bytes through it. The platform uses many layers of backend caching at the data access, logic, and rendering layers to make your shop as responsive as possible if anyone has been to it before. Shopify powers some of the biggest sales on the internet that truly dwarf Good Morning America. The platform is also geographically redundant such that an entire datacenter can fail with only a moment of visible impact to you and your customers. If what I'm saying is true and you don't actually sacrifice that much flexibility on the Shopify platform, why would you choose to have to implement all the above? Another angle is operations: How many people do you think they have monitoring it and ready to respond to any incidents? Shopify serves an order of magnitude more traffic than Baquend saw at the very peak of this occurrence every single minute of the day with a better response time on average. The Shopify platform took an army of engineers 10 years to build so it would seem unlikely that Baquend has all the same features and stability. How much do you think Baquend charged Thinks to build this? Is it more than $29 / month? Source: work at Shopify and built many of these systems.

kilroy123 10y ago
I never said Shopify isn't good. I pay for it and use it. I'm just saying there are limitations by using a third party service and not having complete control of the stack. Plus you haven't rolled out AMP just yet. https://engineering.shopify.com/225104708-shopify-merchants-will-soon-get-ampd https://engineering.shopify.com/225104708-shopify-merchants-...
thirdsun 10y ago
Plus, you could always use Shopify's JavaScript SDK if you need more control. We use it with a static Middleman site hosted on Netlify, which is a great combination: You get a performant backend, easy to use e-commerce administration and all the freedom to create your own site. Another option would be Snipcart, which looks very strong as well but lacked advanced inventory and product management when we had to decide between Shopify and Snipcart.
DivineTraube 10y ago
> It is true that with Shopify or similar platforms you aren't able to make backend choices or implement caching like the article has described, and yes it's true that all the themes in the theme store aren't perfectly optimized for page load time -- but the question really is do you want to do any of this stuff yourself? You're right, that is surely a thing you do not want to do yourself. This is why Baqend does all the browser and CDN caching, TTL estimation, query invalidations and so on automatically. In terms of the frontend if you do not want to rely on a stock theme - and many larger ecommerce site won't - then you will have to do these optimizations yourself. Fortunately with good tooling available as outlined in the article. I think Shopify is in fact a great improvement over systems like Magento. But if Shopify is well-enginneered (which I'm convinced of), how do you handle sudden load spikes in the database? Do you reshard and migrate data in real-time? How does Shopify scale the application tier? How can tenants run scalable custom backend code? What happens if a database or server node crashes? The advantage of Baqend is that its inner workings are published in research papers and blog posts, so people can judge the performance and scalability not only through benchmarks and real-world examples like Thinks but also by looking at the design. In contrast to Shopify, Baqend is backend-as-a-service which means customers have full freedom on how they design their site or shop. They do not have to live with a server-generated HTML that they cannot change - they can for exmaple easily build a React/Angular single page applications, run server-side JavaScript code, do custom queries, build a native app around the same business logic and APIs, subscribe to websocket-based change streams etc. While I respect that it took you 10 years to build Shopify, this is usually not an indicator for scalability and a low-latency design. Often such projects end up with solutions like MySQL sharded at application-level, intermingled technology stacks and legacy systems. Disclaimer: I'm the Baqend CEO and its caching approach is my PhD thesis.