BigCommerce Brings Home New Hardware at MACHathon 2022

For decades, the go-to structure for many ecommerce businesses has been an all-in-one monolith setup, which ties together the front-end — or digital storefront — and the backend — or server-side. 

While a monolith solution might be the right move for small- to mid-sized businesses with limited requirements, this kind of technology can present some challenges as your business moves into the enterprise space and requires greater complexity, such as expanding into new regions or selling through several marketplaces and social channels.

The solution? MACH architecture.

According to the MACH Alliance, MACH (microservices, API-first, cloud-native SaaS and headless) is an industry tech standard describing modern technology. Unlike monolithic architecture, MACH allows business owners to choose the technology that best meets their needs and future roadmap.

Established in 2021, the annual MACHathon event is an opportunity for teams around the world to showcase their most ground-breaking, innovative ideas using MACH technology and composable architectures. 

This year, BigCommerce was thrilled to get in on the action — and take home three MACHathon awards! 

MACHathon 2022: Accelerate at MACH Speed

With a theme of “Accelerate at MACH Speed,” this year’s MACHathon challenged participants to “highlight a real challenge and show how this technology is the solution for driving growth, accomplishing something better or quicker than before, or serving people in better ways.”

To participate in the event, each MACHathon team was required to submit a three-minute demo video explaining their project, why they chose it, which technologies they used, their results and how they plan to continue their project after the MACHathon. 

Additionally, each team submitted architecture diagrams of their solution and documentation explaining why they chose the tech stack they used.

With €3,250 in prizes, the MACHathon culminated in six awards for the projects that demonstrated social importance, feasibility, use of MACH technology and innovation.

Composable Commerce Built for Growth

Partnering with Contentstack and Uniform, BigCommerce and our MACHathon team — called “Rage Against the MACHine” — wanted to create a way to launch new sites quickly and seamlessly. 

Iris Schiefer, Senior Enterprise Account Executive at BigCommerce, used Italian lingerie brand La Perla to help explain the team’s project and goal.

While La Perla already had a main ecommerce site, in January 2022, the brand decided to launch multiple storefronts. This included one for its cosmetics and fragrance subsidiary, La Perla Beauty, which would have a slightly different look and feel and target a different audience than its main ecommerce site.

“We thought, ‘What if we could make that really easy for merchants to spin up a new site, make it look and feel different, be able to test and learn in new markets, take the site down, learn, reiterate, launch and test again, and be able to have those components ready to use again,” Scheifer said. “So we created a composable commerce stack accelerator.”

With the accelerator, a business owner can choose a website theme and launch a new storefront in just a few clicks, explains Hadi Farhat, a Senior Sales Engineer at BigCommerce who worked on the project with Tim Benniks and Ante Sepic of Uniform. 

“Today, if you want to use Multi-Storefront on BigCommerce, it’s fairly easy. You go to the back office, you click on the ‘plus’ sign, you type in a name and it’s ready. But we want this to be even easier for business owners, so we used APIs to programmatically and automatically create a new storefront and assign products to it.” — Hadi Farhat, Senior Sales Engineer at BigCommerce

Based on Uniform experience orchestration (detailed in Uniform’s MACHathon blog post), a BigCommerce headless commerce and a Contentstack headless CMS, the accelerator provides tech teams with a quick and easy solution to test and learn — without the need for heavy development on the backend. 

“Our goal was to show that scaffolding composable stacks is something accessible to all stakeholders, not only developers,” mentioned Benniks. “By using the Uniform orchestration layer, marketers were able to preview and edit the content stored in both BigCommerce and Contentstack in one place. For them it was a seamless experience — and it looks like we achieved our goal, because the audience just loved it.”

If you want to know what all the hype is about, check out the Rage Against the MACHine demo video.

BigCommerce Wins 3 MACHathon 2022 Awards

In late June 2022, in the heart of London, the MACH Alliance hosted a group of executive leaders, technology decision-makers and front-end developers from around the world for its annual MACH ONE Conference. 

While the two-day event was jam-packed with keynote speakers, breakout sessions and career development opportunities, the conference saved one of the most exciting sessions for last: the winner presentations of this year’s MACHathon — and we’re excited to announce that BigCommerce formed part of the stack for three out of the six winning projects! 

• MACHnificent Champion: For the overall winners of the MACH Alliance MACHathon (sponsored by Actindo).

• The Integration Champion: For the team with the most innovative combination of solutions stacked together (sponsored by Contentstack).

• The Maturity Champion: For the most complete end-to-end solution (sponsored by Fluent Commerce).

The Final Word

With competition heating up in the ecommerce industry, creating a website that stands out is crucial for success. But a website that stands out is one that offers the best user experience on the frontend and the best developer experience on the backend. 

With MACH technology, business owners now have the flexibility and agility to future-proof their enterprise technology and improve their ecommerce digital experiences.