A successful business needs to be flexible and adapt to new technologies quickly to satisfy customers’ demands. Retailers ought to give up traditional, monolith techniques to stay ahead of their competitors and provide an excellent customer experience. Nowadays, many API-led solutions are available in the market to implement these changes. Businesses are moving ahead with MACH technology architectures to meet customers’ needs. According to recent research, 81% of global IT decision-makers are planning to add MACH elements to their architecture in the next twelve months.
MACH Architecture
- M - Microservices : The concept of microservices is bringing together loosely coupled, independently deployable small services to compose a single and more complex application. Microservices help these applications deliver quick responses that are reliable and deployed more frequently. It also helps to provide scalability, flexibility, and resilience in digital architectures.
- A - API first : Application Programming Interfaces integrate all the system blocks so that individual components from different Packaged Business Capability (PBC) can work together in a flow. API allows one service to interact with another. It becomes useful when it is connected to microservices such as Function as a Service, Machine Learning as a Service, and Software as a Service. API is the path through which you can distribute the microservice to users. API is a must for microservice architecture to function because the API is the intermediate between its services. There is virtually no downtime or service interruption for customers because upgrades and patching processes are seamless.
- C - Cloud-native : Cloud-native means that all services are delivered in the SaaS model. It leverages SaaS to store, host, elastically scale and automatically update functionalities. These can deliver unique customer experiences.
- H - Headless : It decouples the front end and back end of a commerce platform. Thus, companies can edit or modify the online storefront without interrupting the back end activities. This approach provides complete design freedom to create the user interface and connect with other channels and devices.
Five benefits of MACH for retailers
MACH architecture allows you to choose the best tools from the market and provides you with a structure in which you can easily add, replace, or remove technologies in the future. It focuses on creating tech stacks. This modular approach allows the connected devices to work independently.
Following are the benefits of MACH architecture for modern retail businesses.
- Improved customer experience : Delivering an excellent customer experience is crucial for small and large retail businesses. MACH architecture helps businesses to deliver customised experiences and serve better. The freedom provided by this architecture to choose any DXP platform, language, and architecture allows retail businesses to craft highly personalised customer experiences.
- Shorter time-to-market : In the fast-growing e-commerce market, agility is the key to business success. With MACH architecture, businesses can build, launch, and make changes to the minimum viable products (MVPs) faster. Thus, businesses get the power to test new ideas without investing a huge amount in large-scale implementation.
- Low risk : Low performance and high business risks are the major problems with a monolithic architecture. MACH helps businesses to minimise the risk of choosing the wrong vendors and improve business continuity. In case you find any of the services experiencing a breach, just cut the API cord to minimise the impact. This is the benefit of using replaceable and pluggable services.
- Flexibility: MACH provides brands the flexibility to incorporate any shopping channels that are trending in the market. It results in increased sales and better business.
- No re-platforming : You can never predict when the tools you use in your business will become obsolete and incapable of meeting your needs. The modular architecture of MACH allows brands to replace outdated tools and adopt the emerging ones fast. Switching to MACH is the last re-platforming step to scale your business. Once you move to MACH, you can add, update and replace solutions continuously without disrupting other business processes.
How do MACH-enabled systems make your retail business run better?
With the best retail Point of Sale (POS) software, you can ensure visibility across the retail chain for faster decision-making. Retail POS and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software integration is the best option for businesses to improve sales, marketing, and customer experience.
A POS software is the system used by retailers to process customer sales. It can be a card reader, iPad, or any custom-built system. The CRM software deals with the backend process of the customer transaction process and can accurately capture customer data. Its added features helps you carry out customised marketing campaigns targeting your customers. A POS-CRM software integration can improve customer integration, help with business promotions, and increase customer retention.
MACH technology is undoubtedly one of the best things in the modern IT industry. Present retail accumulation of needs is strongly consumer-oriented. Hence, IT giants seek technological agility in a demand-driven market, and the go-to technology is MACH. Intellect Commerce offers you 6DX - a MACH compliant open retail architecture platform that fits in with any environment without distorting the retailer's existing technological ecosystem. Our 6DX-Cutting-edge Retail Xperience Technology is flexible and highly scalable cloud POS software that delivers Next-Gen retail experiences for new-age customers. Thus, your business can unlock high performance and greater returns that enable you to become a leader in retail.