Whitelabel Retail + In-Store Functionality

Eastern Mountain Sports (EMS) is a physical and online sportswear retailer located in the north-eastern United States. Following an acquisition of EMS by my employer, Sports Direct International, the Research and Development arm of SDI had the opportunity to re-platform their e-commerce property from Demandware (now known as Salesforce Cloud) to something of our own choosing. Reaction Commerce is a startup of a few years based in Santa Monica, California. They build a Node based, semi headless e-commerce platform called Reaction, with a GraphQL API and plugin architecture at its core.

The isomorphic element was important because SEO is such a driver for online retail, thus we had to ensure that many aspects of the product inventory are bot detectable, not just for search engines, but also for social media where a consumer would expect preview images and importation to appear automatically when sharing via WhatsApp for example.  It also alleviates the various issues involved since store operators want to add numerous third party advertising and behaviour tracking scripts which are often associated with poor performance.

An anonymised responsive webpage is generated dynamically for each request, utilising significant in-app caching, and is frontend on the edge using Cloudflare which means the consumer gets a very fast and rapid render of the page, so even if the script takes a load to kick in on their browser, it happens before they begin to start interacting with the page.