Avatria is proud to announce Zocalo, a solution to help orchestrate your composable commerce capabilities. Learn More

Insights

MACH
Is MACH/headless eCommerce right for you?
by Anando Naqui
ARCHITECTURE
MACH
Why you shouldn’t build business logic into your frontend
When we started building Zocalo, our MACH-based eCommerce enablement tool, we brought our decades of experience as digital commerce consultants to the design process. We looked at where eCommerce platforms were 5, 10, and 15 years ago, thought back to all of the poorly built system architectures we’d been brought in to shore up...
Zach McMahon & Anando Naqui
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ANALYTICS
CONVERSION
The Analytics Missteps Too Many Companies Make
One of the fun (albeit challenging) aspects of analytics consulting is that you get to work with a lot of clients in a number of roles. Because of the nature of the work, you’re typically juggling a few different clients at any given time, and because of the way many clients treat analytics work...
John McDonough
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COMMERCE
How to Make eCommerce Sustainable
For many, contemporary eCommerce seems to be inherently unsustainable, given the environmental downsides of shipping ever more packages to locations all over the world. In this article we introduce the sustainable eCommerce movement—an attempt at running a business in a way that reduces negative environmental impact.
Brian Perry
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CONVERSION
Lessons in Machine Learning: Optimizing Revenue
When it comes to balancing conversion and revenue, there is no free lunch: the two concepts are fundamentally at odds. This article looks at how you can optimize your site for revenue while maintaining or improving conversion.
Avatria Data Science and Analytics Team
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CONVERSION
STRATEGY
Improve Conversion by Getting More Out of Your Search Engine
Did you know that over 70% of shoppers never make it to the second page of a product category and almost 90% never make it past the first page of search results? How many do you think even make it to the bottom of that first page? In today’s age, it is critically important that the products your customers are most likely to purchase appear above the fold on the first page. Customers expect you to show them what they’re looking for, and your margin for error is minimal.
Brian Ballard
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CULTURE
How We're Celebrating Pride Month at Avatria
June marks LGBTQ+ Pride Month in the United States to commemorate the Stonewall Riots in 1969. In this article you can learn how to be an Ally and other initiatives that the Avatria team is doing in the month of June.
Avatria Diversity and Inclusion Team
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Have questions or want to chat?
ACCESSIBILITY
COMPLIANCE
WCAG 3.0: The Next Step in Digital Accessibility
On January 21st, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) released the first public draft of a new generation of the WCAG Accessibility guidelines: WCAG 3.0. WCAG 3.0 has a number of significant differences from WCAG 2.x, not just in the site requirements, but also in how the standard is measured and applied. One of the most significant changes under 3.0 is a shift in how conformance is achieved. This article discusses how this change may impact your level of compliance.
Anando Naqui
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CULTURE
ANALYTICS
Giving Back: Lessons in Open Source
As an organization, Avatria has always admired the advancements made to the software development community via open-source technology. This article discusses our experiences in contributing to the LightGBM and how you can move your industry forward by committing to the open source community.
Frank Fineis
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CULTURE
Tips for COVID-19 and Beyond: Building Company Culture Remotely
We’re officially at the one-year mark of the pandemic, which means it’s been over 365 days since any of us were in the office together. And while we won’t turn this post into a lament for face-to-face meetings, team lunches, or the six-pack of beer that’s surely gone bad in the office fridge, we do miss seeing one another! We had to get creative to keep Avatria culture strong over the last year, and so we wanted to share some of the strategies we’ve found successful.
Hanna Parker & Cam Pavao
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COMMERCE
ARCHITECTURE
Considering Upgrading to SAP Commerce 2011? Read this first.
At the end of November 2020, SAP Commerce debuted their latest release, “2011.” After spending some time poking around the release, we wanted to provide a quick overview for those interested in the newest version so that you can determine if upgrading is a priority and avoid common pitfalls.
Stephen Osentoski
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ANALYTICS
How Far Do Customers Browse on eCommerce Sites? Not as Far as You Think.
An expression has been floating around that supposedly describes a painful truth of eCommerce shopping habits; it goes something like this: You could bury a body on page two, and no one would ever find it. It’s one of those ideas that feels right (when was the last time you clicked into the second page of search results for an answer?), but is much harder to find good data about. Fortunately, we have a lot of eCommerce data at hand, so we decided to try to dive into the question for ourselves.
John McDonough
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ANALYTICS
How to Know if a Neural Network is Right for Your Machine Learning Initiative
Deep learning models (aka neural nets) now power everything from self-driving cars to video recommendations on a YouTube feed, having grown very popular over the last couple of years. Despite their popularity, the technology is known to have some drawbacks. In this article we help you determine if it is right for your use case.
Frank Fineis
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Interested in learning more about the browsing patterns of your own customers?
ACCESSIBILITY
COMPLIANCE
Digital Commerce for an Accessible World
This October is the 75th National Employer Disability Awareness Month, and the Department of Labor’s theme for this year is “Increasing Access and Opportunity.” In celebration we wanted to put a spotlight on the topic of Accessibility in Digital Commerce, outline the legislation and standards to be aware of, and offer a simple approach to compliance.
Anando Naqui
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CULTURE
Tips for COVID-19 and Beyond: Home Workspaces
Like much of the rest of the world, we’ve been working from home an awful lot since March. Under normal circumstances we love getting face-to-face time with our coworkers and clients, but as these are far from normal circumstances, we’re doing our part to stop the spread of the virus by staying home. With so many stuck at home right now, we thought it would be fun to give a peek behind the curtains, and show how a few Avatria employees are managing in the midst of a global pandemic.
John McDonough
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COMMERCE
STRATEGY
Considering upgrading to SAP Commerce 1905? Read this first.
Whether your current version of SAP Commerce is going out of support or you’ve targeted new capabilities the version will enable for your business, we wanted to provide a few notes about our upgrade experience and outline some of the potential roadblocks you may face along the way.
Stephen Osentoski
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CULTURE
Tips for COVID-19 and Beyond: Remote Onboarding
Turning a new hire into a full team member should start the day they accept their offer. We're sharing just a few ideas you can leverage to help make remote onboarding smooth and positive for new employees. Most importantly, be creative!
Allie Gauthier
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COMMERCE
STRATEGY
What COVID-19 Means for Digital Commerce in the Long Term
COVID-19 had a number of short-term impacts, but it is also imperative to explore long-term structural changes that the digital commerce market might see, as well as the adaptations companies can make in the coming years.
Anando Naqui
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ARCHITECTURE
STRATEGY
Effective Code Branching Strategies for Software Teams
Branching strategies are critical to clean, efficient, and bug-free development when multiple teams or developers are working within the same codebase. Check out our key strategies we recommend, but most of all: don’t overlook the small stuff.
Stephen Osentoski
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Have questions or want to chat?