Over the past three months, 21YunBox has helped Commune Lifestyle Singapore’s technical team successfully implemented a complete e-commerce system in China. This blog will share how Commune Lifestyle has transformed its site from a SaaS style building system architecture to a 21YunBox + Gatsby + Airtable JAMstack architecture.
After using 21YunBox on Commune's official website in China, their storefront's load time has increased 10 times. 21YunBox has also provided Commune's technical team the convenience and flexibility for in-depth customization of their website. This has lead to more satisfied customers because they could custom order their favorite furniture designs.
About Commune Lifestyle
Commune Lifestyle Pte. Ltd. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Singapore Koda Limited. KODA was established in 1972 and distributes products to more than 50 countries. Koda has a professional technology, production and design team. With its unique design and precise craftsmanship, its product styles are easily distinguished in the market. KODA series products are well-known for their meticulous design, unique style, politeness and nobleness, as they take into account market cost strategy factors. While expanding its main production base in Vietnam, they has also established production bases in Malaysia and Indonesia. Koda currently has 11 first-class production workshops.
Commune's Challenges in Launching in China
Slow Performance and Lack of Flexibility
With the rapid growth of the company in China, their network traffic and content have continued to increase. Their original simple e-commerce website platform could no longer meet the growing demand of Commune in China.
The initial online store platform used by customers in the early days was chosen because it could be implemented cheaper and faster. However, because the platforms are build for a generalized storefront, it lacked ability to scale with Commune's rapid growth.
The increasing demand for popular customized furniture design, the Commune team urgently needed a customizable technology platform that could support the company's sustainable growth.
"The site building system we used originally could not support this level of customizability (ie. allowing customers to choose from custom colors, material type, backrest heights, etc). The integration options where also limited, which made us out of sync from the rest of the e-commerce market." - Maltin Soe, Technical team leader, Commune Lifestyle
Due to the rapid growth, Commune was under pressure to come up with a solution to re-design the e-commerce website with the internal development team.
ICP Filling Could be Confusing
It has always been difficult to apply for ICP registration whether it is a domestic or a foreign company entering China.
Applying for ICP filing is not only time-consuming, if not handled properly, the website may also face the possibility of being shutdown at any time.
In the process of communicating with the customer, 21YunBox found a couple items tended to confuse them:
Can we still host a website without an ICP filing?
According to our customer's own experiences, in the early-days when they first purchased a cloud server in China, the R&D engineers found that the website to be inaccessible. All they saw a prompt like the screenshot below. They initially thought that it was a code-level error. It turns out that their website did not have a valid ICP record causing the website to be inaccessible.
Domain names without valid ICP registration cannot be accessed
I have applied for ICP filing, can I use it on other cloud platforms?
The customer had already completed an ICP filing on the original website but did not understand why it could not be used across multiple platforms. This caused more confusion.
Oversea Technology is NOT Compatible in China
We found that the customer painfully discovered that many popular overseas SaaS/PaaS solutions are not usable in China. For example,
- Common Content Management Systems (CMS): Contentful, Airtable,
- Image Storage Services: Cloudinary, AWS S3
- Static Website Hosting Platforms: Netlify, Github Pages , Gatsby Cloud , etc. will be very slow or even inaccessible.
The main reasons that led to the illusion of "availability" in technology selection were: The customer's technical team conducts technical research, product development and testing outside of mainland China
The customer's technical R&D team is in Singapore. In the early technology selection, they used Airtable as a content management system and Gatsby as a Static Site Generator, which was then deployed and hosted on Gatsby Cloud.
It is also because the customer conducts the User Acceptance Test (UAT) outside of Mainland China, the customer did not perceive that Mainland China cannot access the photos hosted on Airtable and the static website hosted on Gatsby Cloud during the whole process.
As the customer allowed more users to test the new version of the website in China, the customer’s technical team began to receive more and more feedback: "The website cannot be opened", "The photos cannot be loaded" and a series of problems .
Solution
The customer has changed from the original e-commerce website building system provided by Heydian to the Headless E-commerce system developed by the their internal technical team. The core technology stack is Gatsby as the Static Site Generator and replaced Gatsby Cloud with 21YunBox for website deployment and hosting. In addition to this, customer also use these 21YunBox services to improve production efficiency:
-21YunBox Build: 21YunBox uniformly initiates data requests to major headless backend systems, and pre-builds static websites.
-Content Delivery Network (CDN): 21YunBox's extremely fast content delivery network (CDN) nodes are distributed in 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities across China, helping customer to serve the entire user population in China.
-High-End Builder: Due to the large number of product photos on the customer's website, the customer purchased a builder with a high hardware configuration, so that when building the project in 21YunBox Build, all photos will be loaded into the build.
-Continuous Automatic Deployment: When the code changes, 21YunBox will automatically pull the latest code in Git and automatically build and deploy.
-Automatic Routing and Forwarding: After the Git code is submitted, 21YunBox will automatically adapt the URL of the website, which can be done automatically without the participation of the customer's operation and maintenance engineer.
-HTTPS Security Certificate: The entire website is equipped with an HTTPS security certificate, including second-level subdomains and self-determined domain names, which can be completed automatically without the participation of the customer's operation and maintenance engineers.
-ICP Record Consultancy Service: According to the customer's situation, 21YunBox helped the customer complete the ICP record and enabled the website to be online in China in compliance with laws and regulations.
-Technical Expert Assistance: Provide testing assistance for customer's technical selection and website in China.
Customer's Revenue
Accelerated Time-to-Market and Reduced Staff Cost
21YunBox helped the customer speed up the entire process of development, review and deployment. The customer's website went online with 21YunBox and without the assistance from engineering, Commune's website successfully launched new product functions 3 to 4 times a day.
Judging from Maltin's years of experience in the industry, the previous deployment and launch process involved R&D engineers working with operation and maintenance engineers to launch new functions. Under normal conditions, it was very good to be able to go online once a week.
His experience after switching to 21YunBox hasa been: The new function can be launched without the participation of operation engineers at all, now only R&D engineers can independently complete it. At the same time, he feels that 21YunBox Build has greatly improved the company's productivity and reduced costs.
Security No Longer a Concern
The customer’s technical team is no longer worried about the security of the website. The Commune Lifestyle website gets higher security through JAMStack and static hosting.
It is worth mentioning that the process of constructing a static website in 21YunBox is quick. After the website is constructed, it is stored in the CDN nodes in a static manner, so there is no such thing as a traditional "dynamic" service. Users send requests and the server responds, so the static site has no attack surface to let hackers invade. On the the other side, hackers are better at finding intrusion points for a "dynamic" service, thereby obtaining user data, order data, etc. in the "dynamic" service.
"Our new version of the website is purely static (generated when the website is built), which makes hackers have a very limited attack surface and improves security by more than an order of magnitude." - Maltin Soe, Technical team leader, Commune Lifestyle
Performance Without Overhead
Without the additional use of a third-party content delivery networks (CDN), the page load time has become 10 times faster. In addition, 21YunBox's intuitive architecture, transparent process, seamless integration and out-of-the-box features enable the customer's R&D teams to:
Complete the project in-house, without introducing outsourcing development companies and additional third-party services (additional costs and additional risks)
Be able to control more without relying on the IT operation and maintenance department, you can quickly solve any problems.
Agile development, you no longer need to rely on IT engineers or DevOps engineers to release and launch code to make it go live.
Historically, one of biggest worry for the customer's team has been that the websites performance and high availability. This worry has gone away now that 21YunBox continuously monitors and solve any slowdown or availability issues.
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