Winner of Creative Problem Solving Award, Certified BigCommerce Partner, B2B Specialized Partner.
Exceptional user experiences do not happen by chance, they are the result of a carefully structured UX design process. In today’s digital-first world, a thoughtful approach to user experience design ensures that every interaction feels intuitive, meaningful, and efficient. Whether you are designing for an eCommerce platform or a complex digital product, a systematic process helps turn creative ideas into functional, user-centered solutions that drive engagement and conversions.
User Experience (UX) Design is the practice of creating digital experiences that are both functional and enjoyable. It blends UX research methods, interaction design, psychology, and usability principles to meet user needs effectively. A well-designed experience considers clarity, consistency, and accessibility at every touchpoint. From navigation flow and layout balance to visual hierarchy and responsive interfaces, UX design ensures users find value and satisfaction in every step of their journey.
A defined UX workflow gives structure to creativity. Without it, design decisions can feel random, leading to disjointed experiences. A systematic approach ensures that every phase, from research and ideation to usability testing and refinement, supports a cohesive vision. For online businesses, this process promotes smoother collaboration between teams, more predictable outcomes, and experiences that convert effectively across all platforms.
Following a clear UX design methodology ensures consistency, efficiency, and measurable results. It enables teams to validate ideas early and make informed improvements before launch. The key benefits include:
In essence, a solid UX process ensures every decision enhances usability and business performance simultaneously.

Every successful digital product is built on a structured foundation. The following stages outline the essential steps of a well-executed UX design process.
Every great experience starts with understanding users. Through surveys, interviews, analytics, and heatmaps, designers uncover user motivations, challenges, and behaviors. These insights inform the design direction and eliminate guesswork early on.
This stage transforms data into clarity. By defining problem statements, and conducting user journey mapping, teams identify opportunities and brainstorm innovative solutions using design thinking principles.
Information architecture (IA) organizes content so users can find what they need effortlessly. For eCommerce websites, a logical IA ensures that categories, filters, and menus guide shoppers seamlessly through the buying process.
Wireframes are the blueprints of design. They define structure, hierarchy, and placement before visuals come into play. Including responsive design at this stage ensures adaptability across all screens and devices. This step sets a strong foundation, allowing teams to focus on usability and flow before adding visual details.
Prototypes bring wireframes to life, allowing teams to test flow and functionality early. This helps validate decisions, identify usability gaps, and improve interaction before development begins. They make abstract ideas possible, helping teams see how users will actually experience the product. By observing real interactions, designers can fine-tune details that often make the biggest difference, like button placement, transitions, and navigation flow.
The visual design phase focuses on aesthetics and usability. By applying consistent color schemes, typography, and visual hierarchy, designers ensure clarity and reinforce the brand’s identity while enhancing the emotional appeal of the interface.
Usability testing methods for websites help identify friction points and refine interaction design. Observing real users navigate the interface provides actionable feedback for improving accessibility, flow, and overall satisfaction.
Design improvement does not stop with the prototype. Iteration allows teams to refine layouts, interactions, and usability before launch, ensuring every element aligns with real user feedback. Continuous testing helps identify what works and what does not, leading to a more intuitive and cohesive product. This process ensures the final design is not only functional but also meaningful to the user experience.
The design handoff stage bridges creativity and implementation. Clear documentation, communication, and UX design tools ensure developers can accurately translate the design intent into a fully functional product. Collaborative discussions help maintain consistency across design and development, minimizing rework and confusion. This shared workflow turns design strategy into a seamless, usable reality.
Once the website goes live, performance tracking begins. Using analytics, user feedback, and heatmaps, teams monitor engagement to identify opportunities for improvement. Insights from this stage help refine usability, accessibility, and visual hierarchy to elevate the user experience. Continuous optimization ensures the product evolves with its users and maintains long-term value.
The UX design process is a journey of creation, and refinement. Each step, from research to post-launch optimization, plays a crucial role in shaping how users experience digital products. By combining structured methods with UX research, and interaction design, businesses can create products that not only look appealing but also feel effortless to use. A process-driven approach to UX ensures that every experience delivers clarity, and ease for the customers, bringing designers one step closer to true UX perfection.
The 10 steps usually include: empathizing, defining, ideating, planning information architecture, wireframe, prototyping, testing, refining, handing off to development, and launching.
Start by introducing the project, defining the problem, and explaining your research. Then describe your ideation, wireframes, prototypes, testing, and final results, ending with key takeaways and lessons learned.
The 80/20 rule, or Pareto Principle, in UX design means that 80% of user interactions come from 20% of features. Designers focus on enhancing those features to improve usability and overall user satisfaction.
It’s a visual balance rule, use 60% of a dominant color, 30% of a secondary color, and 10% of an accent. This creates harmony, focus, and aesthetic consistency in digital interfaces.
In the fast-moving world of automotive eCommerce, staying competitive means doing more than just listing products online. Dealers today need innovative digital strategies that increase local engagement in buyers, simplify complex product catalogs, and encourage repeat purchases. One of the most effective yet often underused methods to achieve this is strategic product bundling, a smart way to sell convenience, build trust, and increase order value, all at once.
In today’s competitive market, automotive eCommerce dealers are not just selling cars or parts; they are selling convenience and reliability. As more buyers move online, dealerships must evolve beyond traditional sales promotion tactics and deliver seamless digital experiences.
Modern automotive dealer marketing now depends on tools that streamline buying decisions and boost engagement. One of the most impactful tools is product bundling, the practice of grouping complementary products or accessories into ready-to-purchase sets.
Customers value efficiency. They prefer complete solutions over searching for individual parts. For dealers, offering automotive parts bundles or car accessory kits enhances convenience, boosts sales per transaction, and builds long-term trust.
Automotive dealers often manage vast and complex product catalogs of hundreds or even thousands of products for different makes, models, and years. Listing each item individually can overwhelm both the seller and the customer.
Common challenges include:
These issues make it difficult to scale eCommerce operations efficiently. Dealers need a more intuitive way to present their catalog, one that helps customers find complete solutions and makes every purchase feel more valuable.
Although the terms are often used interchangeably, bundles and kits serve slightly different purposes. Bundles typically combine complementary items, for example, filters, fluids, and tools that work well together. Kits, meanwhile, are built for a specific function, such as a brake repair or detailing setup.
Both approaches simplify the buying process. Instead of selecting each component individually, customers can choose a ready-made solution that meets their needs. This not only increases convenience but also boosts conversion rates and overall customer satisfaction.
A well-designed automotive eCommerce website UX can highlight these bundled offers effectively through related product suggestions or bundle promotions that guide customers smoothly from browsing to checkout.

For dealers, bundling is more than just a marketing tactic, it’s a growth accelerator. By pairing slower-moving products with high-demand parts, they can maintain healthier stock levels and reduce dead inventory. It also helps establish the dealer as a knowledgeable expert. When customers see pre-curated kits, it communicates reliability, two key factors in automotive customer retention strategy.
When integrated with hyperlocal automotive SEO and targeted digital ads, these bundles help dealerships reach the right audience, drive engagement and repeat purchases.
For most small and mid-sized dealerships, ready-made solutions are a practical starting point. Tools like Bundle Buddy allow eCommerce stores to create and manage product bundles directly within their existing platforms.
These plug-and-play integrations help increase average order value, run effective automotive sales promotions, and test bundle-based campaigns quickly, all without significant development time or cost.
However, larger auto parts dealers often face more complex needs, extensive catalogs, compatibility variations, and advanced filtering requirements. Off-the-shelf tools may not fully support these scenarios.That’s where custom eCommerce app development becomes crucial. Custom-built bundling solutions can handle variation-based combinations, sync with inventory systems, and automate personalized product recommendations based on user behavior or location.
For automotive eCommerce developers, this flexibility ensures scalability, precision, and a seamless buying experience, helping dealers to deliver high-performance online stores built for real-world problems.
The 3 C’s of auto repair are Concern, Cause, and Correction. They help you clearly explain what’s wrong with a vehicle, why it happened, and how you fixed it, building trust and transparency with your customers.
You can increase sales by offering automotive service bundles, using local engagement SEO to reach nearby buyers, and running targeted social media or email campaigns to boost engagement. Combine these with great customer experiences and loyalty rewards to drive repeat business.
The Four P’s are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Focusing on quality vehicles, transparent pricing, a strong local and online presence, local promotions and engaging marketing helps you attract and retain more customers.
An eCommerce growth strategy drives engagement, visibility, and loyalty through tools like optimized websites, local SEO, and smart product bundling.
For automotive dealers, bundling and kits represent more than a sales tactic; they’re a way to bring structure and clarity to an otherwise complex buying journey. When customers can find complete, compatible solutions in one place, it enhances confidence, reduces effort, and boosts engagement.
In modern automotive eCommerce, success depends on how effectively technology supports both the business and the buyer. From optimized website design and hyperlocal SEO to intelligent bundling logic, every digital enhancement should work toward one outcome: a smoother, more intuitive shopping experience.
As the industry moves toward greater personalization and integration, smart bundling strategies will continue to shape how dealers connect with customers online, turning every transaction into an opportunity for sustained trust and growth.
Success in eCommerce is possible only with constant evolution in a fast-moving market landscape. With the need for agility and personalization, eCommerce businesses are seeking speed, flexibility, and creative freedom in developing the eCommerce store and designing storefront solutions.
Gone are the days when your theme-based eCommerce website met the customer expectations and business needs. Legacy frameworks like BigCommerce Stencil and other older monolithic architectures bundle the frontend and backend together, making them unsuitable for rapid development. With those legacy frameworks, developers must heavily modify the code every time there is a change, as modifying the backend can affect the frontend and vice versa.
For marketers seeking to offer personalized experiences and modify the look and feel of the storefronts to align with the latest trends, legacy frameworks do not make it easy to customize. As a result, both developers and marketers prefer a more modern headless platform like BigCommerce Catalyst that allows them to develop the backend and design the storefronts independently, implement the latest eCommerce innovations swiftly, and adapt to changing market conditions and customer preferences quickly.

BigCommerce Catalyst combines modern developer tooling with marketer-friendly controls. As a result, developers gain the technical capabilities and agility to deliver a great eCommerce experience, and marketers get the creative freedom to create content the way they want.
This article lists five compelling reasons why upgrading your storefront from BigCommerce Stencil to Catalyst will be a game-changer for both developers and marketers.

Being a headless platform, BigCommerce Catalyst features a decoupled storefront architecture that enables the independent development of the frontend and backend without affecting one another. It gives developers and marketers unparalleled flexibility.
As an API-driven commerce platform, BigCommerce Catalyst enables your storefront to communicate with the BigCommerce backend using GraphQL and REST APIs. As a result, developers can pull all the necessary data and orchestrate it with other systems without requiring extensive recoding. It offers three main benefits for developers.
Developers do not have to constantly tweak the frontend and backend together to make the changes and iterations work. They can make everything work by designing API orchestration layers that merge data from multiple sources, including product recommendations, analytics tools, CRMs, or headless CMS systems, into a single cohesive user experience.
They can also easily integrate new features and functions using APIs, making modular eCommerce and composable commerce a reality. BigCommerce Catalyst’s middleware and routing flexibility ensure seamless communication between microservices and external APIs, forming the backbone of microservices eCommerce.
Imagine designing a new UI from scratch for a design revamp, only to have it fail to meet the design goals in the test phase. In a traditional monolithic architecture, redesigning it would consume a significant amount of time, resources, and development work, as developers would have to work with massive amounts of code to tweak both the frontend and backend.
In contrast, BigCommerce Catalyst enables rapid development, testing, and deployment, as developers can easily connect the new UI to the existing backend with a few API calls, ensuring the site works flawlessly. This translates into dynamic, personalized experiences at scale.
Developers can take the modular approach to upgrading the site to BigCommerce Catalyst. They can integrate every functionality as separate microservices through APIs. This modularity enables developers to implement incremental migration, progressively moving sections, pages, or experiences from BigCommerce Stencil to BigCommerce Catalyst, without disrupting the operations.
The headless architecture benefits marketers by enabling faster go-to-market campaigns.
For instance, if you want to put products on sale for Black Friday, it involves creating a catalog of those products in the backend. You may also need automation in the backend to apply discount percentages to those products and update the pricing accordingly. At the same time, in the frontend, it will require displaying pricing changes on the product page.
Implementing these changes in a monolithic architecture without breaking the UI requires extensive work at both the frontend and backend. Marketers must work with developers for a few days to implement them. This dependency limits the marketers’ creative freedom and limits the time available for them to launch, test, and optimize campaigns. BigCommerce Catalyst enables marketers to make these changes much faster without waiting for development cycles.
Developers prioritize better Lighthouse scores, which indicate the quality and performance of web pages. They also aim for cleaner code performance budgets, i.e., the limitations set for various parameters of your website’s code to determine its speed and loading times. On the other hand, marketers strive to achieve better SEO rankings, increase engagement, and drive conversions. Upgrading storefront to BigCommerce Catalyst makes all that possible.
Being a headless platform, BigCommerce Catalyst declutters and simplifies code by separating the frontend from the backend, thus enabling excellent performance. It significantly reduces load times and improves search visibility with out-of-the-box Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG); you can even use hybrid modes, combining them for edge deployment. By leveraging SSR, SSG, and Next.js, BigCommerce Catalyst ensures smooth interactions, minimal layout shifts, and superior mobile performance, thereby enabling a high degree of control over Core Web Vitals optimization.
With its modular, API-driven architecture, cleaner code management, and faster deployment cycles, BigCommerce Catalyst helps developers meet their goals. By enabling quicker content updates, improving SEO performance, and enhancing engagement through improved site speed, it meets the needs of marketers. The flexibility and scalability of the headless architecture benefit both teams.
BigCommerce Catalyst streamlines the development process while enabling scalability and collaboration, with a developer-first environment. Using CLI deployment tools, you can modernize the development process with:
For instance, if you cater to various regions and demographics through separate regional and brand sites, with BigCommerce Catalyst, you can manage a multi-storefront launch by connecting all those sites to a single backend and product catalog. Developers can integrate automations for price conversions and support different currencies across regional sites. This shared logic makes life easy for developers.
It benefits marketers as well. They can effortlessly tailor messaging, languages, and promotions for each market, ensuring every audience gets a localized experience.
BigCommerce Catalyst makes it easy for marketers to create content, make quick iterations, and test them with its deep Makeswift integration. Makeswift is a visual page builder integrated with the Catalyst architecture, enabling seamless collaboration between marketing and development teams.
The drag-and-drop, preview, and publish nature of Makeswift empowers marketers to create content, including landing pages, campaign microsites, or promotional banners instantly, and update the site without relying on developer intervention. With Makeswift integration, they can create content blocks using pre-approved components, ensuring design consistency and speed.
On the other hand, developers can focus on building reusable modules and advanced integrations. This results in faster campaign deployment, reduced developer dependency, and enhanced collaboration across teams.
Traditional monolithic architectures like BigCommerce Stencil accumulate technical debt: templates become rigid, the site becomes bloated with modifications and scaling, upgrades are cumbersome, and cross-team collaboration becomes slow.
BigCommerce Catalyst addresses these problems by enabling independent upgrades of UI components, layouts, and integrations. It helps developers separate all the concerns, debug and solve them one by one, and achieve rapid feature development cycles.
It ensures future-proofing and long-term growth of the business by integrating with composable commerce stacks, headless CMS tools, and advanced analytics platforms. The modular design empowers teams to add, replace, or scale microservices without costly replatforming.
Upgrading from BigCommerce Stencil to BigCommerce Catalyst can transform your eCommerce business. It completely changes your eCommerce storefront development process, creating a ripple effect that benefits developers, marketers, and everyone involved in the site’s operation. Therefore, it represents a strategic evolution for businesses that have built their e-commerce sites on BigCommerce’s legacy frameworks.
For developers, BigCommerce Catalyst offers ease of development, combined with the unmatched flexibility of a headless platform and the performance of API-driven commerce. It gives them modern tooling, CLI deployment, SSR/SSG flexibility, and API orchestration.
For marketers, it reduces the dependence on developers and offers creative autonomy and content control through Makeswift integration. It also enables faster time-to-market and better Core Web Vitals optimization.
As the market becomes increasingly crowded with competition, it is time to upgrade your eCommerce site, built on a legacy BigCommerce framework, to the state-of-the-art API-driven headless commerce architecture, namely BigCommerce Catalyst.
To achieve scalability, innovation, and future-proofing of your eCommerce business through incremental migration or a complete rebuild of your eCommerce store on BigCommerce Catalyst, contact Arizon Digital today. Arizon Digital has a dedicated team of experts handling BigCommerce upgrades and replatforming services.
BigCommerce Stencil is a traditional monolithic theme framework, whereas BigCommerce Catalyst is a modern, headless, API-driven storefront built on Next.js. Catalyst enables faster, more flexible, and scalable development.
BigCommerce Catalyst is a headless commerce framework that decouples the frontend and backend, offering developers modern tooling, SSR/SSG support, and marketers visual editing flexibility for agile eCommerce experiences.
Yes. With its Makeswift integration, marketers and content teams can easily create, edit, and publish pages visually, eliminating the need for developer assistance. It enables faster campaign execution.
Yes. Businesses can adopt an incremental migration strategy, gradually moving storefront sections from Stencil to Catalyst without disrupting backend operations or the live site.
In today’s fast-evolving business landscape, success in eCommerce is possible only if you can align the development roadmap of your site to keep up with customer expectations and market trends. If you lag behind, the customer experience suffers, leading customers to look for alternatives and ultimately choose your competitors.
Slow storefronts, rigid systems, and limited customization can quickly push customers away and hold your business back. That is why replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst is the right path to address these issues and future-proof your eCommerce business.
This article explains what replatforming is and lists the five symptoms your eCommerce site shows when it needs replatforming to a modern headless platform like BigCommerce Catalyst.

Replatforming refers to the process of moving your existing eCommerce store from one platform to another. The most common objectives of replatforming are to:
Replatforming enables you to achieve these objectives by migrating your website to modern eCommerce platforms instead of rebuilding everything from scratch.
Legacy eCommerce platforms built on monolithic architecture have numerous limitations, and businesses cannot afford to be held back by these limitations in 2025. Replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst offers the perfect evolution path.
BigCommerce Catalyst combines the freedom to customize the frontend quickly and extensively with backend reliability. Replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst helps you deliver better site performance, seamless integrations, and exceptional customer experiences.
You can identify the need for replatforming when your eCommerce site shows the following symptoms.

eCommerce website performance is not just about speed; it is about customer experience. Slow page load times, downtime, or lag during high-traffic periods affect customer experience. While the desirability of a product plays a crucial role in conversion, a laggy or slow website can discourage customers from completing the purchase. According to a study conducted by Potent, a B2B eCommerce site that loads in 1 second has a conversion rate 3x higher than a site that loads in 5 seconds. For B2C sites, the difference in conversion rates is 2.5X.
Further, a slow site has far-reaching adverse consequences than what is visible. For instance, slow loading times and poor performance can also affect Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which in turn affects the discoverability of your business.
Websites built on legacy platforms often have performance issues. These platforms lack scalability, and the sites built on them cannot handle sudden spikes in traffic. Imagine having a site that crashes on Black Friday; it can be disastrous for user experience, profitability, and customer retention. Mitigating these performance issues can also be challenging, as monolithic architectures combine the frontend and backend, making modifications lengthy and tedious. So, a slow website is a clear sign that your legacy eCommerce platform is limiting your potential.
BigCommerce Catalyst is a headless commerce platform that decouples the frontend and backend, making it possible for developers to modify them independently and scale easily. The platform addresses performance issues that plague monolithic architectures and delivers excellent storefront performance, ensuring consistent speed and responsiveness even during unpredictable traffic spikes.
In eCommerce, marketers are dependent on the developers for content updates, launch campaigns, and other marketing activities. For instance, if the marketing team needs to post a digital ad for lead generation, they should direct those who click the ad to a landing page that provides all the necessary information to convince visitors to leave their contact information for further communication with your business.
The marketers need the developers to create the landing page, design the call-to-action form to collect leads and save them in a database, and host the page. The primary responsibility of developers is to maintain the eCommerce site, develop it according to the market demands and customer expectations, and ensure that the site runs smoothly. So, teamwork with marketers to create a landing page may take a backseat. As a result, marketers may have to wait for developers to complete these time-bound tasks critical for marketing.
But modern marketing requires agility. If your marketers often wait for developer support to launch campaigns or make content updates, it means your current platform is limiting the marketers from making those updates autonomously.
Replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst enables a modular eCommerce solution where the headless storefront integrates seamlessly with Content Management Solutions. These CMS tools let your marketing teams experiment and publish faster without developer support.
Websites built on legacy eCommerce platforms may lack the API flexibility needed to integrate modern tools, such as CRMs, ERPs, payment gateways, or marketing automation software. If you cannot integrate these systems and tools, you cannot add modern functionality and features to your site, and your store may fall behind in user experience and appeal.
In contrast, with BigCommerce Catalyst’s API-first architecture, you can integrate these tools and business systems seamlessly with API calls. This scalable and secure architecture lets you unify your data and create a truly connected commerce ecosystem without costly workarounds or third-party plugins that slow performance.
Legacy eCommerce platforms have many limitations. For instance, they may restrict the number of SKUs you can have for a product listed on your site. So, you cannot add more SKUs. Furthermore, it may limit your ability to expand your reach to other regions and countries, serve new customer groups, and add new product categories.
When you need scaling, you may also have to add expensive infrastructure to keep up with the increase in traffic and transactions. You may also suffer from rising maintenance costs. If you are facing these limitations in scaling, it is time to migrate.
Being a cloud-native platform, BigCommerce Catalyst offers easy scalability. Further, it facilitates market expansion by providing advanced developer tools to expand globally, manage complex catalogs, and maintain peak performance with increases in traffic and transaction volume. The BigCommerce Catalyst migration support ensures minimal disruption during your transition.
Modern Customer experience involves speed, personalization, and omnichannel experiences.
These three are indispensable for eCommerce success today, and legacy platforms do not offer them. Most legacy platforms do not support modern storefront designs, dynamic content, or personalization capabilities, such as AI-powered recommendations. So, remaining on those platforms puts your business at risk of losing engagement and appeal.
Replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst empowers you with the ability to design fluid, headless storefronts that adapt across devices and touchpoints, resulting in a consistent and immersive brand experience that keeps customers returning.
If your eCommerce store feels slow, restricted, outdated, or difficult to manage, it may indicate that the site is due for replatforming.
Replatforming to BigCommerce Catalyst brings all the benefits of having the site built on a modern, API-driven headless platform, namely flexibility, speed and performance, quick storefront upgrades, personalization, agility, and future-proofing. Combining all these benefits, BigCommerce Catalyst offers the foundation for innovation and growth and empowers brands to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
The time to act is now. To replatform your site to BigCommerce Catalyst and step into the future of commerce, contact Arizon Digital. With a dedicated team of replatforming experts and a proven track record of successfully migrating numerous online stores to BigCommerce Catalyst, Arizon Digital offers replatforming services tailored to meet your unique business needs.
Replatforming involves moving an eCommerce site to a new platform with upgrades and enhancements, while rehosting simply lifts and shifts your site to another server without functional improvements.
Migrating from a traditional eCommerce platform like Magento or Shopify to BigCommerce Catalyst to achieve better speed, flexibility, and headless storefront capabilities is an example of replatforming.
Replatforming enhances website speed, scalability, integrations, and content flexibility. It allows you to innovate faster, improve user experience, and reduce long-term maintenance costs.
You can start with a thorough audit, define goals, and partner with an experienced BigCommerce Catalyst migration support team to implement a seamless migration while ensuring data accuracy, performance optimization, and minimal downtime during transition.
Smartphones have brought us closer to the digital world. As of July 2025, 64.35% of global web traffic comes from mobile devices. Today, we conduct all our interactions on mobile devices; we make purchases and avail services through apps and websites, and mobile phones are the device of choice for that.
So, optimizing websites and apps for mobile devices is an inevitable necessity. Businesses that fail to do so cannot withstand the competition and succeed, as sites and applications that are not optimized for mobile are unappealing to users. The quality of a site’s mobile user experience is often the reason why users choose to stay longer, interact with it more effectively, and decide whether to convert. That is why Mobile UX has become one of the most critical factors in customer satisfaction and business success.
This article explores mobile UX design, explains its design principles, and outlines the practices that make mobile UX work.

Mobile UX refers to the experience users have when interacting with an application or a website on a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet.
Optimizing a site or app for mobile is completely different from designing it for other devices. Unlike computers, mobile devices are compact, portable, and operated with touch input. So, from the look and feel of the user interface to site navigation, every aspect of the website/app design requires rethinking so that the user experience remains intuitive, accessible, and efficient on mobile devices.
That is why you should build the user experience on mobile from the ground up with a mobile-first design, rather than adapting it as an afterthought from an existing version of the site/app designed for larger devices.
A good-looking site/app can attract users. However, if it is not usable, intuitive, or inclusive, it will not retain users over a long period and achieve conversions. Therefore, a strong mobile UX design is not just skin-deep.
It combines visual appeal with usability, accessibility, speed, performance, and consistency. Some of the core elements that make mobile experiences enjoyable and conversion-oriented include:
A good UX design follows proven mobile UX design principles, such as:

There are two ways to design a website or application for mobile: you can either adapt an existing desktop version to work with mobile devices, or you can take the mobile-first approach. The former makes the mobile experience of the site/app feel like an afterthought, and the latter enables you to design the mobile UX from scratch.
With the mobile-first approach, you can start designing your website/app, optimizing it for the smallest screens and progressively enhancing it for larger devices. The mobile-first approach ensures the site/app functions optimally on mobile devices, enabling faster loading times and making essential features accessible on mobile from the outset.
Designing it from scratch for the smallest screens also ensures that the various elements on the app/site are not shrunk and crammed into a smaller area.
A responsive design is closely related to the mobile-first approach. It adapts the site/app layouts across screen sizes, enabling cross-device consistency on devices with different screen sizes and aspect ratios. As a result, users enjoy a consistent look and feel across phones, tablets, and desktops. This improves both trust and conversion optimization.
Inclusivity is one of the most essential qualities of a great mobile UX. A well-designed mobile UX makes the site/app accessible to people with disabilities. It also enables people to use mobile phones in various situations and environments.
For instance, while using the mobile in bright sunlight, the display may not be clearly visible; similarly, videos with low volume may not be audible in noisy environments. You must design mobile UX, taking all these factors into account and ensuring accessibility in various contexts.
To ensure accessibility, you must provide:

Inclusive design not only improves usability but also expands your audience reach.
Slow loading times, lag, and slow response to inputs are among the biggest detractors of mobile user experience. Mobile phones have excellent processing power and performance, and the network speeds are high in most areas these days. Therefore, users expect nothing short of lightning-fast load times and instantaneous responses to inputs.
A few extra seconds of delay can significantly increase bounce rates. According to Google, a mere increase from one second to three seconds in loading times increases the probability of bounce by 32%. When the delay increases to 10 seconds, the probability increases by 123%!
Additionally, users are more likely to convert when sites load quickly and provide instantaneous responses. Better speed directly boosts conversion optimization, as users are more likely to complete purchases or sign up when pages load instantly. So, it is evident that performance and speed optimization are indispensable.
You can boost the site performance and optimize speed by:
Adding design complexities and integrating every feature possible does not necessarily lead to a good mobile UX. Mobile UX is not cramming everything into the available screen space, but reducing cognitive load.
The ultimate goal of a mobile UX design is to achieve conversion. Adding distractions and jarring design elements can actually hinder conversion, as they provide users with numerous options to explore, thereby increasing their cognitive load. A good mobile UX design is minimal, enabling users to complete tasks with minimal effort.
For instance, having fewer steps in the checkout process increases usability, decreases drop-offs, and improves conversion. According to a study conducted by Baymard Institute, an average large-sized eCommerce site can gain as much as a 35% increase in conversion rate from design changes to its checkout process. Therefore, it is generally a good mobile UX design practice to minimize the number of steps and simplify navigation in the checkout process.
You can apply this philosophy to every aspect of mobile UX design to ease users’ cognitive load throughout their journey and make using your site/app enjoyable.
To maintain minimalism and reduce the cognitive load of the users:
Design principles can only provide the direction and guide you towards a good mobile UX design. You still need to identify where users tap, scroll, or abruptly pause or abandon journeys to understand user behavior. Understanding user behavior enables you to optimize and align the mobile UX with user behavior.
To understand user behavior effectively, you need accurate data. This is where heatmaps become crucial. Heatmaps uncover where users interact with the mobile screen by tapping and scrolling, and at what point they abandon their journeys.
Once you have completed the initial design and development, a UX audit helps evaluate
every aspect of the mobile user experience, from navigation to accessibility, responsiveness, and visual hierarchy. These audits uncover usability gaps and fuel continuous improvement.
By combining heatmaps and UX audits, you can align design with actual user needs, leading to measurable conversion optimization.
Users typically access your site from multiple devices. They may start with one device, and later continue the journey on another. Those devices could be phones, tablets, or desktops, each with a different resolution, aspect ratio, orientation, operating system, and user input devices.
Your site should work uniformly across all devices and maintain visual and brand consistency. Maintaining cross-device consistency ensures that branding, interaction design, and navigation feel seamless across touchpoints.
Emerging technologies, such as AI, are reshaping mobile UX design. Automation enhances mobile UX design through:
Future mobile experiences will likely blend AI-driven insights with human-led interaction design and innovations.
Looks and user interface design are only one aspect of the mobile UX. A great user experience is more than that. To build great UX on mobile devices, you must focus on mobile-first design, responsiveness, accessibility, speed and performance, cross-device consistency, and consistent development and optimization based on data-driven insights.
When you implement all these best practices, your site/app will offer a striking, intuitive, inclusive, and conversion-friendly user experience. Prioritizing mobile UX design principles will help you future-proof your site/app and provide lasting returns in engagement, retention, and brand loyalty.
To improve or customize the mobile UX of your website/app, contact Arizon Digital today. Arizon Digital has a dedicated team that specializes in mobile UX design. To know more, contact us.
Mobile UX design refers to the process of creating seamless, intuitive, and accessible experiences for users on mobile devices. It focuses on intuitive touch interactions, speed and snappiness, ease of navigation, and creating a logical user flow and visual hierarchy to enhance usability and satisfaction.
You can start with a mobile-first approach, prioritizing the optimization of the site/app for mobile devices. You must simplify navigation, ensure large touch targets, optimize performance, follow accessibility standards, test with real users, and iterate using heatmaps and conduct UX audits for continuous improvement.
The 80/20 rule suggests that 80% of users utilize only 20% of the features. Designing around those core features improves usability, reduces clutter, and significantly enhances the mobile user experience.
AI cannot fully implement UI/UX design on its own. It can analyze data, run UX audits, and suggest design improvements, complementing human designers, who remain crucial for creativity, empathy, storytelling, and crafting emotionally relatable mobile user experiences.
Gone are the times when having an eCommerce strategy was optional. Today, even a strong online presence is insufficient; businesses must deliver seamless, personalized, and lightning-fast shopping experiences to attract and retain their customers. Customers expect high levels of responsiveness, fast page loads, experiences tailored to their preferences, easy navigation, and frictionless checkout.
The traditional monolithic architecture, with its template-driven systems, has served well in the past. But today, eCommerce sites built on these older systems struggle to adapt to meet today’s business demands. They suffer from slower performance, reduced scalability, and a lack of adequate third-party integration. They struggle to incorporate the latest features and functionalities, and future-proof businesses.
This is where upgrading to headless commerce comes in. It decouples the frontend from the backend and has APIs in its core to carry out every function. It allows rapid innovation, enhanced customer experience, and robust future-proofing. For businesses running their online stores on the BigCommerce platform, upgrading storefronts involves migrating from a theme-based legacy setup built with Stencil to a flexible, API-driven commerce solution, namely BigCommerce Catalyst.
This article outlines the need for upgrading from legacy systems to modern headless platforms. It covers the differences between BigCommerce Stencil and Catalyst, and lists the steps involved in upgrading to BigCommerce Catalyst.

Upgrading in eCommerce refers to the process of migrating your storefront from a legacy architecture to a more modern one. Upgrading does not involve completely discarding the platform or redesigning everything from scratch. In fact, it retains your trusted backend systems while transforming the storefront into a future-ready experience.
For some businesses, even legacy platforms with monolithic architecture are adequate, especially when they do not require scalability, frequent UI design changes, new functionality and features, or third-party integrations. So, it is crucial to identify when you should upgrade your storefront.
By observing the following signs, you can identify the need to upgrade. You need to upgrade your storefront when:
Upgrading, replatforming, and rehosting are similar terms in eCommerce. However, they have significant differences and are suitable for different use cases.
| What does it mean in today’s eCommerce landscape? | When is it suitable? | |
Upgrading | Upgrading involves modernizing the storefront while retaining the backend platform as it is. The site is migrated from an older architecture to a newer one, and the platform remains the same. Example: BigCommerce Stencil to BigCommerce Catalyst | When you have a stable, solid backend, but your frontend needs rapid development and iteration, speed, and design flexibility |
Replatforming | Replatforming involves migrating the entire eCommerce site to a completely different eCommerce platform. Example: Magento to BigCommerce | When your backend is limited, preventing you from scaling and adding features and integrations |
Rehosting | Rehosting is the process of migrating an existing architecture to a new infrastructure without redesigning or making modifications to the storefront. Example: Moving the setup of a storefront built on Magento and hosted on-premises to cloud infrastructure like AWS, without changing application code | When your architecture and applications are stable and performant, but your infrastructure is creating bottlenecks, you should rehost |
While replatforming or rehosting may be necessary for some businesses, upgrading is the best option for most. Replatforming can be disruptive, expensive, and time-consuming, and rehosting cannot solve your architectural problems.
Upgrading strikes the perfect balance between the two. It brings the latest features and functionalities, enhancing customer experience and team productivity while retaining your existing backend setup and the resources you have invested in it.
Benefits of upgrading storefront include:
1.Enhanced Performance and Speed: You can achieve lightning-fast page loading, enhance customer experience, and improve conversion rates and SEO with modern frameworks like Next.js.
2.Increased Developer Efficiency: Developers can innovate faster and spend less time and effort on maintenance, with the headless commerce architecture.
3.Simplified Marketing: Marketers can develop and deploy landing pages, campaigns, and content without any technical assistance from developers. Tools like Makeswift make it possible for non-technical teams, giving them autonomy and agility.
4.Scalability: API-driven commerce enables you to integrate your existing business systems, such as ERP, CRM, marketing automation tools, etc., using APIs. With these integrations, you can scale your operations effectively.
5.Reduced Risk: Since upgrading does not entail complete migration, only the storefront architecture changes; the backend remains intact. So, the transition is less disruptive and carries reduced risk of data loss and other problems compared to replatforming.
For businesses that built their storefronts on BigCommerce Stencil, upgrading to BigCommerce Catalyst makes a significant difference in terms of adaptability to fast-changing market conditions while maintaining operational stability. So, how are these two different?
| Feature / Aspect | BigCommerce Stencil | BigCommerce Catalyst |
| Type | Theme-based architecture/ templating system | Headless storefront framework built on Next.js and React |
| Architecture | Monolithic architecture with frontend tightly coupled with the backend | API-driven composable headless architecture, with frontend decoupled from the backend |
| Technology Stack | Built on Handlebars.js, SCSS, and JavaScript | Built on Next.js, React, and GraphQL Storefront API |
| Storefront Designing Tools | Theme editor for basic customization of Stencil themes | Visual CMS tools (Makeswift) and other modern frontend frameworks for a fully custom design |
| Hosting | Fully hosted directly on BigCommerce, with built-in CDN and caching | Backend hosted on BigCommerce, while the frontend can be hosted independently on cloud platforms like Vercel, Netlify, or custom servers |
| Integrations | Limited to apps and extensions available in the app marketplace; hard/impossible to achieve deep integration with modern SaaS tools like headless CMS, advanced analytics, CDPs, or ERPs | Can directly connect third-party tools like Contentful (CMS), HubSpot (CRM/marketing automation), Segment (analytics/CDP), or even custom back-office systems via APIs and SDKs |
| Flexibility | Limited customization of storefront; template-driven | Highly flexible, component-based, API-first |
| Performance | Good performance via CDN and caching | Optimized performance with SSR, SSG, and edge deployment |
| Marketing Tools | Content changes require developer input and intervention; takes time | Visual page builder (e.g., Makeswift) enables marketers to manage content and the pages autonomously without developer support |
| Best For | Small to mid-sized merchants with simple needs and limited resources, prioritizing initial setup speed over long-term flexibility | Mid-market players with scaling requirements to enterprise merchants needing scale, customization, and speed |
While Stencil works for smaller merchants, Catalyst is the future-ready choice for ambitious mid-sized companies and large enterprises that want a performant, flexible, and scalable headless commerce platform.

Take an audit of your storefront and identify its current limitations, such as slow site speed, performance issues, inability to integrate your business systems, limited design capabilities, or challenges with content management. Assess whether those limitations and challenges can be addressed by upgrading to BigCommerce Catalyst. If you are a large enterprise, or a medium-scale business with plans for expansion into new markets, product categories, or a previously unreached audience, then BigCommerce Catalyst will suit your needs.
Once you identify your needs and set your goals, prioritize your upgrades. Since upgrading to BigCommerce Catalyst does not involve migrating your backend, you can plan your migration in phases by gradually adding third-party tools and integrations. While you must redesign your storefront on BigCommerce Catalyst since you cannot carry over the elements from a BigCommerce Stencil storefront, you can still plan a phased rollout for different regions or products. It will ease the transition process. In contrast, you can also do a full migration.
BigCommerce Catalyst provides a starter project, a pre-packaged storefront with all the core features and components required to run a eCommerce website out of the box. It includes core eCommerce components like product listings, checkout, shopping cart, and account pages. With this starter project, you do not have to design everything from scratch; you can use BigCommerce’s official CLI (Command Line Interface) to get this project and start customizing the codebase instantly. The project has built-in connections to BigCommerce APIs, so your store talks directly to your backend.
You can start customizing the storefront and tailoring your UI by building React components based on your brand’s design guidelines. You can add all your third-party tools and integrations, such as checkout, product catalogues, and marketing automation, and connect them with APIs. You can ensure efficient data delivery by configuring the GraphQL Storefront API.
Ease of managing the site and adding content to it is one of the most significant benefits of BigCommerce Catalyst. Non-technical staff, including the marketers, can design campaigns and add content using the Catalyst visual editor with some training. This reduces bottlenecks, accelerates campaigns, and gives marketers complete control over content creation.
Test your site and compare its performance with the previous Stencil-based storefront. Also, benchmark its performance against the competition. Conduct user acceptance testing and ensure SEO and accessibility compliance. Verify whether the site has met your objectives and whether it will deliver all the benefits of migrating from BigCommerce Stencil to BigCommerce Catalyst. Tweak the site to meet the goals and prepare it for launch.
Once you have thoroughly tested the site and ensured its effectiveness, you can deploy it via platforms like Vercel, which enable global scalability, edge caching, and lightning-fast performance.
Constantly monitor the performance and analytics of the site, and refine the UX based on the insights. Future-proof your site by adding new integrations that enable new features and functionality. Look for any drop in performance and optimize page speed.
This structured approach ensures that businesses not only migrate successfully but also unlock the full value of BigCommerce Catalyst.
The eCommerce landscape evolves fast, and businesses need a next-gen API-driven commerce platform to keep up and accommodate future needs. Legacy systems like Stencil cannot keep up.
For most businesses, upgrading storefront from BigCommerce Stencil to BigCommerce Catalyst makes a significant difference. It does not have the risks associated with a full replatforming to an entirely new system. At the same time, it offers all the benefits of a modern headless platform without the complexity. It enhances speed and performance, as well as agility, scalability, and autonomy. It enables personalization and innovation.
By leveraging the flexibility of a headless platform, the power of API-driven commerce, and the ease of marketer-friendly tools, you can future-proof your business for the next decade with BigCommerce Catalyst.
To upgrade your storefront with BigCommerce Catalyst from Stencil and future-proof your business, contact Arizon Digital. With a dedicated team of experts and a proven track record of successfully migrating numerous online stores to BigCommerce Catalyst, Arizon Digital offers platform upgrading services tailored to meet your unique business needs.
Upgrading involves modernizing your storefront while keeping the backend intact. Replatforming involves migrating your entire online store to a different eCommerce platform. Rehosting involves migrating only the hosting infrastructure without significant architectural changes.
Slow performance, limited flexibility, or delayed marketing campaigns due to slow development are symptoms of a site that needs an upgrade. If you want to scale in terms of size, traffic, and reach, or integrate advanced tools, you will benefit most from BigCommerce Catalyst.
No. Catalyst is suitable not only for enterprises but also for fast-growing mid-market merchants who want to improve performance and reduce dependency on developers.
A complete migration to Catalyst typically takes weeks to months, depending on the complexity of your storefront, integrations, and custom features.
In a fast-moving world, customers don’t have the time to go through your website entirely and decide whether they want to take the action you expect from them, such as purchasing a product, signing up for a demo class, or downloading the trial version of your software.
The visual appeal of your site is the first thing that catches their eye. You need to make a great first impression to win their attention and encourage further engagement with your site. This is where UI design comes in.
But that is only the first step; the usability of your site, ease of navigation, smooth flow towards subsequent actions, and fast performance shape the user experience, which is crucial for creating user engagement and guiding them towards taking desired actions, such as bringing them into the sales funnel and achieving conversion. UX design focuses on these aspects of your website.’
UI/UX Design is all about putting thought into every single element on your site that contributes to user satisfaction and executing it to perfection so that your site looks good and works well for your customers.
This article serves as a guide to understanding how to design intuitive interfaces and implement UI/UX design from the outset. It covers the key elements of UI/UX design, how to implement effective UI/UX design, and how to establish a user-centric digital experience that drives results.

User Interface is the visual aspect of a website or digital product, such as apps, web apps, or any other interfaces users may interact with. It is defined by layout, colors, fonts, buttons, images, and animations. These elements combine to form the presentation layer that users see and interact with.
A good UI Design makes interacting with your product effortless and enjoyable. It has the following qualities.
UX Design goes beyond how the user interface looks and how attractive it is to your target audience. It focuses on the overall experience of a user as they navigate through your website, right from their point of arrival to navigating through pages and completing the key actions you designed your website for, such as making purchases or engaging with your business.
UX design involves configuring various aspects of your website, such as structure, flow, accessibility, and performance, to tailor the user experience while interacting with your website.
Great UX Design creates experiences around the thought process of customers. It meets the psychological and functional expectations of users at every stage of the customer journey. An engaging UX design encompasses the following elements.
UI and UX Design are two sides of the same coin. UI focuses on aesthetics and interaction points, while UX is more about usability, efficiency, and emotional connection of your website.
When you get both of them right, you create a seamless and satisfying digital experience. On the other hand, if you get even one of those wrong, your website could become either unattractive or unusable. That is why UI/UX design is important in its entirety.
You should approach UI/UX design in a holistic manner. Effective website design happens when you develop the user interface and the user experience in tandem.
To achieve business success, it is not enough to align your products and services with customer expectations. You should also tune the look, feel, usability, and overall experience of your website, too, to delight them.
Building a UI/UX Design around your customers’ preferences is a great place to start creating digital experiences that resonate with users, reduce friction, and drive engagement. Great design and pleasing user experience are never a coincidence. They stem from a conscious and intentional effort to understand what your customers want and make informed UI/UX design choices accordingly, and follow UI/UX design best practices. Start with your users – design for them and grow with them.
To find out how to improve UX on your website and get your UI/UX design spot on, you can also seek the services of experts from Arizon Digital who specialize in custom UI design services. To know more, contact us.
UI Design focuses on how things look; UX Design focuses on how they work.
Responsive design ensures that your site functions optimally across devices, which improves user satisfaction and search engine rankings.
A better UX increases time on site and reduces bounce rates, both of which positively influence your SEO.
Yes. Search engines favor an accessible design, and it expands your reach to more users.
Building software is a collaborative effort involving hundreds or thousands of individuals and multiple teams, working together in harmony over an extended period. This massive undertaking can bear the fruits of success only when it reaches legitimate users who purchased a license to use it. Piracy, unauthorized use, and using a single license on multiple devices can significantly dent your profitability.
So, protecting your digital assets is just as important as building them, regardless of the size of your organization or the nature of your software product offerings. It applies to all kinds of companies and product offerings, from startups scaling their SaaS products to enterprises with a suite of proprietary tools, or app developers managing thousands of licenses. That is where a custom-developed license vault comes in.
This article explores the benefits of custom license vault. It describes why custom license management app development is the most strategic solution for modern software companies aiming to protect their IP, maintain compliance, and scale securely through robust software license protection.

It verifies software entitlements, prevents unauthorized access, and ensures only legitimate users can use your on-premise or cloud-based software.
Off-the-shelf solutions cannot meet unique licensing needs. Custom development ensures alignment with your software distribution strategy.
For software running offline, mechanisms such as device binding, local encryption, and periodic synchronization are essential. Custom app development helps you select these features and customize your enterprise license vault.
Custom vaults allow integration with privileged access controls, role-based rules, AES-256 encryption, API authentication, and security compliance frameworks.
If you offer modular features or tier-based access, a custom vault enables precise control at the user level.
By controlling access and detecting unauthorized use, a custom vault protects your IP and reduces piracy, directly safeguarding your revenue.
A custom vault integrates tightly with your existing backend systems, making license management part of a unified customer experience.
Custom vaults can be equipped with dashboards and alerts, enabling you to track usage trends, detect anomalies, and plan more effective upgrades or renewals.
You can automate trial expiry, enforce subscription renewals, or control temporary access, which is key for SaaS and timed deployments.
Custom vaults evolve with your business. With these, you can implement new delivery models, integrations, and feature expansions without rearchitecting your security.
A license vault is a digital safe that stores and manages digital licenses for software applications in a secure server. It verifies the entitlements of customers who purchased your software and grants them access to:
The license vault acts as a gatekeeper, preventing license misuse and unauthorized access by users without a valid license. It ensures only legitimate users can use your software, preventing piracy and misuse from siphoning your profits.
A custom license vault is a system specifically developed to meet your business needs.
If you adopt a simple licensing model to secure your software and manage distribution at a small to medium scale, a proven, pre-built system like the Integer License Vault makes license management straightforward.
However, you must consider custom app development to tailor a license vault when you require high scalability and:
A license fault grants user access to software applications based on various parameters, such as the version/SKU the user has purchased, user tier, features they have paid for, validity period of the license, etc. Therefore, license management requires maintaining and securing all this license-related sensitive information carefully. A well-designed license vault secures the following information.
Securing all this information in a custom-developed license vault ensures your intellectual property remains protected across every deployment, be it on-premises or cloud.
Custom app development and a tailored enterprise license vault offer numerous capabilities and benefits. Benefits of custom license vault include:
Every business has unique security requirements.
For instance, if you offer software for individual end-user installation, the installed devices could go offline or remain partly connected. It creates an opportunity for tampering and unauthorized access to your software on diverse hardware. To enable secure license storage and validation in such environments, you need:
On the other hand, if your product offerings are aimed at enterprises and involve global SaaS delivery, you will need privileged access controls, including role-based access, audit trails, and integration with identity management systems.
Custom license management app development enables you to tailor your security architecture to your specific needs and sell software securely. It leverages your existing setup, allowing you to build your security architecture around it. You can customize your security architecture by implementing encryption protocols like AES-256 and RSA, API-level authentication, and real-time license validation. It will ensure that your license data is not only stored securely but also has controlled, verifiable, and auditable access.
Unauthorized access and piracy can seriously impact your revenue and reputation. Standard pre-built license systems often lack the fine-grained protection required to combat these issues.
In contrast, it is hard for bad actors to find a workaround to bypass the software license protection or replicate a license provided by a custom-developed license vault, as it employs various mechanisms to combat piracy, including obfuscation, license fingerprinting, device binding, and real-time authentication.
You can rely on a custom license vault to use these technologies to verify the authenticity of licenses, revoke access to unauthorized installations, invalidate shared keys, and block the use of cracked versions, protecting your intellectual property and maintaining control over your software distribution.
Imagine verifying every digital payment from customers, selecting the right software variant/SKU and feature sets they paid for, manually generating license keys, and mailing those license keys to each user. Add bulk purchases from enterprises to the equation, and the sheer number of errors in this inefficient manual license key management system will make the purchase and activation experiences a nightmare for customers.
Custom license management app development enables seamless integration of the license vault with your business logic, automating key generation, activation, renewal, and revocation as needed.
It will integrate with self-service purchase flows and automate the distribution process. You can also configure your custom license vault to push licenses instantly via email, webhook, or in-app activation. Customized automation in license distribution will strengthen your software license protection and significantly reduce support overhead and license misuse.
Software applications requiring static, one-time licenses are a thing of the past. Software as a Service (SaaS), pay-per-use, and other pricing and deployment models implemented by modern businesses require flexible licensing. With a custom license vault, you can easily offer and manage:
A custom-developed license vault enables you to adapt licensing to match your monetization strategy. With flexible licensing models, you can gain a competitive edge in the market.
Enterprises often have their own set of business systems working in harmony to manage sales, customer support, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and other key functions. It is crucial to avoid disturbing the coordination among this tech stack and disrupting operations while integrating license management with these systems. A custom license vault makes this possible by seamlessly connecting with:
With a custom license vault, you can integrate license activation into your automated workflow, turning software purchases into frictionless user experiences.
If you manage user accounts and store and handle sensitive customer data, such as name, contact information, and credit Card details, you must implement robust security frameworks to safeguard them. Complying with GDPR, HIPAA, or SOC 2 standards helps you keep all this sensitive information safe and secure, preventing data leaks and identity theft. These security frameworks not only ensure data protection but also facilitate third-party audits by logging every license-related event.
A custom-developed license vault helps you achieve compliance with these standards and logs every license-related event, including issuance, renewal, transfer, suspension, or deletion of licenses. You can leverage these audit logs to ensure transparency for internal reviews, meet legal requirements, and earn client trust. You can also enable time-bound privileged access to different teams to ensure each interaction with the vault is traceable and accountable.
If your license management system is designed for a few thousand users, it may not perform correctly when you scale up and start providing licenses for a million users. Off-the-shelf license management solutions are not built with scaling in mind.
In contrast, a custom vault is engineered to scale as your user base grows. It can be configured with sharded databases, microservice architecture, cloud-native deployment, and asynchronous job handling. As a result, it can manage more license records, bulk activations, and complex entitlements without any performance bottlenecks.
Once they pay for your software, the end users are entitled to start using it immediately. A lengthy and complicated licensing process and verification can ruin customer experience. The licensing process should be seamless and straightforward. A custom license vault enables a user-friendly licensing process where they can:
With superior user experience and self-service capabilities in managing licenses for SaaS products and global software distribution, a custom-developed license vault reduces support tickets and improves customer satisfaction.
A software license is not just a tool to enable legitimate users to access your software. It is also an opportunity for you to gain valuable insights on software usage and make critical decisions that determine the software roadmap as well as your business outcomes.
A custom vault can enable analytics capabilities through in-house analytics tools or integration with third-party tools like Google Data Studio, and provide detailed insights by collecting and processing real-time metrics with respect to:
With these insights, your product, marketing, and revenue teams can make data-driven decisions.
When you choose a pre-built license management solution, you rely on the company that offers it to upgrade it with the features and functionalities that you will need in a rapidly evolving software market. In that case, your licensing strategy is locked to your license vault vendor’s roadmap. But with a custom license vault, you can upgrade whenever you like and:
Your custom-developed license vault will align with your vision, ensuring agility in a fast-evolving tech landscape.
Software license protection requires flexibility and scalability that off-the-shelf solutions cannot often meet. If your goals include rapid expansion and scaling, compliance with security standards, and greater control over licensing and software distribution, then a custom-developed license vault is a better fit.
With the flexibility to support unique business models and the strength to safeguard digital assets, a custom license vault becomes an indispensable part of your software distribution strategy. It can help you sell software securely, simplify licensing, and future-proof your tech stack.
A license vault is a secure digital safe designed for managing and verifying software licenses. It prevents unauthorized access and helps enforce licensing policies.
A pre-built off-the-shelf solution comes with commonly used features for companies that require an easy-to-use licensing system. A custom license vault is built to meet your unique business and technical needs. It offers flexibility in licensing models, integrations, and scalability.
Yes. It logs all activities and license use, enabling compliance with regulations and dispute resolution.
Startups require agility to navigate rapidly changing market conditions and evolving customer needs. Enterprises need quick scaling and compliance. Custom license vaults ensure secure, streamlined software licensing that adapts to the business requirements of both startups and established large enterprises.
We have discussed headless commerce in detail. The benefits of headless commerce outweigh the cost and complexities involved in implementing it. The decoupled frontend and backend enable flexibility, scalability, innovation, and future-proofing. It empowers businesses to deliver personalized, fast, and enjoyable shopping experiences. Headless commerce is not just a technical upgrade; it’s a strategic move to future-proof your eCommerce business.
However, the challenges involved in transitioning from traditional commerce to headless architecture should not be underestimated. A one-size-fits-all solution does not work. Customizing the headless platform and implementing it to suit your business is critical for success, and it requires meticulous planning.
This article outlines the critical considerations and steps involved in implementing headless commerce to ensure a smooth and successful transition.

Headless commerce can be complicated, expensive, and time-consuming. Therefore, before deciding to move to a headless commerce platform, you must spend valuable time planning the transition and laying the groundwork.
Following are some of the things you need to consider before transitioning to a headless commerce platform.
Understanding your current eCommerce platform and website structure, evaluating their limitations, and identifying the scope of headless commerce for your business case are crucial for deciding whether to remain in a traditional eCommerce architecture or choose the headless architecture. Headless commerce is not necessarily a suitable architecture for small businesses that do not have massive scaling requirements or need agility. Businesses that do not require constant modifications to the current frontend setup also do not need headless commerce. Hence, it is crucial to determine whether you need it in the first place. You can identify that by seeking answers to the following questions.
Do you constantly modify your frontend to meet changing business conditions and customer expectations?
Every business has a different reason for choosing headless architecture. Identifying your specific business goals is critical for customizing the headless platform to your requirements.
For instance, you may need better site speed and the ability to handle sudden fluctuations in traffic and transactions, a robust omnichannel strategy implementation, or to expand the product catalog and search capabilities. It is critical to define these objectives as it will enable you to select the right plans and integrations to meet these goals.
For instance, low-tier plans may not offer the bandwidth to handle increased traffic. If that is your objective, you must choose an upgraded plan. Similarly, third-party integrations and tools for adding features and functions may require separate subscriptions; if your goal is to integrate the latest and greatest functionality, you must consider the additional costs and accommodate them in your budget. In both cases, you must clarify your objectives first. You can define your business objectives by answering the following questions.
Different platforms utilize different frameworks, APIs, and coding languages. They require specialized skills and knowledge to work with. When you transition from a traditional platform to headless eCommerce, it may necessitate extensive training to handle the platform better. So, you must find answers to the following questions:
While the transition to headless commerce can provide long-term benefits, it comes with higher ongoing and upfront costs, including development, infrastructure changes, hosting, training, and brand-new tools and integrations. It is vital to do budgeting, allocate resources, and ensure you have all the resources for the transition.
When you decide to proceed with the headless transition, it is crucial to leave no stone unturned. While you can modify the frontend whenever you like and add new features and functionalities in the future, it is indispensable to complete the customer journey mapping, identify the customers’ pain points, identify the devices and channels they frequently use, and learn how they interact with your brand. It will enable you to deliver a seamless customer experience across touchpoints from the start and help prevent unforeseen ongoing costs.
This exercise helps you prioritize the relevant touchpoints, design a frontend that appeals to your audience, and add the most suitable feature set to ensure a good user experience.
For instance, the customers of a fashion accessories store may expect a virtual trial room. In contrast, those interested in buying electronics will more likely prefer voice commerce. Identifying what your customers want can help you make critical decisions that positively impact customer experience.
Headless commerce relies on APIs, microservices, and frontend frameworks. Choosing the right tools ensures scalability and performance.
For instance, a medium-sized business that wants to start with headless commerce would prefer a pre-built solution, while a large enterprise might prefer more customization.
Depending on your requirements, you must also select your third-party integrations. For instance, if you have a massive product catalog, you can add inventory management integrations that automate adding new products and apply pricing rules.
Implementing a transition to headless commerce impacts multiple departments. For instance, after the transition, the marketing department may be forced to use a different email marketing integration as the old tools are not available on the new platform in some cases. So, you must consult all stakeholders, communicate the long-term ROI of headless commerce, help them understand the benefits and the potential challenges, achieve consensus, and gain the approval of senior management to secure the required investment and support.
Once you have done the groundwork and secured the budget, you can implement the headless transition with the following steps.
You can start by creating an implementation plan for the transition along with a detailed roadmap that includes timelines, milestones, and the division of responsibilities among team members involved in the project. You can aim for a pilot launch, implementing the transition on a trial basis for just one product. Once you find solutions for the challenges during implementation, you can implement the change on a larger scale across products.
Headless commerce platforms are not created equal; not every platform meets your business requirements and budget.
Platforms like BigCommerce offer entry-level plans with basic features and lower pricing, making them affordable for small and medium-sized businesses. In contrast, other platforms, such as Shopify Plus, offer plans that are only affordable to large enterprises. The features and capabilities of these platforms may vary, and they offer multiple pricing plans that suit different business types and sizes.
It is crucial to assess these factors and select the right platform and pricing plan to meet your goals.
List the features and third-party tools and integrations you need and identify essential APIs, such as payment, inventory, CRM, etc. Use the relevant APIs to integrate those third-party services to your website to enable the features and functionality required to deliver a good customer experience.
You can select a framework like React or Vue.JS to build a frontend that creates a good customer experience and meets your goals and customer expectations. You can optimize it for mobile usage by building a Progressive Web App (PWA).
The backend consists of multiple systems handling various processes in perfect harmony. Headless commerce allows you to develop these functionalities in a modular fashion. You can break them down into independent microservices and make the transition gradual. For instance, you can use the serverless AWS Lambda API for dynamic scaling. This approach lets you complete the transition smoothly with minimal disruption to your eCommerce operations.
While integrating these microservices, you can thoroughly test them, identify bugs and issues, troubleshoot, and run A/B tests on the new frontend to measure conversion improvements.
You can opt for a phased launch of your new eCommerce store based on the headless architecture by rolling it out in stages. For instance, if you run international operations, you can start with a specific region; if you have multiple product categories, you can add one category and slowly move to others. This approach minimizes disruption and ensures a smooth and seamless headless transition.
Transitioning to headless commerce can bring unparalleled flexibility and innovation. However, careful assessment of the current setup and its limitations is required. You must evaluate if the benefits gained align with your business goals. By carefully doing the groundwork, aligning your team, and following a structured implementation process, you can unlock the full potential of headless commerce to deliver exceptional shopping experiences.
Arizon Digital builds lightning-fast storefronts by separating content and commerce layers, which results in faster page loading, smoother browsing, and a superior user experience.
Yes. Arizon Digital offers easy-to-use tools and integrations for your teams to manage product catalogs and campaigns.
Yes. Arizon Digital’s headless commerce implementation enables businesses targeting different regions, languages, or customer segments to manage multiple storefronts from a single backend.
Depending on your scope and requirements, Arizon Digital can launch a headless storefront in a matter of weeks.
Augmented Reality (AR) is no longer just a novelty in eCommerce—it is transforming how consumers shop online by offering interactive and immersive experiences. With digital experiences becoming increasingly necessary, brands that adopt AR bridge the gap between online and in-store shopping. AR allows customers to visualize products in their environment and buy with confidence, transforming how consumers shop online. In 2025, AR is set to redefine customer expectations, shorten buying cycles, and blur the lines between physical and digital commerce.
AR is Driving Growth in Retail: According to PwC, “VR and AR have the potential to add $1.5trillion to the global economy by 2030.” In eCommerce, AR is helping retailers reduce return rates, increase customer satisfaction, and offer personalized shopping experiences, which ultimately drives higher sales and conversions.

Gone are the days when consumers needed to download an app to experience AR. In 2025, WebAR—which allows AR experiences to run directly within a mobile browser—has become more accessible and scalable. Retailers are embedding AR product previews, virtual try-ons, and 3D configurators seamlessly into their websites.
Machine learning is now powering AR interfaces that learn user preferences and tailor experiences in real time. Imagine trying on virtual clothes that auto-adjust to your body type or AR furniture previews that adapt based on your home’s decor.
Platforms like Instagram and TikTok now allow AR shopping experiences directly through shoppable stories and reels. Influencer-led AR filters let users try on products, view features, and purchase instantly—merging entertainment and eCommerce.
Search is becoming visual. Shoppers can now point their phones at an object or environment and receive AR product suggestions overlaid in real-time. This is revolutionizing how discovery and product relevance work in a digital storefront.
Enterprise platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, and Salesforce Commerce Cloud are integrating AR plugins and APIs, making it easier for merchants to scale 3D product experiences without massive investment.
Fashion, eyewear, and beauty brands are using AR to enable virtual try-ons. Shoppers can see how makeup looks on their face, how a pair of sunglasses fits, or how clothes drape on their body.
From sneakers to furniture, AR is letting customers build and visualize custom products before purchase. This reduces returns and increases satisfaction.
Furniture, home decor, and appliance brands are using AR to let shoppers visualize products in their own space with accurate scale and lighting—bridging the gap between in-store confidence and online convenience.
AR-powered assistants can guide customers through product features or step-by-step setup instructions right in their environment, improving onboarding and support.
AR is also gaining traction in B2B commerce. Industrial buyers can preview equipment in context or simulate configurations before placing complex orders.
IKEA’s AR tool now offers an AI-powered interior scan that removes existing furniture and replaces it with new products in a real-life setting.
Warby Parker’s AR app lets customers try on glasses with facial mapping, making the online selection process feel like an in-store experience.
Shopify continues to expand its 3D and AR toolkits for merchants, enabling product visualization across mobile, desktop, and social platforms.
BigCommerce provides a robust platform for implementing AR tools and integrations helping merchants increase customer engagement and enhance brand image.
Sephora allows users to try makeup virtually with real-time color accuracy and skin tone matching using AR.
Puma has partnered with Snapchat to let users virtually try on shoes through fun, interactive filters that drive high engagement and conversions.
As consumer expectations grow and digital commerce becomes more experience-driven, AR is emerging as a critical differentiator. From visualizing purchases to enabling confidence in buying decisions, the brands embracing AR in 2025 are not just keeping up—they’re leading the way.
At Arizon Digital, we help brands leverage next-gen technologies like AR to elevate digital commerce experiences. With deep expertise in implementation and a strong focus on usability, performance, and integration, Arizon enables merchants to go beyond out-of-the-box features. Whether it’s a virtual try-on solution or a WebAR-powered configurator, we work closely with clients to design, develop, and deploy scalable AR solutions that drive measurable business outcomes.