MACH Alliance Members in Plain English

MACH Alliance is one year old. The member list has grown to 35 companies, with many truly developer-friendly platforms. Although there’s no better way to understand their capabilities than jumping into their docs and playing with the API, a brief review might come handy for a newcomer to the headless commerce pack. 

So, inspired with AWS in Plain English I’ve run through co-members’ and here it is – my short, ™️-less, and, not-so-serious explanation of MACH members. 

Algolia, constructor.io

One line explanation: Typo-tolerant product search with instant results.

Use this to: Help shoppers find products with autocomplete and immediate search results filtered and designed according to customer attributes.

It’s like: Amazon search, but prettier.

Amplience

It’s like: Contentfu/Contentstack x Cloudinary👇

Bigcommerce Enterprise

One line explanation: Headless version of Bigcommerce with extra hosting, security, and support options.

Use this to: Manage orders, carts and product catalog when you’re a mid-market to enterprise company.

It’s like: Shopify Plus but Bigcommerce was first to use “headless”.

Bluestone PIM

One line explanation: CMS structured as a product catalog tree which synchronizes with marketplaces.

Use this to: Synchronize product information and prices across any sales channel. 

It’s like: Product_Catalog_August2021_final.xlsx shared on Dropbox that sends changes to marketplaces on every “Save”.

Bold Commerce

One line explanation: SDKs for building checkout pages with support for subscriptions and bundling. 

Use this to: Test which checkout flow works best for different devices, customer segments, pricing rules, and compliance requirements on top of Shopify, Bigcommerce, or commercetools.

It’s like: If Shopify, Bigcommerce, or commercetools had this extra team to untangle checkout UI complexity.

Cloudinary 

One line explanation: Image and video storage with transformation/transcoding features and CDN.

Use this to: Store and modify media for your product pages. 

It’s like: Imagemagick and ffmpeg in the cloud, with support.

Commercetools

One line explanation: All-around ecommerce platform with an extendable data model.

Use this to: Manage orders, carts, and product catalog with geographical and performance scalability.

It’s like: Developer-friendly Magento in the cloud, minus the front-end.

Contentful & Contentstack

One line explanation: Mobile-friendly CMS.

Use this to: Store and update content of your product pages with device, geographical, and performance scalability.

It’s like: Wordpress but works fine with mobile apps, even under really heavy traffic.

enactor, fluentcommerce & NewStore

One line explanation: Inventory tracking with a graphical editor for order routing and mobile POS.

Use this to: Track product availability and orders across multiple stores, with the support for online and offline fulfilment.

It’s like: Your fulfilment team’s checklist looks like this:

fastly & Layer0

One line explanation: Cache for your product pages.

Use this to: Cache your product pages even if product content changes often.

It’s like: Your product pages had the same performance as Shopify or Etsy.

Frontastic & Vuestorefront

One line explanation: Components for building UI on top of headless commerce platforms.

Use this to: Build internationalized, mobile-friendly, single-page shop storefronts.

It’s like: Your storefront is finally taken care of by a horde of senior frontend developers.

Occtoo 

One line explanation: Customer data platform.

Use this to: Connect several ecommerce systems to exchange data in real-time.

It’s like: Ecommerce-focused Segment.

Personify XP 

One line explanation: A script replacing parts of the website according to visitor attributes.

Use this to: Insert more relevant content to a visitor clicking in your shop.

It’s like: A proven hierarchy of 'ifs' you can use to make your product page more personalized to a visitor.

poq

One line explanation: Native mobile apps builder with a drag & drop editor. 

Use this to: Build a mobile app for your shop.

It’s like: Every shopping app looks the same, so why not replace mobile software developers with software itself?

uniform

One line explanation: A UI-controlled script that replaces parts of a website according to visitor attributes.

Use this to: Make static websites dynamic again.

It’s like: A jamstack version of Optimizely.

Voucherify & Talon.one

One line explanation: Rules engine for incentives and rewards with an admin panel.

Use this to: Control who and when can get a discount or loyalty points.

It’s like: Your marketer can deactivate this one coupon code without waiting for the next spring.

VTEX

One line explanation: All-around ecommerce platform with a great number of API endpoints for particular sectors. 

Use this to: Run ecommerce with geographical, performance, vertical and [put yours] scalability.

It’s like: You merged all other MACH Alliance members into the MEGAMACH platform.

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