SPONSORED BY COMMERCE LAYERAround the world, billions of people can sell their wares online, in part thanks to solutions that handle the complexities of securely and reliably managing transactions. Businesses, large and small, can sell directly to customers. But a lot of these ecommerce services provide a heavier surface than many need by managing product catalogs and requiring inflexible interfaces. On this sponsored podcast episode, Ben and Ryan talk with Filippo Conforti, co-founder of Commerce Layer, an API-only ecommerce platform that focuses on the transaction engine. We talk about his early years building ecommerce at Italian luxury brands, the importance of front-ends (and micro-frontends) to ecom, and how milliseconds of page load speed can cost millions. Episode notesConforti was the first Gucci employee building out their ecommerce, so he got to experience life in a fast-moving startup within a big brand. When he left five years later, the team had grown to around 100 people. The ecommerce space is crowded—one of Commerce Layer’s recent clients evaluated around 40 other platforms—but Conforti thinks Commerce Layer stands out by making any web page a shoppable experience. Conforti thinks composable commerce back ends that neglect the front end neutralize the benefits. Commerce Layer provides micro-frontends—standard web components that you can inject into any web page to create shoppable experiences. Getting your ecommerce platform as close to your customer makes real monetary difference. A report from Deloitte finds that a 100ms response time increase on mobile translates to an 8% increase in the conversion rate. Thanks to Mitch, today’s Lifeboat badge winner, for their answer to the question, How to get all weekends within a date range in C#?