Fontis Ecommerce Blog: Commerce Advice and Insights

How eCommerce Managers Can Get Buy-In for a Headless Rebuild

Tue Sep 23, 2025 by Phil Preston in Ecommerce

Discover how eCommerce managers can secure stakeholder buy-in for a headless rebuild. Learn frameworks, pitfalls to avoid, and real-world tactics to drive adoption of headless commerce and deliver measurable ROI.

Typesense vs Algolia: Which Site Search Engine Wins for eCommerce in 2025?

Sun Sep 14, 2025 by Phil Preston in Ecommerce

Explore Algolia vs Typesense in 2025 — from features and pricing to performance and platform fit. See which Algolia alternative delivers the most value for your ecommerce site search strategy.

How Headless Commerce Benefits Large Retailers

Wed Sep 3, 2025 by Phil Preston in Ecommerce

Headless commerce is reshaping enterprise eCommerce. Learn how major retailers like Woolworths, Salling Group, and Lowe’s achieved sales growth, cost savings, faster launches, and peak-season stability through composable, API-driven architectures built for scale and flexibility.

Data Silos, Manual Hacks & Midnight Deploys: How Legacy ERPs Strangle eCommerce Agility

Mon Aug 25, 2025 by Phil Preston in Ecommerce

Legacy ERP systems create silos, manual work, and stalled growth. This article explores why outdated ERP software holds Shopify merchants back, the risks of poor ERP system integration, and how cloud ERP solutions, Microsoft Dynamics, and custom ERP development unlock agility, scalability, and ROI.

What Matters When Building a Custom Checkout Experience

Tue Jul 29, 2025 by Phil Preston in Ecommerce

Explore how to tackle eCommerce checkout challenges with composable commerce solutions. Discover proven strategies to reduce cart abandonment, optimise checkout speed, and improve conversions across devices with actionable insights for enhancing the checkout experience and driving revenue.

Why Australian Retailers Are Lagging in Headless Commerce Adoption

Fri Jul 25, 2025 by Phil Preston in Ecommerce

While many Australian retailers claim they’ve gone headless, are they actually unlocking its true potential? The data reveals a critical gap between surface-level adoption and using this powerful architecture to actually drive revenue. Our latest post dives into the key barriers holding Aussie brands back—from budget pressures to a hidden skills gap—and lays out a clear roadmap to catch up with global leaders.

What Makes a Scalable eCommerce Stack in 2025?

Mon Jun 23, 2025 by Phil Preston in Ecommerce

Shoppers move faster than ever. So do algorithms, tax rules, fulfillment networks, and board-level revenue targets. The stakes for enterprise and mid-market retailers have never been higher. This post breaks down the essential components, the market trends, and the strategic choices that will define scalable commerce in 2025. We’ll cut through the hype and explain what really matters: why composable commerce is now non-negotiable, which pain points it solves, the benefits of open source, and how Fontis engineers next-gen stacks for Australian retailers aiming for market leadership.

Australia 1.0.5 for Magento 2 released

Mon Aug 26, 2019 by Chris Norton in Announcements

We are pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.5 of the Fontis Australia extension for Magento 2. This is a minor update that fixes an issue with NT postcodes.

Changes in this version are:

Remove integer type cast on postcodes, which causes problems for postcodes starting with 0.

The Fontis Australia extension for Magento 2 is available for immediate download on GitHub. If you have any feedback or would like to contribute, please submit an issue on GitHub.

Australia Post API SDK 2.0 released

Fri Apr 5, 2019 by Chris Norton in Announcements

We are pleased to announce the release of version 2.0 of the Australia Post API SDK for PHP. This library is widely used throughout the community and we hope that the new version will address a few of the issues we've had with it over the years, and make it even easier to use for other developers.

Some of the highlights from this release are:

The Guzzle 3 client has been replaced with the more generic HTTPlug PSR-7/PSR-18 client. HTTPlug is a more modern adapter library that uses the current PSR standards for HTTP clients, and removing the Guzzle dependency should also get rid of the annoying "package guzzle/guzzle is abandoned, you should avoid using it" warning Composer shows when installing or updating packages.
The library is now using PSR-4 autoloading, and we took the opportunity to move all of the classes into a top-level Fontis namespace.
PHP 7.1 or greater is now a requirement. Aside from now being the lowest support version of PHP, this allows us to make use of strict types and argument and return type hints.
The license has been changed from LGPL 2.0 to OSL 3.0, for consistency with our other packages. Both are reasonably permissive licenses so this should not have a tangible impact on anyone using the library.
Unit tests have been removed since none of them were relevant any more, and we found the existing tests did not provide much value.

Please note that this release does not include support for the Delivery Choices API. Since Australia Post removed address validation we have not had any need for it, but we'd welcome anyone who wants to contribute changes to add Delivery Choices in.

Australia Day 2019 Release and Packagist Migration

Tue Jan 29, 2019 by Chris Norton in Announcements

Happy Australia Day everyone! Hope everyone down under had a great long weekend. We have a couple of announcements in celebration. Version 1.0.4 of the Australia extension for Magento 2 has now been released. This is a maintenance release that just adds compatibility for Magento 2.3. We’d like to thank Nathaniel Rogers for his contributions to this release. We have also started migrating our free extensions to be…