Architecting Scalable Front-End Systems for High-Traffic Digital Grocery Platforms
Mounica Singireddy , Senior Software Engineer, Ahold Delhaize, Philadelphia, USA Vivek Jain , Digital Development Manager, Academy Sports Plus Outdoors, Texas, USAAbstract
High-traffic digital grocery platforms operate under unique technical constraints: extreme traffic spikes during promotions and holidays, highly dynamic product catalogs, real-time pricing and inventory updates, and stringent performance expectations from users who often abandon carts within seconds of perceived latency. Front-end systems sit at the center of this experience, translating complex backend ecosystems into fast, reliable, and intuitive user journeys. This paper presents a comprehensive architectural framework for building scalable, resilient, and business-aligned front-end systems for large-scale digital grocery platforms. Drawing from modern frontend paradigms—headless commerce, micro frontends, component-driven development, performance engineering, and cloud-native delivery—the paper synthesizes academic research and industry practices into a unified reference architecture. Multiple case studies illustrate real-world applications, trade-offs, and measurable outcomes. The paper concludes with future directions, including AI-assisted personalization, edge intelligence, and experience-driven architecture governance.
Keywords
Scalable Frontend Architecture, Digital Grocery, Micro Frontends, Headless CMS, Performance Engineering, Component-Driven Development, Web Scalability
References
V. Jain, "Headless CMS and the Decoupled Frontend Architecture," International Journal of Innovative Research in Engineering & Multidisciplinary Physical Sciences, vol. 9, no. 4, pp. 1–5, 2021.
V. Jain, "The Role of Micro Frontends in Scaling E-commerce Platforms," 2022.
V. Jain and A. Mittal, "The Rise of Component-Driven Development in Modern Frontend Frameworks," ResearchGate, 2024.
Google, "Web Vitals," 2023.
Amazon, "Latency and Customer Experience," 2020.
Martin Fowler, "Micro Frontends," 2019.
N. Zakas, High Performance JavaScript, O'Reilly, 2010.
IEEE Software, "Scalable Web Architectures," 2021.
Akamai, "State of Online Retail Performance," 2022.
Cloudflare, "Edge Computing for E-commerce," 2023.
Netflix Tech Blog, "UI Performance at Scale," 2020.
Google Chrome Team, "Rendering Performance," 2022.
W3C, "Web Performance Working Group," 2023.
Microsoft, "Frontend Observability," 2021.
Shopify Engineering, "Hydrogen Architecture," 2022.
AWS, "Global CDN Strategies," 2023.
Facebook Engineering, "Component-Based UI," 2019.
Smashing Magazine, "Modern Frontend Architecture," 2021.
IEEE Internet Computing, "Edge Rendering," 2022.
Gartner, "Composable Commerce," 2023.
Forrester, "Digital Experience Platforms," 2022.
McKinsey, "Performance as Revenue Lever," 2021.
Harvard Business Review, "UX and Business Outcomes," 2020.
ACM Queue, "Frontend Scalability," 2019.
W. Brown et al., AntiPatterns in Web Architecture, Wiley, 2018.
Download and View Statistics
Copyright License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors retain the copyright of their manuscripts, and all Open Access articles are disseminated under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC-BY), which licenses unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is appropriately cited. The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, and so forth in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations.


Engineering and Technology
| Open Access |
DOI: