Most commerce platforms have an enterprise tier where the headline benefit is "your storefront runs on our edge network." On lower tiers, you're routed to a single origin region. We made the call to ship every LOAM store — free tier included — onto the same edge network from day one. This is why.
The latency math
The reason edge matters isn't pageload-time bragging rights. It's that conversion falls off a cliff past ~600ms perceived load time. Single-origin commerce sites in Sydney serving customers in Madrid measure 700-1100ms first contentful paint, before anyone has even started rendering. By the time the cart loads, half the visitors have bounced.
Edge caching collapses that to 80-150ms in every region.
What we cache
Three layers, increasing in volatility:
- Static assets (CSS, JS, fonts, images): cached aggressively, invalidated on deploy.
- Catalogue pages (product, collection, search results): cached at the edge with ~30s TTL and tag-based invalidation. Drops, restocks, and price changes invalidate within ~250ms.
- Cart + checkout: never cached. Always hits origin.
Why we eat the cost
Edge bandwidth and storage at this scale isn't cheap — it's roughly 4-7% of revenue at our current load. We could absolutely move it behind a Pro tier and pad margins. But the entire LOAM pitch is "your store should be as fast as Amazon's, regardless of how much you're paying us." Hiding the most performance-critical infrastructure behind a paywall would undermine that.
So far it's worked: free-tier stores convert at ~92% of paid-tier stores' rates, adjusted for traffic mix. That's the closest commerce-platform parity we've seen anyone publish.