Vue Storefront is one of the best PWA apps dedicated to eCommerce platforms. Why? We answer with the following 7 arguments.
Every year, we observe more and more customers migrating from laptops to mobile devices. Business should already be developing stores with the mobile-first approach, but so far, most online stores aren’t ready at all. Responsive Web Design could be the first step, but the real challenge is to maintain high performance of the eStore over an inconsistent and slow network. Progressive Web Apps solve this problem.
Knowing that, we started to think about solving this problem on any eCommerce platform. What’s more, we took into account the biggest problems Divante has encountered repeatedly in the last 10 years of building eCommerce platforms. That’s how Vue Storefront was created.
Vue Storefront is a headless PWA frontend for different eCommerce platforms. It aims to enable the Progressive Web App standard for online stores, but it also solves some other problems.
Let me present you with 7 major reasons to use Vue Storefront and try to convince you that it is the best way to satisfy your clients’ needs, stay on track with modern technologies and be ready for changes in the future.
7 reasons to use Vue Storefront for PWA
1. Speed and reliability of PWA
Loading time is one of the most important factors in the online world. It determines whether a user of your online store has a positive or negative experience. You might spend a lot of time and budget designing an astonishing shopping experience, but if your users are forced to look at the loading bar for too long, they will just quit your store.
It doesn’t even have to be your eCommerce platform’s fault. Users often struggle with very slow or unstable network connections and in this case, there is nothing you can do to provide the proper UX.
Building a positive UX under various network conditions is crucial for eCommerce, and Vue Storefront solves it brilliantly. Vue Storefront leverages advanced caching and preloading techniques, thanks to which online stores load almost instantly – regardless of network speed. Even on a slow 3G network, you can expect a loading time below 0.5 sec!
2. Offline capabilities in PWA
Wait! A slow network connection is one thing, but no internet is quite another. That’s exactly what happens when your users are traveling and have some spare time for browsing. On the train or plane, their network connection can disappear periodically. Vue Storefront solves this challenge with offline-ready features.
Thanks to caching techniques, your users can browse the product catalog and even place an order without an internet connection. With Vue Storefront, you can cater to your users with a consistent, reliable shopping experience regardless of network speed or traffic overloads, for example during Black Friday or the Holidays.
3. Headless architecture
Vue Storefront has been developed with the headless approach. It is a microservice app that can be connected with ANY eCommerce platform. Is your eCommerce already set up on Magento, Shopify or any other platform? No problem. You can benefit from all Vue Storefront features regardless of your eCommerce platform.
What’s more, we’ve put an abstraction API layer between your eCommerce platform and Vue Storefront, thanks to which you can update your eCommerce platform or even migrate to a new one without changing a single line of code in your frontend.
4. Replacing iOS and Android apps
So far, online stores had to develop mobile apps for iOS and Android separately. With a PWA, you don’t have to build them, so you can save a lot of money and you will still engage your mobile users.
Vue Storefront PWA features allow us to pin a webpage to a user’s home screen with one click. After that, the webpage acts just like a mobile app. It can be displayed without a browser UI, has a splash screen and works in offline mode. For the user, there is no difference between your PWA app and a native one.
A PWA can be treated as a multiplatform app, so within one code base you maintain a web app, iOS app and Android app that updates in the background each time a user visits it.
5. Short time to market time and PoC in 160Wh
On almost every modern eCommerce platform, setting up a polished frontend takes a lot of time. Knowing that, we have developed Vue Storefront to be a storefront with an excellent, customisable UX, enabling developers to easily create and modify views.
Vue Storefront is split into an upgradable core (with all business logic) and themes for the visual part (HTML and CSS markup). You can make use of predefined variables and methods exposed by the core inside your themes which allows you to achieve great results in a very short time.
You can test out a fully-featured Vue Storefront with a proof of concept in just 160 working hours.
6. Developer experience
This is an issue in all eCommerce platforms. Completing projects is hard and complicated, often because of the old and outdated technology stack. There’s no pleasure in working with it.
To raise developers’ happiness level and motivation we relied on the newest technology stack which is common for all frontend developers, not only in eCommerce. Thus, while working with Vue Storefront, developers are building strong frontend and JavaScript competences. That can satisfy even the most ambitious developers.
Along with the feedback from our partners and contributors, we are improving the developer experience and the learning curve in each new release of Vue Storefront. Developing with Vue Storefront is a joy for developers and you don’t have to trust me – just join our slack and ask them ;).
7. Future-oriented approach
We strongly believe that integrating the newest cutting-edge tech is the best way to get ready for changing client expectations. This is why we are constantly looking for the most promising pieces of future tech and adding them to Vue Storefront.
While using Vue Storefront, you can be sure that you’re always up to date with cutting-edge tech, one step ahead of the others, and your clients benefit from all the advantages of modern technology that you provide them with. Vue Storefront is the first eCommerce that can work 100% offline with placing orders included and has Amazon Echo and Google Alexa integration. Soon it will be enhanced with chatbots and AI for the product grid.
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In this article, I have mentioned only a few reasons why Vue Storefront is worth giving a try, but there is so much more.
Vue Storefront is one of the hottest pieces of eCommerce tech with over 3K Github starts, 700+ developers on our Slack, 50+ core contributors and over 20 agencies working on product development.
Learn more about Vue Storefront:
Published October 31, 2018
