We are excited to announce that an up-to-date Front-Commerce demo is now available for everyone!
You may have heard about the product before, viewed a screenshot, video or live demo in a meetup… It is now time for you to start playing with our PWA storefront for real and tell us what you think.
Gathering feedback from everyone
Front-Commerce aims to change the way e-commerce websites are designed. Actually, it’s a product built on top of the Magento2 API leveraging technologies. GraphQL and React provide a base theme allowing frontend developers to quickly install any user interface.
Our goal is to enable brands and businesses to create a delightful buying experience for their customers, no matter which e-commerce solutions they use.
Right now, we are particularly interested in getting feedback from developers and potential partners. This public demo will also allow you to show the product to customers.
We would also like to give feedback and share our experience. Recently, Magento announced its wish to make PWA a priority, which means selecting a durable frontend stack… And we have been here since our first commitment in October 2015!
You will find bugs because it is 100% finished yet!
We wanted to get the product in your hands as soon as possible, and we believe the time has come.
Most of the biggest technical roadblocks have now been overcome:
- we decided to use GraphQL over Falcor
- we implemented Server Side Rendering (SSR)
- we extended the Magento2 API to get missing information and data (urls, prices…)
- we ensured user tracking (Analytics) was possible across the entire buying experience
- we made it multilingual and multi-store as you would expect from any Magento2 website
- we implemented a complete checkout process and even experimented with an Embedded Payment system (using PayZen)
- we implemented caching at the middleware level (using GraphQL DataLoaders) to ensure the experience would not be too much degraded by slow backends
- we experimented with React Native to ensure at some point most of the code could be reused for a native application
- we found ways to test every part of the product in an automated way
- we built a POC to illustrate how WordPress could be easily integrated in a shop
- we integrated the checkout process according to our vision of a theme following the Atomic Design principles… and you can even access the current style guide!
This public demo will also allow us to ensure that Search Engines are crawling the shop properly, since we implemented the best SEO technical practices we were aware of.
But of course there are still a few months of development for us to make it production ready.
A public roadmap
We are bootstrapping the project with our own funds, and have already been supported by BPI France so far… But we have to pay the bills. That is why we will now focus on making Front-Commerce ready for production with our first paying customers. They will be rewarded for their trust with an optimized e-commerce shop. Let’s increase their Black Friday and Christmas sales!
While our team will be working on those first integrations, we will improve the product. We will focus on the remaining features and take time to think about the mechanisms for overriding the base theme easily. Only then, we will find the time (and money) to document everything, publish code samples and make everything easier for developers and partners. We want them to be able to integrate Front-Commerce by themselves.
As we said, we would now want to start talking with everyone interested in the product and see how our roadmap could match your goals. That is why we have published it and we will keep updating it with your feedback.
Start playing with Front-Commerce’s PWA storefront
Now that you know the context, you can start experimenting with Front-Commerce and the possible future of your e-commerce experiences!
Here is what we are bringing to you today:
- The public demonstration site: based on a multilingual Magento2 website with sample data
- Direct access to the GraphQL endpoint (at https://demo.front-commerce.com/graphql) with its interactive playground
- A very simple alternative “B2B” shop using the same Magento2 instance, to illustrate multi-store support
- The demo theme styleguide showcasing the checkout process & how the Atomic Design methodology could help build your frontend in isolation (without access to any server side code)
- Our public product roadmap so you know what to expect
- Our Slack