If you have an online store, you are likely to be very excited about a free eCommerce app that besides improving the performance of your online store can also boost SEO ranking. Who will not have such an effective system to turn things around with a positive note? Well, Progressive Web Apps or PWA finally can help you achieve this. You can just turn your regular store into a mobile app with a lot of additional benefits.
Obviously, there are several reasons why businesses are increasingly preferring PWA. But how can you implement this technology for your e-commerce store? Well, we have Vue Storefront as a PWA app that can transform your web store just the way we described above. Vue Storefront is a fully-fledged Progressive Web app and it comes with loads of eCommerce features and abilities.
Why do eCommerce Stores Find Progressive Web Apps Helpful?
Progressive Web Apps came in 2015 as an alternative technology for bespoke solutions and that is the way it was implemented by Twitter and Pinterest, to deliver an ultra-fast user experience for their users. Whether you are a Woocommerce or Magento development company, you know the importance of PWA to make e-commerce accessible. Soon, eCommerce stores followed and brands such as Trivago or AliExpress made their user experience better and increased conversion rates through this technology.
Following this, there were changes in Google’s search criteria and parameters as well. The Mobile-First Indexing announced by Google in 2018 and the adoption of PWA technology by Microsoft and the operating system of Apple soon pushed the technology further upward. As more and more businesses on the web embraced the mobile-first approach they had no option but to turn toward PWA. Thus PWA became synonymous with technology for fast-paced shopping and e-commerce experience.
Vue Storefront: Stand-Alone PWA for eCommerce
Vue Storefront refers to the ambitious project to make PWA technology available specifically for eCommerce stores. It is designed to provide 100% offline access and fully platform-independent to deliver similar user experience across all platforms. As an Open Source project, it is open to receive support from anyone and developers can use it to enhance the shopping experience of web or mobile stores.
Vue Storefront is a standalone PWA solution for web stores that can drastically enhance the shopping experience. Moreover, thanks to the ability to connect to an array of eCommerce backend solutions like Magento, Prestashop or Shopware through their respective API, it can be used by any store. It can also serve as a great code base for developers who build front-end for eCommerce stores. Already the Magento developers have built an API for Vue.js storefront using Magento2 backend. So, it has emerged as a ready to use e-commerce app solution to improve performance and user experience of countless stores.
Documentation
The Vue Storefront documentation needs a lot of work. The documentation of the project remained incomplete as of now. Though the developers behind the project are working on it and soon we can have comprehensive documentation to guide developers on each and everything. Some parts of the documentation that have been finished can be accessed now.
The Key Challenges
Vue Storefront was basically built to offer solutions for a variety of key business challenges pertaining to the shopping experience of web stores. The objective of the development team behind the application is to deliver a solution to ensure the following.
- The super-fast front-end for the e-commerce store by providing PWA like interface to access the catalog of products that can be made available within milliseconds.
- Ensuring scalability by making the app endure excess traffic overloads on the store.
- Off-line access to products and shopping.
- Ensuring frictionless shopping experience that can be compared with the native app user experience.
- One single all-in-one front-end interface for both desktop and mobile screens.
Technologies
Vue Storefront comes loaded with an all-in-one comprehensive front-end for accessing the eCommerce store on multiple platforms. Vue.js framework is used by the app as the front-end library while Node.js & Express.js is used for server-API. ElasticSearch is used as the database of products which provides complete PWA or off-line support.
Design
The Vue Storefront app is built to be completely customized in design through a theme engine. Some constant design elements of the project include Material Icons apart from design convention to help more realistic appearance if the product.
Install and Use
To use the Vue storefront and run it on the store you first need to have the current version of the node, preferably the v8.3.0 for development purposes. Apart from this, you need a docker or you can use ElasticSearch + Redis and can install them on the localhost.
The Problem
One cannot deny the wide-ranging advantages of Vue Storefront as a revolutionary tool for enhancing the customer’s shopping experience. Moreover, being a fully-fledged open-source Progressive Web Application, it doesn’t charge a penny from the users.
But the real problem with Vue Storefront is the difficulties in implementation. The embedding of the app in your existing eCommerce website involves some technical complexities and coding needs. Implementation of PWA with your e-commerce store obviously needs certain coding skills.
But, such challenges are nothing when we compare the same with the benefits of PWAs. Vue Storefront is truly worth the complexities of implementation and to make things simple you can just hire an experienced developer who can execute the code as required. The best thing is, the Headless architecture of PWA offers a lot of flexibility to embed it with the back end of any eCommerce platform.
Conclusion
Vue Storefront is a kind of app that just fits in for all kinds of online businesses and web stores. If you are running an eCommerce website, the Progressive Web App through Vue Storefront can be really a credible solution for enhancing customer experience and to boost business conversion.
