The easiest way to build an e-commerce web app using established foundations

Today, shops have gone digital. You can find many businesses seeking e-commerceplatforms to go online. If you plan to provide a personalized e-commerce experience to your customers, most of you might look to develop one from the ground up.

Here, the challenge is that it takes time and effort, delaying the time to market. The good news is, you don’t need to do everything from scratch. There are many Storefronts out there, which you can customize for your needs.

In this article, I will discuss four Storefronts based on React to help you head start your e-commerce journey.

1. Snipcart - Pluggable Shopping Cart for Gatsby and NextJS

Snipcart is a pluggable shopping cart platform for your e-commerce website. If you already deployed your website using a framework like Gatsby or Next.js, you can easily convert it into a web store without starting from scratch.

I have gone through hundreds of Snipcart reviews and let me sum up what are the advantages.

• We can build the site with any CMS and plugin Snipcart.
• Additional features to sync products & inventories using the Snipcart API.
• Automate shipping process.
• Manage Snipcart data directly from the CMS.

However, it’s essential to note that it charges 2% of your transaction fees. Considering the development effort it saves, I feel it will trade-off for small and medium-sized organizations. Besides, you can contact them for custom pricing plans.

The Developer Experience

The importance here is that the plug and playability. You can add the functionality behind the e-commerce by using the Gatsby Snipcart plugin, which we can find either on the Gatsby plugin library or NPM.

The second step is to add the Gatsby Snipcart plugin to the package.json and then update the config.json with the Snipcart API key, and BOOM! It is plugged into your site now.

2. Reaction Commerce - 10.7k Stars, 2k Forks, and 5000+ Contributors

The secret behind the lightning speed is with Reaction Commerce is the real-time data transfer without page reloads and app updates. This is an open-source e-commerce platform with a 5000+ active developer community. They offer a paid tier as well, with premium support.

If we look at GitHub commits per year insights we can identify continuous activity from 2018 which gives confidence that the project is still active.

Reaction Commerce is specifically built for Storefronts and administrator user interfaces and also you have the ability to customize by modifying the core. Additionally, with the integration of GraphQL API, multiple shops also can exist within a single installation.

Several limitations

• The company Reactive Commerce started in 2016, but the company growth rate is prolonged.
• There is less number of plugins available, and finally.

The Developer Experience

It’s important to highlight its headless architecture, which means you can build your custom UI, and you can connect the reaction API, which is built on top of GraphQL with any client. This offers developers the freedom to choose a comfortable client platform or framework as they wish.

Tip: Share your reusable components between projects using Bit (Github).

Bit makes it simple to share, document, and reuse independent components between projects. Use it to maximize code reuse, keep a consistent design, collaborate as a team, speed delivery, and build apps that scale.

Bit supports Node, TypeScript, React, Vue, Angular, and more.

3. JAMstack E-Commerce Professional - A Newborn

JAMStack e-commerce professional is new. However, looking at its features and the architecture, I feel like this will be able to challenge the existing storefronts due to its simple approach.

JAMStack e-commerce professional currently in their Beta, and with its Javascript-based architecture, we can develop faster, more secure, and easy to scale websites.

With the hype of JAM Stack and the familiarity it brings in for web developers, this storefront is likely to get developers’ attention out there.

Limitations

Since this is new, the lack of resources to followup is a concern in my opinion. However, I feel the active community will address this limitation over time.

The Developer Experience

Even though JAMStack e-commerce Professional is new to the game, you do not need to fear as a developer because JAMStack is released in late 2015, and you are not alone. Since the JavaScript ecosystem is quite familiar for many developers, JAMStack e-commerce customization becomes relatively straightforward. You can also find one-click hosting with AWS Amplify console.

4. Next.js Commerce - A starter kit for ECommerce with Next.js

Next.js commerce is a starter kit that comes with e-commerce core functionalities to head start your development. If you are familiar with Next.js, I’m sure you will consider this as an option since it’s highly customizable.

Next.js Storefront started its development in late September 2020. In three months, it gained 2400 stars on GitHub and more than 300 people have forked the Next.js commerce GitHub repository.

Limitations

Next.js commerce is in its early stage and has fewer resources to follow up.

The Developer Experience

The main advantage of Next.js Commerce is that it reduces the learning curve for anyone familiar with Next.js to understand its code and fast track the development. In most cases, you need only several customizations to tailor it for your need. Yet, if you need advanced features, it’s more about extending the code.

Since Next.js already comes with a range of features to speed up, extending its behaviour. Therefore, overall it would be a great option to reduce the overall development effort.

Summary

Eventually, we have come to the end of the article, and let’s sum up everything in brief. There is an array of e-commerce Storefronts to speed up the development.

Regardless of what you choose, all of them will help reduce the development effort by providing a base to start with. Some might even provide the essential features that you can directly use for your e-commerce application.
However, it’s necessary to understand the overall costs involved while choosing a Storefront.

These costs could come as licensing, subscription, operational costs, and the learning curve developers have to go through.

Therefore, it’s essential to understand the customization or development level you expect to carry out with the Storefront and see whether it supports these modifications.

I hope the article will be useful for you to select the right Storefront for your use case. If you find any other Storefronts worth mentioning, please put them in the comments below.

Happy coding!

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