# Boost your eCommerce

Each year more and more users migrate from laptops to mobile devices as their primary tool for browsing the web. Currently, most eCommerce shops aren’t ready for this. Responsive Web Design is a good start for webshops, but the real challenge is to maintain high performance with an inconsistent and slow network on mobile devices. Progressive Web Apps solve this problem.

With all of this in mind, we collected the biggest problems Divante has encountered repeatedly in the last 10 years of building eCommerce, and we started to think about a tool to solve these problems on any eCommerce platform. That's how we came up with Vue Storefront.

![Vue Storefront-3](//images.ctfassets.net/ob7fjdpx9cry/5fJbkRS5ZuQmk4UGg2Ca60/20f2d9db5e91687a0c030f03311252f5/vendic_guest_post_3.jpg)

Vue Storefront is a headless, future-proof PWA frontend for eCommerce that aims to solve as many eCommerce problems as possible. We work together with more than 20 eCommerce agencies to boost it and shape the future of eCommerce.

In this article I’ll try to convince you as to why choosing Vue Storefront for your next eCommerce project is the best way to satisfy your client's needs, stay on track with modern technologies and be ready for changes.

7 reasons to build PWA with Vue Storefront

1Speed and reliability

The loading time of your webshop is one of the most important factors determining whether users have a positive or negative experience. No matter how much time you spend on designing an enjoyable shopping experience, if your users are forced to look at a loading bar for too long, they will get annoyed and just leave your shop.

It doesn't have to be the fault of your webshop, it could simply be that the network connection is too slow or unstable and there is nothing you can do to provide the proper user experience.

Fixing this crucial UX issue was one of our primary goals and Vue Storefront is handling it brilliantly. Thanks to advanced caching and preloading techniques, webshops with Vue Storefront load almost instantly regardless of network speed. Even on a slow 3G network, you can expect a loading time below 0.5 sec!

2PWA with offline capabilities

Wait, that’s not all! Users browse the web when they have time and this happens mostly when traveling. On their way, a network connection can be unstable and disappear periodically. This is why we decided to make Vue Storefront offline-ready. It means that users can browse the product catalog and even place an order without an internet connection.

With Vue Storefront, you can provide your users with a consistent, reliable shopping experience regardless of network speed, which wasn’t possible before with any other eCommerce platform! You can literally control the network - how cool is that?

Ah, and I almost forgot that thanks to the same technology, Vue Storefront is bulletproof when it comes to traffic overloads like Black Friday.

3Headless architecture

Vue Storefront is meant to be a storefront for ANY eCommerce. No matter if you are using Magento, Shopify or other platforms - it can work perfectly with Vue Storefront and benefit from all its features. Moreover, thanks to the abstraction API layer between your eCommerce and Vue Storefront, you can migrate to the newest versions of your platform (or even a completely different eCommerce) without changing a single line of code in your frontend. We currently have out of the box integration with Magento 1.9 and Magento 2 but integrating any other eCommerce platform is a piece of cake thanks to our integration boilerplate.

![Vue Storefront-2](//images.ctfassets.net/ob7fjdpx9cry/5LvtvWijh6QWACqm0qScWI/f863b3faf54872f997f2a82669cd766e/vendic_guest_post_2.png)

4It can replace your iOS and Android apps

Another great advantage of using Vue Storefront is the fact that it’s a Progressive Web App. Along with many features providing an amazing mobile user experience, there is one that can save you a lot of money and allow you to completely forget about developing native mobile apps.

Vue Storefront can be pinned to a user’s home screen with one click and then displayed without browsers UI with a splash screen just like a native app so users can’t see any difference between your app and the native one. Of course, the app will work offline. You can also send native push notifications to your users to re-engage them and remind them about promotions, order statuses, etc.

Progressive Web Apps can be installed and treated as multiplatform apps without changing a single line of code so you’re basically maintaining a web app, iOS app, and Android app all at the same time, and all with the same code.

Another advantage of using Vue Storefront over native apps is the fact that it’s always up to date. Native apps rely on marketplaces like App Store or Google Play and are updated mostly only via WIFI. In contrast, Progressive Web Apps do not rely on any 3rd party marketplace, and the newest version is delivered to users whenever possible (mostly the only requirement is network connectivity).

![Vue Storefront-1](//images.ctfassets.net/ob7fjdpx9cry/6mEz9BD7vqCeoAsiUcmm2s/1e224fb71302c25470a34fe440bb59e4/vendic_guest_post_1.jpg)

5PoC in 160 Wh and insanely fast time to market

Delivering a polished eCommerce frontend to your clients can take a lot of time with almost every modern eCommerce platform. This is why we focused so much on providing tools that allow developers to easily create and modify views.

We split Vue Storefront into an upgradable core that contains all the business logic required for your shop to work, and themes with 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.

For example, you can create a fully-featured Vue Storefront Proof of Concept with custom layout and Magento as a backend in 160 Wh!

6Developer experience

The developer experience is an issue in all eCommerce platforms. Getting things done is hard and complicated. Technology stacks are often outdated and not so enjoyable to work with. I’m sure that I don’t need to convince you that developers’ happiness can make a lot of difference in speed, effectiveness, and quality of development.

With this in mind, we strongly focused on providing the best possible developer experience for Vue Storefront developers. We are relying on the newest technology stack which is common for all frontend developers, not only the eCommerce ones. Thus, while working with Vue Storefront, you are building a strong Frontend and, at the same time, JavaScript competences that can satisfy even most ambitious developers.

We are constantly getting feedback from our partners and contributors and improving the developer experience along with the learning curve in each new release. Developing with Vue Storefront is a joy for developers and you don’t have to trust me - just join our slack and ask them ;).

7Future-oriented approach

In Vue Storefront, we strongly believe that integrating the newest cutting-edge tech is the best way to be ready for upcoming client needs. This is why we are constantly researching the most promising pieces of future tech and adding them to the Storefront.

You can be sure that with Vue Storefront, you’ll be always up to date with cutting-edge tech one step ahead of the others and your clients will benefit from all the advantages that modern technology has to offer. Vue Storefront is the first eCommerce that can work 100% offline with placing orders included. We are currently working on Amazon Echo and Google Alexa integration, along with researching topics such as chatbots and AI for products grid.

The bottom line

In this article, I listed only a few reasons why it’s worth giving Vue Storefront a try.

It’s one of the hottest pieces of tech in the eCommerce world today with 2000+ Github stars, 400+ developers on our Slack, 50+ core contributors and more than 20 agencies working on the product (at the time of writing but it’s growing fast as hell).

We are strongly focussed on being up to date with all the benefits that modern technology affords while keeping developers happy and keeping the development itself fast and easy. The best part is that you don’t need to change your eCommerce platform at all - Vue Storefront is an enhancement for your currently existing store making it easier to maintain, more mobile-oriented and future-proof.

If you have any questions, please make yourself at home in Vue Storefront Slack where our community members will answer all your questions.

With only 160 Wh to make a fully-featured customized Proof of Concept, it’s a sin to not give it a try.

Fijne kerstdagen en een succesvol 2018!

Estera Dugulan

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