With the impending release of Magento 2.3, it’s time for merchants to start thinking about how they’ll be able to use the plethora of new features to grow their e-commerce business. It’s also time to start thinking about choosing a front-end solution that can match the capabilities of a powerful backend platform such as Magento.

PWA Studio is definitely one of the new features that merchants are looking forward to the most. The transformative power of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) on any e-commerce business is set to make them the next big thing.

If you need a PWA storefront for your Magento backend, Vue Storefront might be a perfect choice.

What is Vue Storefront?

Vue Storefront is an open-source, standalone Headless and PWA storefront for your e-commerce business. It offers a set of modern tools that lets business owners create stunning storefronts to present their businesses in the best light.

You can connect it to any backend solution such as Shopware or Magento through the API. Once you do that, you’ll have an all-in-one frontend for your business.

How does it change shopping experience?

The reason why Vue Storefront was created is to conquer the many challenges that e-commerce businesses have to deal with. As with every other PWA, its goal is to ensure a smooth, native app-like shopping experience. This means a couple of things.

Fast front-end

The front-end of the store needs to be ultra-fast. One of the biggest advantages that native apps have over mobile web pages is their much higher responsiveness. For the best experience, the user needs to feel immediate interaction with the store, without any lags or reloads.

Vue Storefront takes the PWA approach to this, ensuring that the storefront can render product catalogs within milliseconds.

Traffic overloads safety

Another issue that e-commerce merchants face is traffic overloads. This is especially the case with shops that experience seasonal peaks in traffic. Traffic overloads make the browsing very slow and inconvenient, which can reduce customer satisfaction by a lot.

To prevent that, Vue Storefront ensures overloads safety. It adds a lot of endurance to overloads so that an online store can handle large spikes in traffic.

Offline browsing

Unless they’re precached, web pages won’t run while the user is offline. Even if they do, they’ll have a limited number of functions. And that’s the rub, as e-commerce merchants can’t let a loss of connection to get between them and their shoppers.

This is why Vue Storefront provides the ability to create a storefront that users will be able to browse even if they have no internet connection at all. What’s important here is Vue Storefront’s ability to keep your store fully functional in the event of a connection loss, so you don’t have to lose sales in such situations.

Multi-platform support

If you want to stay competitive, you have to develop storefronts for both desktop and mobile platforms. Simply optimizing your website for smartphones won’t do the trick, since mobile web browsing only yields 2.3% conversion rate on average.

To create a good shopping experience on both desktop and mobile, you’d have to use multiple apps dedicated to each platform. But not with Vue Storefront. As an all-in-one solution, it ensures that you can manage your front-end development for both mobile and desktop screen without having to resort to different apps.

Vue Storefront features

To ensure all of the above, along with many other aspects of creating a perfect storefront, Vue Storefront comes with a set of unique features. Here are some of the main ones:

• IndexedDB database – This in-browser database is what makes offline browsing possible. Everything from browsing a store to placing an order can be done without an internet The in-browser queue ensures that the order is automatically processed as soon as the user is back online.
• js-based frontend – The modern Vue.js is used as a frontend library that makes it easy to design and customize your storefront.
• Platform agnostic – The built-in support for Pimcore, Magento 1, and Magento 2 allows you to connect Vue Storefront to any other back-end platform.
• Native app-like features – This includes the ability to pin the PWA to a device’s home screen, as well as push notifications.
• High-speed and local caching – IndexedDB works together with Service Workers to reduce the average server response time to less than 0.3s, while the average client-side rendering time is less than 2s.

Magento 2 support

Vue Storefront and Magento 2 are a perfect match. With the two combined, you can create an amazing storefront and build a perfect e-commerce shop in virtually no time.

When it comes to SEO, Vue Storefront ensures a variety of support features such as SSR (Service Site Rendering) and meta information management. It also offers URL ReWrite controls and lets you create SEO-friendly URLs.

As for checkout, payment, and shipping, there’s a wide variety of features that work perfectly with Magento 2. These features include:

• SSL security support for sensitive transactions and online orders
• Multiple shipping address management
• Tax and shipping calculations prior to checkout
• Free shipping functionality
• One-page online checkout

When it comes to analytics, Vue Storefront supports Google Analytics integration and all analytics features that come with Magento 2. Among other useful features, it can generate a variety of reports (sales, tax, product reviews, etc.).

The list of supported features goes on and on. Of course, Vue Storefront also fully supports marketing and promotion tools, order management, customers service, and all other aspects of owning and running an e-commerce business.

The final word

Vue Storefront is a very powerful front-end solution that ensures the user stays up-to-date with the latest trends in e-commerce. Its features offer you pretty much everything you need to build an outstanding storefront and bring your business to the next level.

Better yet, the platform is constantly evolving. New features are being explored and worked on even as you’re reading this. It’s certainly one of the best PWA development solutions for Magento. The two of them can be an incredibly powerful team at your disposal.