Developer’s perspective: Vue Storefront for a great CX in eCommerce [interview]

Alek is an independent UX designer and front-end dev for whom the Vue Storefront framework provides an efficient toolset for creating seamless customer experience in online stores. In this interview, we ask Alek about his experiences with Vue Storefront.

You decided to use Vue Storefront in several online stores (DW Shop, FLYN Wetsuits). As an independent studio owner, you must have learned Vue Storefront from the basics. Tell us more about your motivation to leverage it and your adventures with VS.

From the very core, I’m a Graphic and UX Designer so in terms of eCommerce at the end of the day, what’s most important for me and my work is the seamlessness of the Customer Experience. After just a few clicks and seeing how performant Vue Storefront was, I became 100% sure I want to test out this framework in the real world. Oh, and I love Vue.js.

You evolved from a UX designer to eCommerce development. That’s a great combination to work on customer-centered stores. How did this all start and what is your technology of choice?

It’s been 4 years now since I finalized my first eCommerce project. Since then, I have created multiple eCommerce stores. I design the UX’s for these stores and then I develop the code on my own, or in the case of bigger productions, with assistance from my team. I started out with WooCommerce, then did production-ready stores with Shopify. Lately, I’m focused on Magento 2 + Vue Storefront.

How did you learn about Vue Storefront?

Google :) I was searching for “eCommerce PWA” and that’s how I came across Vue Storefront for the first time. From there, I dived deeper into the GitHub docs, visited the landing page, YouTube, and Medium stories and joined the VS Slack community which is one of the best things that happened to this project from my point of view.

Before discovering Vue Storefront, I was working on a minimalistic eCommerce PWA Proof-Of-Concept using Nuxt.js + Shopify JS SDK, but dropped the project after deciding on Magento 2 and Vue Storefront.

What were the main reasons for you to use Vue Storefront in your projects?

Purely from the theming perspective, it’s the best developer experience for eCommerce I have seen so far. First of all, because Vue Storefront provided me with a lot of Out-of-the-Box modules and components that are simply waiting to be re-used and customized. These are things like Filters, Attribute Selectors, eCommerce modules like Product Carousels, Related Products, etc. Second of all, the project’s structure with a theme as a separate app-in-app is also a great thing — you can keep the core untouched and do all the important work in your own theme’s repository.

What’s more, I love the JAMStack approach so separating the front-end from the CMS Platform is the best thing that has ever happened to eCommerce development! Also, my clients were very excited about the framework’s performance.

Apart from the above, I am a big PWA fan and I believe this technology is going to take the world by storm.

What was the first project that you used Vue Storefront in?

Well, that was an implementation for DWShop (dwshop.pl). The company needed their first selling platform for luxury haircare and SPA cosmetics. It was a great case for a first project as its requirements were simple and straightforward. The minimalist approach is this store’s strength.

Custom features included custom header and footer components, external checkout via Magento 2 and shipping price information in a Microcart component based on cart totals and shipping price.

What were the biggest challenges while learning and implementing Vue Storefront? How did you overcome these challenges?

At the beginning of working with the framework, the whole Vue Storefront ecosystem might seem very complex and difficult to master, mainly because there is so much code over there! :D

The most important thing for me was to understand the fundamental architecture and what did what. In my opinion, it is crucial to focus on the theme repository you are going to work on, and the greatest reference there is the Default Theme.

Before, you mentioned the Vue Storefront Community, where contributors are a great source of inspiration and support. Do you plan to become a VS contributor?

I already made some small contributions to Vue Storefront docs via GitHub :) My perfect idea would be developing a great reusable theme boilerplate(s) for Vue Storefront that would be an alternative to the ones that we have right now and maybe some curated premium themes :)

OK, last but not least! Name your favorite Vue Storefront features for eCommerce.

That would definitely be:

• Insanely fast performance
• Search engine (really great one and has so much potential to be even better)
• Lazy image loading
• Filters
• Cache
• Add to Home Screen option

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Alek Grygier is an independent developer based in Poland. You can reach him at Vue Storefront Slack & GitHub @allozaur or via alek@newfantastic.com.

Learn more about the Vue Storefront framework for eCommerce PWA at https://vuestorefront.io