Headless commerce is all the rage, and there has been a noticeable surge towards flexible technology stacks amongst ecommerce retailers. SaaS platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce have made great strides, winning big clients. API-driven platforms like Commercetools (John Lewis recently announced) and Elastic Path continue to grow in popularity. Shopware‘s answer to this increasingly complex world demanding more flexibility is version 6 of its platform. The new version offers a headless API-first solution with a PWA front-end.
Composable commerce & headless commerce
We’ve seen the term ‘composable commerce’ banded around quite a lot recently. Whilst we don’t endorse new buzzwords, the concept is sound and one we cover in this episode. Composable commerce = providing a systems architecture that enables businesses to plug and play with best of breed technology by providing open APIs and headless commerce capability.
Shopware’s flexible new headless commerce solution provides solid out-the-box commerce features as well as a robust API to enable merchants to tailor the solution to their specific business needs. By adding a PWA front-end built on Vue.js, the Shopware team is confident it has built a future-proofed ecommerce platform. The platform gives businesses the flexibility to create a presentation layer that’s highly performant and also delivers a high quality customer experience.
For our 53rd episode, we’re joined by Shopware’s Developer Evangelist, Sander Mangel, to talk about the new platform version 6. Shopware launched v6 and the end of 2019 and it represented a complete re-architecture to an API-first platform. Sander gives us the insider view on how v6 has evolved in 2020, which features have been migrated, how much progress has been made by the community in porting apps over to the new platform and lets us get under the hood of the new PWA.
You can also listen to this systems integration for ecommerce episode via the following:
Key discussion points
- How has v6 evolved during 2020?
- What core platform features are now fully migrated?
- In what functional areas are customers pushing for improvements?
- What’s in the product roadmap for 2021?
- What are the business reasons for providing a PWA solution?
- How do Shopware’s native CMS features work with the PWA?
- Why did you launch a cloud solution and what are the customer benefits?
- What’s the pricing model for the new cloud solution?
