Alokai Storefront

The Alokai ecosystem has different tools to help you build your eCommerce applications - Storefront UI to help implement a design system, Alokai Connect to connect to your backend services, or our Unified Data Layer to normalize data across multiple eCommerce platforms.

Alokai Storefront is an eCommerce accelerator built on top of our ecosystem that provides common eCommerce features out-of-the-box, while being customizable for your use cases.

Benefits

Three of the key benefits of using Alokai Storefront are:

1. Acceleration: Develop faster with prebuilt solutions for standard eCommerce features, best development practices, and a growing list of Storefront Modules
2. Unified Data Layer: Standardize your data layer across multiple eCommerce platforms, making migration or multi-platform development easier
3. Customization: Modify any part of your application - from UI to business logic - to fit your exact use case

Acceleration

Out-of-the-box, Alokai Storefront provides you with a fullstack Alokai application: using our Server Middleware to connect to your backend services and a Next.js or Nuxt.js frontend to provide a great user experience.

With dozens of pre-built pages, components, data-fetching patterns and more, you can build great user experiences faster.

An Alokai Storefront covers a whole user journey including:

Not only does Alokai Storefront provide the core eCommerce functionality, but it also comes with the dev tooling and best practices to aid your development process.

For example, it includes pre-configured tools like a monorepo powered by Turborepo, linting with ESLint, formatting with Prettier, and full type-safety from your middleware to your frontend.

These practices are things we've learned over the years developing storefronts and are included to help you build better applications efficiently. However, you can always remove them or customize them depending on your preferences.

Another way Alokai Storefront accelerates your development is through the use of Storefront Modules. These are pre-built solutions for more advanced use cases like Product List, SAP Quick Order, and more.

See More:

• Read all of the Storefront Features
• See the full tech stack powering Alokai Storefront
• Explore the growing list of Storefront Modules

Unified Data Layer

Alokai's Unified Data Layer provides a standardized way to interact with data across multiple eCommerce platforms. It helps standardize two key aspects of eCommerce applications:

• Unified Data Model - standardized data structures for common eCommerce elements
• Unified Methods - standardized API calls for eCommerce operations

This means that regardless of the platform, your core eCommerce data will be represented using the same data structures. So if you're migrating from one platform to another or if you're working across multiple eCommerce backends, the number of changes you'll need to make to your frontend will be significantly reduced.

See More:

• Take a deeper dive into the Unified Data Layer
• Learn how we normalize data from different backends

Customization

While Alokai Storefront has a powerful set of pre-built features, each part of the application is designed to be readily customizable. You can change the look and feel of UI elements, extend the Unified Data Layer, and customize the business logic to fit your specific needs.

With Alokai Storefront, many of the pre-built features are directly exposed to you as a developer. For example, all of the pages are directly implemented in the Frontend application of your codebase. This means that you have full access to the its code and can easily extend, override, or remove any implementation.

One of the most common use cases for customization is modifying the Unified Data Layer to fetch additional data from your backend services. For example, fetching additional product data, orchestrating multiple API calls, or adding custom business logic on top of data normalizers. Through the use of Storefront Extensions, you can get more control over the data flow in your application.

See More:

• Customizing Storefront UI
• Writing Storefront Extensions

Alokai Storefront Coverage

Through the Unified Data Layer, Alokai Storefront supports the following eCommerce backends.

• Adobe Commerce (Magento)
• BigCommerce
• Commercetools
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• SAP Commerce Cloud

For the full list of features, please refer to the Storefront Features documentation.

Next Steps

Let's get started by exploring the key concepts of Alokai Storefront.