With nearly 2,000 registrations, the first ever Vue Storefront Summit made quite a splash. Those who attended were able to enjoy two jam-packed days of insightful sessions around the future trends of headless commerce. The first trend of which is that we actually discussed the future of bodiless commerce, but we will get to that…
What you need to know
The Summit started with a keynote from Patrick Friday, the company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO). where he laid out the history behind Vue Storefront and covered each milestone, some of which were the following:
- 2017 - After having built PWA on Vue.js, Vue Storefront is born. In November, the first Proof of Concept is ready.
- 2018 - The first commercial release happened in 2018 and Vue Storefront achieved 3,000 Github stars in one year, making it the fastest growing open source ecommerce project on Github.
- 2019 - 5,000 Github stars is reached and the first enterprise client (Zadig and Voltaire) is launched. The key milestone came in December, however, where it was announced that the development of Vue Storefront Next (now Vue Storefront 2) would trigger the decision to start the separation from Divante.
- 2020 - Important changes in management with Bart Roszkowski joining as the new Chief Operating Officer( COO) to help with fundraising and operations of the company. Following this, Vue Storefront secures $1.5m investment and joins Y Combinator (the best accelerator for startups in the world).
All of the build up led to what the future holds for Vue Storefront, which includes Vue Storefront 2 (VSF 2), opening up a US office in San Francisco and building out ecommerce platform partnerships and collaborations like the MACH Alliance. The key aspect though is that Vue Storefront is creating a new category for itself in the headless commerce space and Patrick framed this as “Vue Storefront becoming a standard bodiless frontend for all major ecommerce platforms” because frontend tools are not headless, but in fact bodiless.
The Future of the Vue Storefront Ecosystem
The keynote shaped the rest of the day and the consecutive sessions dove into more detail on what Vue Storefront’s roadmap looks like. Filip Rakowski, the Chief Technical Officer (CTO) was in charge of the big reveal and introducing the new product VSF 2, which is now production-ready! His talk centered around VSF 2 and the three things it aims to help merchants with:
- Getting things done - VSF 2 will help merchants get things done faster (i. e. build ecommerce projects faster and support in dealing with repetitive tasks).
- Flexibility - VSF 2 will offer merchants the flexibility to change or remove everything, allowing them to experiment and find out what combination works.
- Performance - VSF 2 has a well-optimised boilerplate for the start and performance-oriented architecture for the later stages.
Filip also discussed how Vue Storefront is built as an ecosystem of independent tools and integrations, which he then showcased. The session ended with Filip discussing that great hosting and infrastructure are next with the Vue Storefront Cloud (which they are currently working on).
“Building great frontend experiences has never been easier.” - Filip Rakowski, CTO at Vue Storefront
This leaves us with a lot to look forward to and that was just the overview and start of the conference, but the GPMD tech team also attended several of the platform specific talks and VSF 2 deep dive sessions. For those who are interested, we will be sharing a detailed overview next week. In the meantime, you can view the rest of the sessions here: Vue Storefront Summit.
