Headless Commerce?

Multi-Vendor Questions
1

Has anyone looked into connecting a headless commerce solution to CS-Cart like Vue Storefront? (https://www.vuestorefront.io/)

It seems the existing CS-Cart frontend is slow, clunky and older. With headless commerce being the future for building ecommerce websites I'm wondering is CS-Cart is capable of this. It would immediately increase the speed and flexibility of CS-Cart.

Many headless solutions work with Shopify, Magento, Spree, etc., but I can't find any that mention CS-Cart.

Thanks

2

They said that this year will be released cs-cart laravel version. That version will be more scalable and due to API system will be easier to work with any front end framework like vue, angular, redux…. Keep in mind these projects are “heavier” than a simple addon and more complex thus I don’t think is for the average e-commerce owner. In most cases you will need full stack developer

3

Thanks! Looking at "CS-Cart 5" it seems to be a completely new product. So doing any sort of migration doesn't look possible. Also, the announcement notes say when it's first released it won't have all the features. Which means it will be months (years?) before we would be able to use it.

We have already started building a new vendor admin in the back-end for vendors and now looking at building the new front-end. With 2 full-time developers on the back-end I'm now looking at hiring someone full-time to work on the front-end.

So, are you saying CS-Cart 4's API won't be sufficient to work with a headless ecommerce front-end like Vue Storefront?

4

I'd be interested to hear why you need this. Do you have so many visitors that your website is always slow?

Because I think for most "normal" cs-cart users, speed is not an issue at all, assuming you have a well tuned server.

5

Flow, I have yet to find a fast marketplace implementation of CS-Cart. Do you have any examples you could share? We have worked directly with CS-Cart, Simtech, AWS developers and CS-Cart partners and all admitted "Yes. it's just slow". We currently run 4 servers all optimized with AWS's help.

This is part of the reason they have completely re-built it with CS-Cart 5. It seems during the checkout process specifically when multiple vendors are in the shopping cart it takes quite a long time due to the way it is fetching information from all vendors at once.

I would love to learn more from you on how to speed thing up if you have any ideas.

6

The only solution to speed, no matter what, is bare metal server

7

We have worked directly with CS-Cart, Simtech, AWS developers and CS-Cart partners and all admitted "Yes. it's just slow". We currently run 4 servers all optimized with AWS's help.

Ok I understand, you are probably a much bigger user than most of us on the forum (small to mid sized B2C websites).

For me, with at peaktimes during big promotions maybe 100 to 150 customers, cs-carts speed hasn't really been an issue.

8

Thanks! Looking at "CS-Cart 5" it seems to be a completely new product. So doing any sort of migration doesn't look possible. Also, the announcement notes say when it's first released it won't have all the features. Which means it will be months (years?) before we would be able to use it.

We have already started building a new vendor admin in the back-end for vendors and now looking at building the new front-end. With 2 full-time developers on the back-end I'm now looking at hiring someone full-time to work on the front-end.

So, are you saying CS-Cart 4's API won't be sufficient to work with a headless ecommerce front-end like Vue Storefront?

Approximately, the MVP prototype should be available till the end of this year. Probably, there will be a way to migrate at least products, orders, users, vendors and maybe some basic settings.