“Headless commerce” is a phrase that will get thrown round lot (I’ve typed it several times at this time already), however Vue Storefront CEO Patrick Friday has an particularly vivid method of utilizing the idea to illustrate his startup’s place in the broader ecosystem.
“Vue Storefront is the bodiless front-end,” Friday mentioned. “We are the walking head.”
In different phrases, whereas most headless commerce corporations are targeted on creating back-end infrastructure, Vue powers the front-end, specifically the progressive net functions with which customers really work together. The firm describes itself as “the lightning-fast frontend platform for headless commerce.”
Friday mentioned that he and CTO Filip Rakowski created the Vue Storefront expertise as an open-source venture whereas working at e-commerce company Divante, earlier than ultimately spinning it out right into a separate startup final 12 months. The firm was additionally a part of the most up-to-date class at accelerator Y Combinator, and it recently raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by SMOK Ventures and Movens VC.
“We had to set up a new entity in the middle of COVID, we had to raise in the middle of COVID and we had to convince the agency get rid of the product in the middle of COVID,” Friday mentioned. He even recalled signing papers with an investor one morning in early December and doing an interview with Y Combinator that night.
Image Credits: Vue Storefront
As they’ve constructed a enterprise round the core open-source expertise, Friday and his workforce have realized that Vue has extra to supply than simply constructing net apps, as a result of it connects e-commerce platforms like Magento and Shopify with headless content material administration techniques like Contentstack and Contentful, funds techniques like PayPal and Stripe and different third-party companies.
In truth, Friday mentioned prospects have been telling them, “You are like the glue. Headless was so complex to me, and then I got this Vue Storefront thing to come in on top everything else and be the glue connecting things.”
The platform has been used to create greater than 300 shops worldwide. Friday mentioned adoption has accelerated as the pandemic and ensuing progress in e-commerce have pushed companies to understand they’re utilizing “this legacy platform, using outdated frameworks and technologies from a good four or five years ago.”
Rakowski added, “We also see that many customers actually come to us deciding that Vue Storefront can be the first step of migration to another platform. We can quickly migrate the front-end and write back-end agnostic code.”
Because it had simply raised funding, the Vue Storefront workforce didn’t participant in the recent YC Demo Day, and can be presenting at the subsequent Demo Day as a substitute. In the meantime, it should be holding its personal digital Vue Storefront Summit on April 20.
