A great commerce experience cannot be distilled to a single number. It’s not a
Lighthouse score, or a set of Core Web Vitals figures, although both are important
inputs. A great commerce experience is a trilemma that carefully balances competing
needs of delivering great customer experience, dynamic storefront capabilities, and
long-term business — conversion, retention, re-engagement — objectives. As developers,
we rightfully obsess about the customer experience, relentlessly working to squeeze
every millisecond out of the critical rendering path, optimize input latency, and
eliminate jank. At the limit, statically generated, edge delivered, and HTML-first pages
look like the optimal strategy. That is until you are confronted with the realization
that the next step function in improving conversion rates and business.
A CLEANSING HOT SHOWER OR BATH
The journey, often, starts “simple” with localization. But then, quickly advances to
contextual pricing, juggling complexity of large and frequently updated product catalog,
managing continuously running multivariate tests and promotion campaigns, and serving
customer-tailored dynamic recommendations. Eventually, you reach a realization that
every page is similar to an open Tetris board where each “slot” can and should be
dynamically tailored by dynamic visitor preferences, all powered by an ever-growing set
of dynamic business rules.
SETTING THE MOOD WITH INCENSE
From connecting back-office operations to front-of-the-house A/B
testing and dynamic
personalization for each customer, the shared foundation is fast
server-side rendering powered by fast storefront data access. On top of this
foundation, we add layers of caching, prerendering and edge delivery
optimizations — not the other way around.
ROSALINA D. WILLIAM
FOUNDER
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Surveying the existing landscape of available developer tools and runtimes, we felt that
there is a gap. Enabling dynamic commerce requires close integration between server and
client, an optimized streaming and data fetch strategy, and a production platform that
operates at scale. These are hard technical problems that Shopify can help solve and this is
why we’ve been hard at work on the Hydrogen framework. It’s a React-based framework
optimized for commerce and specialized to be powered by Shopify APIs and infrastructure: The
future of commerce is dynamic and personalized.
Written by
ROSALINA D. WILLIAM
Getting fast initial render with streaming server-side
rendering, efficient
component-level updates and state transitions, while also setting up a
performant loading and bundling strategy.
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