Why Shopware Frontends?
Shopware Composable Frontends is a framework for building custom, cloud-native Shopware Storefronts.
We observe, that a theme-based approach to customize a Shopware storefront can be limiting. With more customizations, it becomes increasingly hard to maintain and keep in sync with the growing matrix of dependencies like the Shopware Core, the theme, plugins and custom extensions.
In those cases, a headless approach can be less complex and more agile and scalable. It turns the dependency hierarchy inside out, by decoupling the frontend from the backend. Shopware Frontends implements that approach with an open architecture which favors flexibilty and scalability over feature-completeness and configurability.
Key Aspects
Below are some key aspects explanining why Shopware Frontends could be a good fit for your project.
Shopware native
Shopware Frontends is built for Shopware 6.
No compromises or generic implementations — it works just like a developer would expect it to. Core concepts like content management, cart, payments or checkout are deeply integrated and fully functional.
Cloud first
Shopware Frontends is designed to work only with HTTP APIs available in Shopware Cloud. No themes, plugins or server access required. Even the developer IDE can be started in the cloud.
Stable
Shopware Frontends doesn’t rely on Shopware’s internal APIs (such as twig blocks, DAL or events), hence not being subject to breaking changes in those APIs — as opposed to theme-based storefronts. Especially for big frontend projects this drastically reduces the complexity of platform updates.
Efficient
There is no lock-in on technologies or frontend tooling. Shopware Frontends comes prepared with a smart default of tooling. Vue3, Vite, Nuxt3 and unocss/Tailwind.css — each by themselves coming with a rich ecosystem of tooling, extensions and integrations can be replaced and extended to meet any projects needs.
This tech-stack is the definition of superior developer experience, quick learning and rapid prototyping.
Flexible
No theming system means no inheritance magic, drastically reduced compatibility issues, update efforts, and restrictions to what your site can look like. Build your site in a lego-block-manner by using prepared templates or just get creative using all perks of utility-driven CSS.
Limitations
Shopware Frontends is a framework and not a finished product. Even it the demo store template looks like a proper store, it's not an off-the-shelf solution.
In contrast to Shopware's Twig Storefront, Shopware Frontends is not compatible with any apps, themes or plugins. If you want to use third party extensions, you need to ensure that they come with useful Store API endpoints and implement the frontend logic and UI yourself.
We recommend having profound knowledge of Vue.js or another reactive Javascript framework and experience with headless frontend architecture when you plan to implement a project with Shopware Frontends.
