How to Build a High-Performing Digital Storefront with Modern Frontend Architecture (and Save Money)

In a deeply competitive modern ecommerce market, offering unique and attractive products is crucial. Building a convenient digital storefront for your customers is the key to success. In this article, we explore the digital storefront experience, find out how a robust frontend architecture shapes an online storefront, and provide some examples of how the storefront can skyrocket your sales.

Moreover, we’ll present the revamped Virto Commerce Frontend Architecture, designed to simplify custom development, leverage standard network products, and deliver faster speeds at a lower cost.

1. DIGITAL STOREFRONT MEANING
2. HEADLESS APPROACH: THE BEST PRACTICE IN FRONTEND ARCHITECTURE
3. WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF A ROBUST DIGITAL STOREFRONT FOR A BUSINESS?
4.  MODERN VIRTO COMMERCE FRONTEND ARCHITECTURE: THE #1 COMPOSABLE SOLUTION TO BUILD DIGITAL STOREFRONTS
5. HOW ARE NEW FRONTEND SOLUTIONS BUILT ON VIRTO COMMERCE?
6.  WRAPPING UP

In this article, we use the terms digital storefront and frontend interchangeably. In simple terms, a digital storefront or frontend is a part of a digital shop eсommerce system where buyers can see, choose, and purchase products for individual or business purposes. A high-performing and user-friendly digital storefront implies businesses can easily attract new clients, successfully retain existing ones, and scale quickly.

The frontend acts as a customer-facing “head” and the backend acts as the “body” responsible for commerce business logic. In the ideal ecommerce scenario, frontend and backend layers work separately as part of a headless solution.

In contrast to a traditional ecommerce architecture that uses a single code for both frontend and backend, the headless solution allows the backend to be connected to as many digital storefronts as the business wants via APIs. This allows a high level of personalization and upgradability for each frontend element and each part of the business website separately, not affecting digital storefront performance.

The headless approach in ecommerce has become the de facto standard for B2B and B2C online stores. Frontend technologies evolve rapidly, with a typical lifespan of about five years or less before they are replaced by something entirely new. Frontend redesigns occur even more frequently. In contrast, backend technologies are more stable and remain consistent over time.

Thus, to avoid the constant updating of an entire ecommerce platform (which is costly and time-consuming for businesses), it’s best to adopt a headless approach and decouple the frontend from the backend.

Modern digital storefront solutions like Virto Commerce are headless in nature. They have a so-called three-tier frontend architecture that includes a client tier (i.e., frontend), a data tier (i.e., backend), and a business tier that uses a set of specific rules to gather and process data. A business tier can store user preferences and transfer data from a client tier to a data tier and back.

By decoupling the user interface or client tier from the backend and business tier, headless ecommerce architecture results in a more robust digital storefront. While the business tier acts as an intermediary and handles complex logic behind API integrations, the data tier ensures secure and efficient data management. This approach also makes it easier to adopt new technologies and launch new functionalities without disrupting the entire ecommerce system.

To make an ecommerce website work properly, businesses must pay attention to both their backend and frontend. They should be correctly integrated with all the databases, catalogs, and analytics systems while offering a great user experience on the customer side.

A well-structured and user-friendly digital storefront is more likely to rank higher in Google Search Rankings and other search engines. A digital storefront with intuitive navigation, adaptive mobile-friendly web design, SEO content, and fast loading times improves user engagement metrics like bounce rate and time on site, which are crucial for search engine ranking.

Moreover, with API integrations, an ecommerce website can synchronize data across multiple channels (e.g., multiple online storefronts, marketplaces, or social media platforms) with relevant content and accurate product descriptions and prices to drive more traffic to the website.

A user-friendly digital storefront with fast load times and adaptive web design likewise acts as a crucial factor for customer retention. According to Google, more than 90% of B2B customers say a superior mobile experience makes them likely to buy from the same vendor again.

A few of the main characteristics of a website that customers want to come back to are high-quality product images with detailed product descriptions and a simple checkout process with various available secure payment options. The latter leads to reduced cart abandonment and increased ecommerce sales.

With a robust digital storefront, ecommerce businesses have access to comprehensive data insights on distributors and end consumers, including customers’ preferences and purchasing patterns. This allows companies to make business decisions supported by numbers and create highly personalized recommendations based on purchasing history, potentially increasing conversion rates.

Businesses that plan on launching new regions and scaling internationally find a headless digital storefront quite useful. A strong electronic storefront can accommodate increased traffic, higher volume of products, complex catalogs, and price lists, as well as support multi-regional and multi-currency operations without compromising the website’s performance.

The advantage of a robust headless digital storefront is that it’s easier to redesign and adapt to new trends or special limited or seasonal offers, personalizing a store for specific categories of customers. Digital storefronts allow ecommerce businesses to scale beyond their offline store location and get more clients in a shorter time span.

Here's an example of a frontend architecture that helps enterprises build robust digital storefronts for their ecommerce businesses.

Virto Commerce Frontend Architecture has been API-first, composable, and headless, with decoupled frontend and backend layers, from the beginning. From starting the very first ecommerce store to building enterprise-level B2B Portals with out-of-the-box features—solutions of any complexity can be launched quickly with Virto Commerce’s headless API-first architecture.

The latest revamped edition of Virto Commerce Frontend Architecture, however, makes the development of digital storefronts faster and cheaper, and here is how.

The new Virto Commerce Frontend Architecture helps reduce the time and resources spent on custom development by standardizing one of the three digital storefront software development elements.

Previously, Virto Commerce used a custom-built .NET application to handle processing requests and managing data. By moving away from a custom .NET application to a load balancer setup, Virto Commerce reduced the need for custom coding. IT specialists can easily configure and set up the system independently without requiring a dedicated digital storefront software developer on the client side.

The load balancer doesn’t require as much custom code as it's a more standardized, out-of-the-box solution that handles application traffic distribution across multiple servers. Now, ecommerce businesses deploying Virto Commerce Frontend Architecture can launch updates and new features faster, with less effort, and lower maintenance costs. This leads to faster time-to-market for new features and improvements.

Moreover, by eliminating excessive intermediate elements in solution deployment, the new Virto Commerce Frontend Architecture helps businesses reduce costs associated with third-party service subscriptions that were necessary to maintain the custom .NET application.

In addition to being a feasible storefront development solution for teams that prefer time-saving standardized elements, Virto Commerce Frontend Architecture is also a viable option for designers and frontend developers who want a fully customizable solution. Virto Commerce Frontend includes everything needed for customization and development:

• Atomic Design System in Figma for composable user interfaces;
• Storybook for building UI components and pages in isolation;
• Production Ready Frontend Applications.

Virto Commerce Frontend Architecture enables the creation of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)—websites that function as full-fledged mobile applications directly within the browser. eCommerce websites built on Virto Commerce can truly elevate user experience for their customers with the following features:

• Access device features (e.g., camera, audio, geolocation, or fingerprint scanner);
• Push notifications and SMS support;
• Offline capabilities, and more.

For ecommerce enterprises and their customers, PWAs offer faster load times, improved user experience and engagement, and seamless shopping experience across all devices.

To sum up, the new Virto Commerce Frontend Architecture is designed to be straightforward, enabling teams to work more efficiently and focus on innovation.

With the new Virto Commerce Frontend Architecture, building on new solutions for digital storefronts is easier than ever before, thanks to an infinite loop of innovation.

At the initial stage of the iterative product change cycle, the Virto Commerce team collaborates closely with the client or their implementation partner, leveraging and reusing out-of-the-box components to build an ecommerce digital storefront. Later, the implementation partner’s team can seamlessly integrate their applications and customize the solution to meet specific business needs, thanks to the API-first approach.

After the initial testing and feedback collection, the client’s team can effortlessly launch and scale the frontend solution, adding new B2B and B2C ecommerce scenarios along the way and enjoying the infinite upgradability that Virto Commerce provides.

Here is just a small demonstration of how diverse (and easily personalized) the Virto Commerce Frontend can be.

Having a robust electronic storefront has its indisputable benefit for ecommerce businesses. These benefits include but are not limited to higher brand visibility, increased conversion and retention rates among customers, and faster market expansion. To enjoy tangible results with a digital storefront, companies must rely on a trusted and experienced solution partner.

By choosing Virto Commerce, many global enterprises successfully build B2B and B2C ecommerce digital storefronts that assist their business growth. Your business can be the next in line for ecommerce excellence.