Elastic Path and Partners Release New Joint Experiences for Customers

Earlier this year, we (Elastic Path) acquired fellow headless commerce solution provider, Moltin - an acquisition that excited many in the digital commerce space – more importantly our customers and partners. This merger of ecommerce leaders allows for quicker delivery of innovative experiences.

"We believe that headless, microservices-based solutions are the future of digital commerce", said Art McManus, Chief Technology Officer at FitForCommerce, "This acquisition brings together two industry-leading companies with highly complementary technology that will address the challenges organizations face when delivering innovative commerce experiences." Collectively we now possess more commerce-focused talent and resources. With our microservices-based architecture and advanced API orchestration, our go-to-market plans also include easier to use business and developer tools.

What does this mean for our partners and customers?

After the acquisition announcement we began offering opportunities for our valued partners to start developing on Elastic Path Commerce Cloud’s new capabilities ahead of everyone else. We’re excited to promote and share our joint developments with the world.

BOUNTEOUS

Bounteous creates big-picture digital solutions that help leading companies deliver transformational digital brand experiences. They form problem-solving partnerships with our clients to envision, design and build their digital futures. We were very excited for them to participate. Check out how the process unfolded for them… The Front-End Commerce team at Bounteous firmly believes that some of the best experiences on the web today are JAMstack-based. As soon as they learned about the Moltin acquisition, and its emphasis on JAMstack ecommerce, they jumped at the opportunity to gain experience with a set of APIs tailor-made for this modern web development workflow and prove how well it applies to building best-in-class ecommerce experiences for merchants.

For more from Ricardo and his team, check out our quick Q&A on their experience with Elastic Path Commerce Cloud.

What was the reason behind looking to build and extend beyond the reach of Elastic Path microservices vs just building on top of what was offered?

When we look at other successful microservices providers such as Algolia, Hasura, and Auth0, we observed their outreach strategy of providing as many tutorials and starters as possible on a very large number of frameworks, languages and platforms. Given how well-developed Elastic Path’s examples already are for the React ecosystem (Gatsby, Next.js), and Elastic Path’s aforementioned emphasis on JAMstack ecommerce, we saw an opportunity to extend the reach of the platform to a wider developer audience by providing an additional open source JAMstack example. Given our team’s experience with Vue.js, we chose Gridsome as the basis of that example, as it is currently the Vue.js framework that most closely adheres to JAMstack principles.

Were there specific objectives (or initial assumptions you were looking to validate) with these two new open source projects?

Namely that JAMstack-based ecommerce sites are faster to develop, and produce better shopping experiences; if so, then it becomes critically important to choose a platform that enables a frictionless JAMstack workflow.

Why did you select Neltify, Algolia and Storefront UI?

The common thread between all of them was mostly from a time constraint perspective.  

• We’ve worked with Algolia in the past, and we see how prevalent they are in the open source space, so we were confident we could integrate them in some capacity. 
• Netlify offers a pretty capable free tier, which made it easy to validate the git- and webhook-based workflow. We were able to set up builds and deploys without any DevOps experience; this was key in demonstrating a key tenet of JAMstack development, as we wanted to make the most with the little time that we had. 
• Storefront UI has been on our radar for the few months, since it is an open source Vue.js component library built specifically for commerce and adhering to Google’s UX Playbook for Retail. Other component libraries are usually tailored to assembling an application UI/UX, so this made it a natural choice to create a visually appealing ecommerce site in a short amount of time.  

Are you happy with the outcome? If so, why?

Absolutely. While there’s much room for improvement and refinement in our experience created, we feel we were able to prove that with the right platform, and the right tools, it’s possible to create a best-in-class ecommerce site in a fraction of the time.

Would you look to invest time in a project with Elastic Path again?If so, why?

Not only would we look to invest time in another project with Elastic Path again, we will be actively bringing Elastic Path's platform and microservices to our clients. The benefits of a JAMstack front end are hard to ignore; a platform that enables this modern workflow is a force multiplier and allows us to build superior solutions for our merchants.