The technology behind Saleor 2.0

With e-commerce sales growing in the US by 16% in 2017, people want shopping to be easy and convenient, but they also expect it to be a fun experience tailored to the time, place, and way they want to make purchases. While designing the new version of Saleor, we highlighted four key opportunities for change:

Introducing a PWA storefront

Building a fully-fledged API

Giving shop owners a new dashboard experience

Moving from a monolithic platform to a modular set up

These are the new features that bring value not just to online retailers currently using Saleor, but to people looking at maintainable solutions that will serve them throughout the technology changes of the years to come. The story behind the development of these features is the story of Saleor 2.0.

PWA: Any place, any time, any device shopping experiences

We started our redesign by looking through the eyes of the end user, thinking how we can provide the kind of shopping experiences that people are starting to demand. Above all, that means delivering the best mobile-first experience possible. 80% of shoppers now browse products online rather than in physical stores, while over 60% have made a purchase through their phone in the last year and one third of all e-commerce purchases are now mobile.

In designing Saleor 2.0, we needed to start by thinking how we could offer a platform that any online retailer could adapt for both static and mobile devices — and how we could enhance that value now and into the future.

The answer is a PWA (Progressive Web App) storefront which delivers a single-page application, allowing end users to download and save retailers’ pages as applications on the home screens of their devices. Shoppers can then browse online stores and make purchases even when they have poor internet connection or no connection at all. A customer gets on a plane and switches their phone to flight mode, but they can still check out a retailer’s PWA offline, assign products to the cart, and see the orders automatically sent (and payments processed) as soon as they touch down and regain net connection.

GraphQL API: Making the shift to headless e-commerce

The Django back-end of the Saleor platform is a monolithic system that works well, but having the front-end in the same structure does not offer ease of updating to newer versions and also limits the flexibility of features.

We believe that GraphQL is a complete game-changer for how we build applications for the modern web. And that’s why it was our technology of choice for the Saleor API. It moves Saleor to the very edge of technology and turns it into a headless commerce solution, unlocking a whole bunch of new and exciting possibilities and integrations. It also allows us to provide users with two key features they demanded: