PWA frontend on Magento 2.3 site - thoughts?

[shopper150]

I'm interested in having an e-commerce site built using the above.

Does anyone have any experience? It seems to be relatively new and I'm particularly interested in which PWA frontend to go for?

Want a fluid, quick site for customers to be able to buy and checkout quickly.

[jammy-git]

What are your requirements - both from the site and any integrations?

[bob-in-toon]

You should try looking at Aero Commerce - just did a VC raise for them.

Much faster than anything out there incl Magento and much more marketing friendly and you could integrate pwa frontend

[DSLiverpool]

bob-in-toon said:

You should try looking at Aero Commerce - just did a VC raise for them.

Much faster than anything out there incl Magento and much more marketing friendly and you could integrate pwa frontend

Can’t help on the Magento sorry (Jammys the man) but good luck to the Aero guys they are very clever engineers but I doubt any agencies would trust them after VS who sold the platform directly to end users and cut agencies out.

It’s a bit naive and confident stating it’s the “ultimate ecommerce platform” they might need more funding to defend that claim.

[shopper150]

jammy-git said:

What are requirements - both from the site and any integrations?

I'm looking at options to re-platform an existing Magento 1 website that doesn't do much business.
Need a platform that would allow flexibility to change the checkout process depending on product selected (similar to buying insurance, lots of different questions, possible credit check requirement). I think this rules out Shopify (I also don't like to pay a percentage of the transaction to Shopify).
I think Magento's ability to pretty much customize/change anything.

Considering how many people purchase through mobile now, I was attracted to the idea of using a PWA front end.

[jammy-git]

It's not a route I would advise unless you have a budget in the tens of thousands.

Magento 2.3 is soon going to be the only supported branch of Magento 2 and there are still 1100+ open, verified bugs with the platform. This makes development.... "frustrating" and lengthy, and unfortunately this means agencies and freelancers have to pass on that cost to you, the client. PWAs are also a relatively new technology, not particularly well supported by Apple (they're being dragged into the PWA world kicking and screaming) and you'll always end up coming up against unexpected issues when using new technologies like this - again adding to the development timeframe and cost.

My recommendation, would be either WordPress + Woocommerce, especially if it's a low traffic site. Maybe look for a developer or agency that have experience using the Roots Sage template which provides a bit more of a recognised MVC structure upon WordPress.

An alternative to Magento which is gaining traction (quite slowly) would be BigCommerce - I don't have any experience of the platform myself though.

Even if you did have a budget of tens of thousands, having a fair amount of experience of both Magento 1 + 2, and creating bespoke apps using Laravel + VueJS (which is what most of the Magento PWA frontends use), I think it would be cheaper to go the completely bespoke route with Laravel + VueJS and I think you'd end up with a better site at the end of it which will be exactly aligned to your requirements. The only caveat to this would be if your requirements happen to exactly align with Magentos feature-set; mutli-currencies, multi-site, multiple customer groups with different pricing levels, tier pricing, etc, etc.

Happy to have a chat this week if you want some more in depth information.