Composable Storefront Overview

The Composable Storefront solution for B2C Commerce is based on two key technologies: the Progressive Web App Kit (PWA Kit) for creating your storefront and Managed Runtime for hosting it.

Like all composable, API-driven technologies, PWA Kit and Managed Runtime can be combined with other ecommerce technologies from Salesforce or other vendors. With Composable Storefront, you can architect a technology stack that meets your exact needs and can scale with your business.

For a summary of the developer workflow, see Get Started with Composable Storefront.

The PWA Kit is a framework for creating storefronts in JavaScript (or TypeScript) using the React platform, which has become a fixture of modern web development.

With the PWA Kit framework you get:

• Project templates, including the Retail React App. The Retail React App is a customizable storefront that implements core ecommerce flows from home page to checkout.
• A rendering system that works on both the server side and client side—and handles hydration (the process of transferring rendering from server to client).
• A routing system that allows you to inject data from the Commerce API into your components.
• Utility functions and scripts for automating routine development tasks.
• Integration with the B2C Commerce API and Open Commerce API (OCAPI).

A progressive web app (PWA) is a website whose user experience includes features that we normally associate with mobile apps, including fast load times, smooth rendering, and seamless transitions.

The reason they’re called “progressive” is that these features are added one-at-a-time (or progressively), based on what the user’s device and browser can support.

Managed Runtime provides the infrastructure to deploy, host, and monitor your PWA Kit storefront on a public cloud platform. With Managed Runtime, you can focus on developing your storefront instead of managing servers.

Managed Runtime follows the Twelve-factor App methodology. Your storefront is powered by a single codebase that is built statelessly and can be deployed on the most efficient and low-cost computing infrastructure available. Each deployment completely replaces the previous deployment and is reconfigured from scratch.

And most importantly, Managed Runtime offers the same enterprise-grade security and 99.99% historical uptime as all Salesforce technologies.

For more detailed information, see the Managed Runtime Overview.

The Composable Storefront tools occasionally make reference to Mobify, which was the name of the company that originally developed these technologies. Mobify was acquired by Salesforce in 2020.

We welcome contributions to PWA Kit from the open-source community! To learn more about the contribution process, see Contributing to PWA Kit.

If you like PWA Kit, consider starring the GitHub Repo. It helps others discover PWA Kit!

Now that you’re familiar with the basics of PWA Kit and Managed Runtime, explore the other guides in the Get Started series:

1. Build a Demo Site
2. Deploy Your Site