Frend Front

Creator & Maintainer

Frend Front is a complete eCommerce boilerplate and framework for rapid development. Powering sites the likes of Holzweiler, Amundsen Sports and more.

eCommerce is hard.

Think of the simplest business you can find, it sells a single product and only accepts card. Easy to make, right? If your initial thought was yes, then you’re right! You need a good looking website, a product, a payment processor and a way to drive traffic. Then what?

Scale

Now picture that very same business handling 100+ orders per day. The list of features will have grown to this (if not more).

  • Site
  • Payment processor
  • Product management
  • Order management
  • Warehouse management
  • Shipping integration
  • Accounting system

Given this is a developer page, lets only get into the most relevant part, a headless website.

Headless eCommerce at scale

At Frend we build eCommerce solutions for both small and large businesses. A business can go viral overnight or barely move at all, and a website must handle both traffic cases cost efficiently.

Take the above example, an ecommerce business handling hundreds of orders per day also requires tenfold the amount of services to stay operational. We can say the same about an ecommerce website serving 3000+ requests per hour.

Complexity nightmare

Doing so requires a lot of infrastructure. Cache layers, content delivery, media streaming, automated updates, third party service connectors, and direct integrations with CMS and eCommerce engines like Centra and Shopify.

Lots of infrastructure means lots of unneded complexity. A project would require thousands of lines of code simply wiring the pieces together. This not only leads to excess development time, but also decreases maintainability.

  • What if we as developers wouldn’t need to think about caching?
  • What if we didn’t have to repeatedly code complex business logic for basic operations like adding to cart?
  • What if we could swap out the entire eCommerce engine from Centra to Shopify without having to rewrite any part of the codebase?

Enter Frend Front

These were the questions I asked myself when I was tasked with creating version 1 of Frend Front. And the resulting product is an acellerator that

  • Reduces project development time by nearly 50%.
  • Enables granular country and region based content segmentation
  • Delivers perma-cached content to clients at a global scale
  • Builds a tight integration between the CMS and eCommerce engines
  • Is composable enough to be incrementally adopted into existing projects
  • Allows for versioned development and upgrades without breaking existing projects
  • And most importantly, allows the developer to not think about any of the above concepts.

Sounds like an all in one platform like Shopify doesn’t it? It kind of is, but for developers.