🏫 How to build a headless storefront with Shopify

Most devs would tell you that diving into Hydrogen and customizing your Shopify storefront is like climbing a techy mountain – one with steep learning curve.

But guess what? That mountain's about to turn into a nice, flat path.

Shopify just published a complete guide to going headless with Shopify, designed specifically for developers. That's right, they're laying out the whole journey, step by step, making that learning curve look more like a stroll.

No more learning curve excuses! :)

🤖 Custom Page URL and Custom Page Templates

With Shopify, you can’t remove resource markers like pages , or blogs. It’s a minor issue, but strangely enough, it has been one of the most annoying issues with Shopify.

Merchants have complained about this. They want control over URL structure to create their own taxonomy. This is particularly important when it comes to SEO and advertising:

• In advertising - like Google Ads or Facebook ads, the preference is always to link to yoursite.com/maypromo rather than yoursite.com/pages/maypromo.

• In SEO, link optimization and link depth are important for ranking.

Workaround suggested. Requests submitted. 08 pages of merchants’ complaints, 04 years, and 167 replies later. There’s still no update.

As a developer and product manager, I understand - there are always more prioritized features. Issues like this might easily fall off Product Managers’ radars. So we want to make it one step easier: If you have a Shopify Hydrogen store, you can easily create custom URLs for custom pages in Weaverse, using our visual page builder.

🌊 Customer Account in Pilot Theme

How many Shopify themes have customer account features? Not many, I’d say. and not free, I’d say.

Our original vision for Pilot Theme has always been this: The best of Shopify Theme + The best of Hydrogen framework. You have a performant, feature-rich theme without losing the user-friendliness that made the Shopify themes popular.

That’s why we've updated our Hydrogen theme with the new Shopify Customer Account API, allowing for passwordless login.

Here's what it means for customers and developers:

• Seamless Authentication: Sign in easily without needing to remember passwords.

• Data Scoping: Your shopping experience is now more personalized. - Enhanced Security: Your data is safer than ever with additional protection measures. !

(In case you don’t remember, Pilot theme is the first Hydrogen theme. Imagine Dawn theme, but for headless Shopify storefronts built with Hydrogen)

⚡ Near-instant HMR When Developing Shopify Apps

Here's another contribution I've made to Shopify: I've updated the Shopify App Remix template to be compatible with Vite. Now, Shopify developers can experience near-instant HMR while developing Shopify apps ⚡