React

Why I built an API-first e-commerce platform

By Luca Siviero

devto-react2w ago · Jul 7, 20267 min read

Image courtesy of devto-react

Hi! I'm Luca, from Italy, and I've spent the last two years building Webround: an API-first e-commerce platform. This is something that started as a project of mine with a totally different target: I wanted a quicker way to update my portfolio because I was completing different projects every week. After a lot of headaches, early mornings, late nights and a ton of coffee, I had what I wanted: a way to no-code my portfolio and update it as I wanted. But while I was completing the project, an idea

Hi! I'm Luca, from Italy, and I've spent the last two years building Webround: an API-first e-commerce platform.

This is something that started as a project of mine with a totally different target: I wanted a quicker way to update my portfolio because I was completing different projects every week. After a lot of headaches, early mornings, late nights and a ton of coffee, I had what I wanted: a way to no-code my portfolio and update it as I wanted.

But while I was completing the project, an idea of making it a headless platform started growing: why would you keep things static and limited to portfolios? AI's already great at doing that!

This idea started getting more serious, to the point that I fired myself from the previous job and after waaay more coffee, late nights, early mornings and a lot of building, breaking, changing, crying, it started to take shape as the product that is today.

While building the platform, I worked as a freelance dev for smaller businesses in town and I had the (very bad) privilege of seeing what they were doing with e-commerce platforms, website management, hosting and more. Nothing ever made any sense because every set-up started from a mix of old technology, forgotten stuff, weird hosting providers, on-premise setups, big ahh monoliths, hacked servers, random throwing errors systems and much more ugly stuff.

I never tried to force Webround into making sense. I've always wanted to be free (in general in my life) and as a developer, the fact that other platforms started feeling as a constraint rather than a tool when things started evolving, was throwing me off.

After working with other popular platforms, I realized that today's landscape is almost never about making things easier, rather about making users dependent on the platform so it's harder to go away.

Why Webround?

Before answering this question, we have to take a look at two examples.

Shopify: this is arguably the best go-to platform for immediate satisfaction. But you're not buying a website, you're buying an ecosystem and all the deriving things from it. Shopify has a great source of strength that is, at the same time, a great source of pain: the app store. Don't get me wrong, extensibility is huge, but usual customers on Shopify are smaller business owners that are chaotic, lack expertise and threat their website like it's a phone with apps. But a website is not a phone and needs real expertise to make it work correctly, so why would anyone keep finding workarounds to make something work with half-solutions to their unique problems? As a developer, working with Shopify never felt great with all the apps and the ecosystem they force. While merchants keep scaling requests to devs or agencies because they keep finding out that they bought a complex (and closed) ecosystem instead of a website.
WooCommerce, Medusa, Vendure, Prestashop: these tools are open-source and carry all the benefits of open-source solutions, but when you start working with these softwares, you enter a maze of weird stuff that you have to actually understand before you get productive at even writing a single line of code. Then you have to manage the infrastructure, without talking of the common issues that these platform have: poorly designed plugins, the "Plugin Hell" situation, non-existent backwards compatibility, monolithical architecture... well, this is not something that looks promising to build onto.

That's where Webround starts making sense.
Let me make you one question: what if you had a managed environment that lets you build natively, in a modern and standardized way, leveraging SDKs and APIs to build virtually anything, while keeping plugins and extensions as separated microservices that work with the core of the platform and not within the core of the platform?

Well, that's exactly what Webround is. A flexible solution to build virtually anything while keeping the developer at the center.

Who's the target user?

In Webround, the more you know, the more you can do. I have always developed the platform with three users in mind.

The no-code user. This person doesn't want or know how to write code and likes to keep things simple, without the risk of running custom implementations. There are limitations, because this user can only work within the boundaries of no-code components, but there is no room to break stuff, while keeping the flexibility to build any layout through a drag & drop editor.
The React developer. This user can speed up website creation by a lot, for a good reason: not only you can write React code inside an integrated IDE, but you can also install any NPM package and use Tailwind. Although, the real advantage lies in the built-in SDK. With a simple wr prop, you can access the underlying app's state and functions to leverage e-commerce functionalities straight from your custom React components. You can access these tools from the browser, without installing anything. Even builds are server-side.
The builder. Their attitude is simple: "Give me a bunch of APIs and I'll figure it out". Webround is an API-first platform that publicly exposes all the endpoints you need, both for the storefront and for managing the e-commerce, the authentication flow of its customers, the catalog system, the cart and the checkout flow. You can use Webround to build headless stores or even as a data layer for your own custom app! It's totally doable; all you need to do is read the docs at docs.webround.com and you're ready to go.

There's more

E-commerce is not just a storefront. Behind every store there are events to handle, data to sync, notifications to send, external systems to connect. The usual answer on other platforms is: open another app, install another plugin and pay another subscription.

With Webround, you have native tools for this.

Webhooks to react to platform events in real time.
Edge Hooks to inject secure runtime data before your pages render.
Checkout Hooks to manipulate the payment flow before it reaches Stripe (Webround partners with Stripe Connect).
App Extensions to build isolated micro-services that plug directly into the platform without touching the core.

This is a way bigger topic that needs to be analyzed in a separated session, so I'll just anticipate that these tools exist for now :)

Final thoughts

I'm not here to sell you anything. I'm looking for users. No-coders who want to explore a modern solution, React developers who want to speed up their work, and hardcore builders who just want a solid set of APIs and the freedom to do whatever they want with them.

If you want to reach out or give me some thoughts about Webround, what you like, what you don't like, what you think is a good or a bad idea, you're absolutely free to reach out!

Just a little anticipation: the website requires you to sign-up with email or google and to verify your account. But, apart from this, every function is basically free to use. Another thing, is that you'd need a subscription to call APIs from the outside (for publicly accessible data). You can either activate a trial, either contact me to request an activation: I'll be more than happy to welcome you here.

Finally, if you want to see my big face, I've created an introduction video to Webround, uploaded on the official channel, where you'll also find a set of tutorials to do the basic stuff with the no-code editor.