Having more than 2,400 customers with over 3,200 active online stores who rely on VTEX to connect them with their consumers is a big challenge.
VTEX’s clients are all over the globe, in 38 different countries, meaning that the company needs to have products and services that can be customized for every type of client, no matter their field or business strategy.
Being customizable and flexible for a software company means a lot of effort and investments to match, but that didn’t stop VTEX and that’s how the VTEX IO concept was launched.
VTEX believes that retailers should have the power to sell anything, from anywhere to anywhere and in any channel.
To do that, the platform is constantly evolving to help brands deal with increasingly complex scenarios (e.g cross-border, marketplace, omnichannel) in a simpler and more strategic way.
In the past ten years, probably one of the most distracting jobs online retailers have had to deal with has a name and, honestly, a big budget to go along with: the storefront.
In order to have great conversion rates and brand visibility, operations need to deal with implementing, managing, and evolving their store’s front-end in a way that’s both meaningful and useful to the consumer.
Furthermore, over the past years, front-end capabilities have been constantly evolving, as development changed drastically with new frameworks and tools. From complex design systems to companies undergoing A/B testing for every single part of their experiences, front-end implementation and management are taking more and more time and resources. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
In a few words, VTEX IO is a serverless and low-code development platform designed to create scalable, production-ready web applications.
Basically, it means that merchants can combine pre-built services from VTEX with custom-built and third-party applications to build a truly tailored solution, one that fits the unique needs of their business. The Store Framework is an IO-based collection of elements, designed specifically for front-end development.
By combining VTEX Commerce Cloud with VTEX IO, customers can have both a composable CMS to build their experiences and a low-code development platform to connect other data sources. The beauty of VTEX IO is that if you want you can build your own applications and platform extensions with third-party partners that have the solutions you need.
How does this work in practice? Well, while VTEX is making the implementation easier with ready-to-use components, the community of developers and the constantly growing pool of customers work to make those same components evolve.
In the end, the principle behind VTEX IO and the Store Framework is simple: using an atomic and modular design architecture, we created everything from small UI elements to complex, pre-built components — such as product shelves, sliders, menus and so on — that access all VTEX data to show it seamlessly in the front-end. With those components, you can rapidly build pages and templates without ever having to start from scratch.
Not only was VTEX IO a pioneer in headless and composable commerce, but it also changed the way customers design and think about their customer experiences.
As customers demand newer and newer ways of interaction (from conversational commerce to live shopping), stores often find out their ideal customer journeys are no longer usable. With VTEX IO and the VTEX Store Framework, adapting to the customer is no longer a desire, but a daily reality.
