Today online shopping is given more preference than the conventional way of shopping. And recent technological advancements have made it too easy to shop from your sofa and get the right things delivered to your doorstep. The introduction and expansion of eCommerce have surely changed many industries, and it is only growing.
According to research, there are more than 12 million eCommerce websites around the world, and by 2022, this channel alone will generate $5.42 trillion in sales for different businesses.
So, having a business that has an online presence is highly needed. Research shows that 95% of all shopping will happen online by 2040, and if you want to grow, eCommerce development is the way ahead. As we advance in this article, we will understand what eCommerce development is, why you need to choose the right framework, and why ReactJS is a strong competitor in this domain today. But first, let’s start by understanding what eCommerce development is.
What is eCommerce Development?
eCommerce development is the process of creating and developing an e-commerce website or app where customers can buy things online. It includes creating technical components like how a website or app will work, what features it will have, how users will interact with it, carts, payments, and so on.
Importance of Choosing the Right Framework
Choosing the right type of framework for your eCommerce development has major implications like the following,
Time to Create Applications
When creating a software product, the amount of time you spend creating a functioning solution to the unique challenges is critical in selecting the proper technology.
Some technologies aid in the speedy creation of apps and choosing one is influenced by the project timeframe and team skills. If you want to design a solution quickly and deploy it in less than a month, you should choose a technology that allows you to produce outcomes in less time.
React fits great here as it provides reusable components and best React UI libraries that can be used throughout app development and reduce app development time.
Maintaining Applications
Maintaining applications is a burdensome task for every developer, but it is quite important. Once an application is built and deployed, it needs to be maintained and monitored continuously to keep the performance at par. You’ll need to provide regular patches to the underlying libraries or update them too.
Moreover, you’ll have to keep the apps secure and working at all times. In such scenarios, choosing the right technology makes a big difference. It is known that some technologies are hard to work with and maintain. If you choose a legacy framework or technology that does not get enough importance today, and experts in that domain, your projects will surely suffer.
If you choose a flourishing language like ReactJS, there is an ample amount of talent in that domain, and maintaining your applications will be very easy. React is open-source and the community kills bugs as and when they are encountered so it is easy to maintain applications. You can get all the latest updates and use them to improve your products.
Future Support
You should never try to catch a falling knife phrase is ideal in this context of framework selection. It is preferable to avoid the framework if there is a question about its future support or if its popularity is dropping considerably.
Finding good developers and development tools will be difficult if you pick this type of technology, and it will hinder your delivery deadlines. It is suggested to choose a popular and well-known technology to avoid problems.
React is still maintained by the engineers at Facebook who collaborate with open-source contributors, hence it will be getting support for a long time. If you are looking to build an application that stays working for a long time, React will be a good choice.
Performance
When choosing a framework, performance is one of the most important considerations. If your app does not serve customers quickly, it will be useless. In such cases, the app will not serve its purpose, and your development teams will have to constantly work towards making it fast.
Some technologies and frameworks are naturally slower, and using them to build apps will only result in slow-performing applications. ReactJS is developed to power the future of web applications and is highly performance-oriented helping in building scalable front-end interfaces.
By now, you know the importance of choosing the right framework, so let’s understand this great front-end framework ReactJS for eCommerce development.
What is ReactJS?
Developed and released by Facebook, ReactJS is a JavaScript-based frontend framework for building scalable and reusable interfaces. Though it is open-sourced now, many Facebook engineers still work on its development to ensure that the framework stays up to its reputation helping developers around the world.
React follows a component-based approach wherein every item can be created as a standalone and reusable component. Once the component is created, it can be used across apps to integrate functionality. This way, developers have to write less code in React compared to other frameworks.
React has some excellent features that make it suitable for web apps and e-commerce development. So let’s discuss them in detail.
Features of ReactJS
Virtual DOM
Virtual DOM is one of the flagship features of the ReactJS framework. While working with ReactJS, the framework keeps two copies of browser DOM, one is the original one which is rendered, and the other is a copy for reference.
Virtual DOM was developed wherein the two DOM copies are compared, and the areas of the original DOM are rendered only where there is a change. It removed the need to re-render entire pages again and introduced a way to re-render parts of webpages where changes have occurred. This gives a massive speed boost to ReactJS apps.
Component-based Architecture
ReactJS follows the component-based architecture, where a UI is broken down into smaller individual pieces developed independently and together to form the UI. This approach makes development easier, and each component can be used anywhere around the project.
JSX
When building apps with ReactJS, there are no separate HTML files. Instead, ReactJS has introduced a new way of writing HTML in apps, which is JSX. With this approach, developers can directly write HTML code in JavaScript files, and the framework will render that as HTML elements on a page. It will help developers speed the development and reduce the number of files in the project.
One-way Data Binding
In ReactJS, data flows in a single way. If you want to edit anything in a component at runtime, you need to add a callback function for it. With this data flow way, developers can have a better understanding of how their app works and how to build better features.
With a hoard of features, ReactJS is a good choice for many application development projects, and one such use case is to use it in building eCommerce apps. The upcoming section will discuss why this framework is the best choice.
Why is ReactJS the Best Choice for eCommerce Development?
Apps Can be Built Faster
If you are looking to build user interfaces at a faster speed, there is no better option than ReactJS. The framework provides the ability to reuse components across your projects. Hence, once you have built something, you can use it in many places without writing the same code repeatedly.
You just have to import the functionality and plug it into your project, which will significantly reduce development time.
Superfast Page Rendering
eCommerce apps need to load fast; else, you can lose a customer to someone who can load their website faster. If you are building an eCommerce user interface with ReactJS, you’ll see that your pages will render quickly with a very minimal delay. With the Virtual DOM, you will also see that your pages will be lightweight, and they will not update entirely as a user interacts with any part of the page.
The virtual DOM can help you reduce the reloads whenever a user plays with any filter. Your pages will always be ready to serve users, and the faster your page loads, the more sales you will make through your store.
SEO-friendly
SEO is quite crucial in eCommerce business. If you can’t rank your products higher on the search engine results, visitors may not come to your site. This problem can be solved by using ReactJS.
SEO scores rely on the page load time and rendering significantly. With React, you will have minimal page load times, and the subsequent loads will happen very quickly. This is why businesses implement the best approach to enhance the seo for React websites for achieving responsive solutions.
Responsive Apps Made Easy
eCommerce applications receive a significant portion of their traffic from mobile phones. Thus, it is important to build your apps with responsive technologies. ReactJS provides easy ways to make your applications responsive, and when your website is responsive, it will surely provide an excellent experience to users.
Conclusion
By now, you know what ReactJS is and why you should use it for your next eCommerce project. Moreover, we also discussed how choosing the right framework is essential as this decision will impact how your app performs, its maintenance, and how quickly you can develop your app. So what to wait for? Find great ReactJS developers and start building your eCommerce application on the React stack.
*This post is contributed by Harikrishna Kundariya – Founder and CEO of eSparkbiz.