Welcome to the Pack!

What is Pack?

Pack is a powerful Digital Experience Platform designed to simplify the process of building modern eCommerce storefronts. Whether you're a brand or a developer, Pack brings together all the essential elements for seamless content management and unparalleled flexibility.

At its core, Pack provides a comprehensive infrastructure that consolidates product information, React components, and content into one centralized system. With Pack, you can effortlessly manage your React front-end builds and deployments, giving you full control over your storefront's design, performance, and customer experience.

Wait, is this “Headless”? What is Shopify Hydrogen? I’ve heard it’s a lot of work.

In a traditional eCommerce setup, the front-end and back-end of your store are tightly integrated (e.g. Shopify backend and its front-end Liquid themes), which limits your ability to introduce new technologies to your stack and adapt quickly. make technology changes and adapt quickly.

“Headless” commerce refers to a modern approach to building eCommerce storefronts where the front-end (the "head") and the back-end (the "body") are decoupled, allowing for greater flexibility and customizability. This approach, however, comes with lots of technical complexity; merchants have to stitch together hosting, a headless CMS, a data orchestrator, a page builder, and build custom integrations from scratch, then also manage all of that infrastructure. While it gives you a lot of flexibility and control, it’s a pain (and expensive) to manage and maintain.

In response, Shopify introduced Hydrogen which is a technology stack that offers a more opinionated framework for building Custom Storefronts (an opinionated “head”). Pack integrates with Shopify’s Headless/Hydrogen approach to provide a robust toolset for both developers and marketers to quickly and efficiently manage their custom storefront.

So how does Pack fit into the equation?

Pack’s visual frontend for Shopify Hydrogen is the missing link between a developer-focused toolset and a site that’s easy for marketers and merchandisers to manage. With Pack’s visual headless CMS, and developer tools, brands and developers can build a fast, customizable, and high-performing frontend experience while leveraging the extensive capabilities of Shopify as your commerce engine. Pack's Shopify connector allows you to integrate with your product catalog, Meta Objects, and content and provides full support for Remix and Oxygen. Instead of managing complex microservices integrations, Pack takes care of the architecture for you so you can focus on building your storefront.

Is Pack a headless content management system (CMS)?

Pack is more than just a headless CMS. In addition to developer and marketer tools, it offers an integrated visual page building experience that caters specifically to brands looking to manage their modern storefronts efficiently. Unlike traditional headless CMS solutions—where the focus is on distributing content across multiple channels—Pack is designed to provide a unified platform for brands to create, edit, preview, and publish content seamlessly. While Pack can integrate with other CMS solutions and make its own content available via API, its primary focus is on empowering brands with an intuitive and flexible toolset to manage their storefronts effectively and efficiently.

So Why Pack?

Here are some key features that make a Pack storefront stand out:

  1. Unified Platform: Pack integrates all the tools you need in one platform so that you can build and manage performant shopping experiences in a single, centralized experience manager. Instead of having to connect your CMS, hosting, visual editing tool, and any middleware, Pack streamlines your workflow and takes a lot of the maintenance out of the equation.

  2. Integrated Visual CMS: Pack offers an intuitive, visual CMS (Content Management System) that gives developers and marketers more control over their content. With its user-friendly interface, anyone on the team - regardless of technical background - can easily update and manage your storefront's content, empowering both technical and non-technical users to make changes effortlessly.

  3. Flexible Integrations: Pack gives you the flexibility to integrate with other technologies and extend the platform’s functionality. With support for React and TypeScript, developers can leverage these popular frameworks to enhance and customize their storefronts, unlocking limitless possibilities for innovation.

  4. Lightning-Fast Performance: Pack is built on state-of-the-art technology that prioritizes speed and performance. Pack provides resources, snippets, and starter repositories in order to provide guidance and recommendations on building the most scalable frontend possible. Your storefront will benefit from blazing-fast page load times, ensuring a seamless and enjoyable shopping experience for your customers.

  5. Low time-to-market: Because it’s opinionated to work with Shopify, you can connect a Hydrogen storefront or stand up a new one in minutes. With Pack’s integration library and starter kit of pre-built components, you can start building your storefront right away.

  6. Opinionated for Shopify: While most custom stacks support a plethora of use cases outside of ecommerce—and thus invest in building integrations and add-ons that aren’t relevant to Shopify—Pack is laser-focused on ecommerce experiences for Shopify. With Pack, you can transform the powerful toolset — Hydrogen, Oxygen, and meta objects — that is included free in every Shopify plan into a fully-functional custom storefronts

When does it make sense for brands to take a more custom approach to their digital storefront?

You should consider taking a custom approach as you face challenges related to:

  • Site speed and performance

  • Building custom experiences

  • Boosting marketing agility, and developer efficiency.

While a headless approach CAN help boost your site speed and give you more flexibility, fully custom “headless” builds are not the ideal path for a growing, mid-market brand because they’re expensive and complex to use.

That’s why we built Pack. Pack offers a more user-friendly and predictable solution for brands—so they can adopt modern technologies and address their specific needs for speed, ease of use, and flexibility.

Our goal is to give brands access to the speed and flexibility of modern architecture without the inherent risks associated with a custom headless approach. With a user-friendly and predictable solution, brands can harness the power of modern technologies, while minimizing the complexities and potential challenges that come with implementing a fully custom headless commerce setup.

Getting Started

To help you get started quickly, we've provided handy guides that cover the basics. Jump right in and explore our comprehensive documentation to unlock the full potential of Pack for your Shopify workflow.

We're excited to have you on board with Pack, where you can tap into modern frameworks, collaborative dev workflows, a built-in visual CMS, drag-and-drop page builder and fully-managed hosting to power your brand's growth. Let's create something extraordinary together!

Guides: Jump right in

Follow our handy guides to get started on the basics as quickly as possible:

pageGetting startedpageCreating your first StorefrontpageEditing your Storefront

Fundamentals: Dive a little deeper

Learn the fundamentals of Pack to get a deeper understanding of our main features:

pageOrganizationpageStorefrontspageCustomizer

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