Page Comparison

The Product / Use Cases

• What is exactly the use case Styla Frontend covers?
  To deliver a full e-commerce website frontend using product data from a “headless“ shop’s API.

• Where is the line between Styla Frontend and a “headless“ shop, for instance, BigCommerce?
  BigCommerce delivers product data, shopping capabilities and handles orders. Styla renders and hosts any content on the website and provides a tool to create non-product pages.

• What’s the difference between Styla Frontend and Styla CMS?
  Styla Frontend is the product that lets you build your complete frontend for a “headless” e-commerce application. An older product, Styla CMS, covers a different use case (including Styla content on a non-Styla website) and you can find its documentation here.

• How fast Styla Frontend is?
  Most pages score higher than 90 in Google Lighthouse tests. It depends on the amount and type of content. A page with just some HTML and an image or two will usually score close to 98. The more custom modules and scripts you add to your pages, the slower they will get.

• Where is Styla Frontend hosted?
  In AWS, Frankfurt, Germany.

• Is Styla Frontend served over a CDN?
  Yes, it uses AWS’ CloudFront.

• What if I need to cover store fronts in multiple languages with Styla Frontend?
  You need a separate BigCommerce and Styla front for each of the languages/locales.

• Is Styla Frontend a Progressive Web App?
  Yes, as long as you provide the data needed to configure its manifest.

• Can I use tracking scripts from Google/Hubspot/LinkedIn?
  Yes, you can include them as on any other website.

• How is European GDPR covered?
  Styla on its own only receives the IP and the user-agent which end-users accessing the website use. Styla does not store this data after having processed the request. This changes if you include third-party content like tracking scripts. All the data is hosted in Germany.

• I love the selection of plugins BigCommerce / Shopify offers? Can I use all of them with Styla Frontend?
  Styla Frontend only uses the data it gets over the API. All website content is rendered by Styla only. So if your plugin directly influences the appearance, it won’t be included by Styla. If it influences the product data used by Styla to render pages, it will be included.

• Can Styla push content to external (native) web/mobile apps?
  This is not possible at the moment. But Styla Frontend, being responsive and a PWA, works perfectly fine on different view ports/devices.

• Styla doesn't have built-in blog feature. So what can we do about our blog?
  You can create a page mocking a blog feed with banner modules linking to your blog entries and then recreate each blog entry as a separate page. Automatically generated blog feeds should be provided by Styla in the future.

...