Use Next JS or liquid for webstore building

Technical Q&A
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1

Hi,hope you all are fine and having a good day,

I have a few questions we would like to a shopify’s expert opinion on that.We are using shopify as the backend for our mobile app and our webshop. Our webshop is created with Next,JS, and we are using shopify APIs to handle the data.We are using following things and would like to know if we will be able to do them with liquid.

  1. firebase to authenticate and then create a customer on shopify.
  2. Google address completion API for adding the address.
  3. custom backend for scheduling the users delivery time
  4. 5000+ products
  5. Multilingual pages
  6. Recipes connected with the products and user can buy all the products at once in the recipe
  7. Using contentful to get all the content dynamically, so we dont have to hard code each time, we can change from there and its good to go.
  8. we are using shopify checkout to place orders.

Kindly tell us the why we should consider liquid over Next and why we should not. What do you think the major con will be when we’re shifting our project to liquid as have more than 5000 products etc.

link to our webshop: https://gotigerapp.com/enThank you in advance.

2

Hi there!

Liquid is just a template language, which offers some limited treatment of the items to render. You can create snippets, and sections, to reuse in a “components” way. You can also use Web Components to have more functionality in a more isolated way.

The main reason why we are still using Liquid and not changing to a headless storefront with Hydrogen is because of the flexibility is brings to our Product team, since they can manage the content and create their own pages from the Customizer.

As far as I know, this hasn’t been solved yet in Hydrogen or for any Headless Storefront.

Also, mind that you cannot really manage the server side of you app, since this is completely managed by Shopify.

They have recently launched Shopify Functions that extend the power of the developers to modify the behavior of the backend at some specific points, but not in a completely flexible way as you probably expect.

So, when it comes to your list:

  1. You have to build this entirely in JS or use an app that helps with this. Main problem here is were to store your secrets.

  2. See what I mentioned above about Shopify Functions, also checkout extensibility. Checkout is one of the most closed and protected areas of Shopify.

  3. See above.

  4. Check what your plan allows, we have over 3000 and it’s not an issue.

  5. There’s a way to manage this, yes.

  6. Yes, but you have to build your own way of achieving this. Soon the Metafield objects will be able to help with this better. We have something similiar to this on our website’s blog (umamicart.com)

  7. Definitely yes with Shopify Customizer.

  8. Ok.

You can check our Dawn’s theme, which is an open source theme made by Shopify implementing lots of advanced cases.

Regards,