Plasmic for headless Shopify and vs. Builder.io

Plasmic Studio Questions
1

Hi everybody :wave:! I am currently running two Shopify stores and looking to move away to a headless solution. I have zeroed in on https://swell.is

I want to launch a few more stores and currently deciding the best way to move forward.

Now, I know what I donā€™t want and that is total dependence on the development teams for making frontend changes.
As I have the luxury to set these projects from the start, I want to make sure the product and marketing teams have the right tools and flexibility to make content changes.

There are not many visual builders in this space, and for me it has come down to builder.io and Plasmic.

Now, I am not a developer and I have quite a few questions, so please bear with me if some of them are silly :man-facepalming:or too obvious for you:

  1. First of all - Is Plasmic the right tool for my use case? Do you have customers who have build ecommerce stores using a headless jamstack and Plasmic?
  2. I plan to launch multiple stores (different domain names) all connected to the same Swell backend. Do I need to get a new Plasmic subscription/account for each domain or can I host multiple domains within the same account (limited by the total page views)?
  3. You have a fantastic page comparing / positioning Plasmic vs others, but it has no mention of Builder.io - any thoughts on that? I signed up for both tools and found Plasmic to be much more slick and mature.
  4. I have a bootstrap ecommerce theme that Iā€™d like to quickly adapt within Plasmic - what is the best way to do that? Convert it to Figma and then import?
  5. I am assuming Plasmic pages are hosted on a CDN - What network do you use? Are your pages accessible in China beyond the ā€˜Greatā€™ firewall? Do you have any customers in China using your product?
    Thanks a lot!
2

If you want to chat about your use case I can help. Iā€™m building a complex ecommerce marketplace and Iā€™ve already used, and investigated, all of these solutions.

3

Great questions! Some answers :slightly_smiling_face:

First of all - Is Plasmic the right tool for my use case? Do you have customers who have build ecommerce stores using a headless jamstack and Plasmic?
Yup! That is our bread and butter use case. It is easy to grab data from your headless backend and feed it into components and pages designed in Plasmic.

I plan to launch multiple stores (different domain names) all connected to the same Swell backend. Do I need to get a new Plasmic subscription/account for each domain or can I host multiple domains within the same account (limited by the total page views)?
Our subscription is per ā€œteamā€ youā€™ve created, so as long as your different stores all belong to the same ā€œteamā€, you would just need one subscription. No limit on how many domains are being used to host Plasmic content.

You have a fantastic page comparing / positioning Plasmic vs others, but it has no mention of Builder.io - any thoughts on that? I signed up for both tools and found Plasmic to be much more slick and mature.
Ah yeah we should update that page :laughing: Definitely some similarities with Builder.io as a way to visually build your pages and deploy to production without developer involvement. Plasmic focuses a lot more on the design aspect ā€“ our visual editor more resembles design tools like Figma, and gives you a lot of abstractions you need to build scalable designs, including reusable tokens and reusable components with a powerful variants system. Many of our users leverage this power to build every level of design in Plasmic ā€“ from design system components like a Button with different variations, to whole pages with different target audiences (ā€œmaleā€, ā€œfemaleā€).

I have a bootstrap ecommerce theme that Iā€™d like to quickly adapt within Plasmic - what is the best way to do that? Convert it to Figma and then import?
Depending on what it is, if itā€™s not already in Figma, then it should be easier to just build it directly within Plasmic.

I am assuming Plasmic pages are hosted on a CDN - What network do you use? Are your pages accessible in China beyond the ā€˜Greatā€™ firewall? Do you have any customers in China using your product?
Published Plasmic content is served by Amazon Cloudfront. However, if youā€™re using frameworks like Next.js, you would be fetching Plasmic content at build time instead of from the browser, so thereā€™s usually no live dependency on Plasmic at all.

4

Thank you @chungwu! This is a great community, I am very impressed!

5

Hi, @liquid_dingo & @quarrelsome_wren

Have you finally implemented plasmic with Swell Commerce?
If yes, How you are handling the Cart & Checkout please

Thanks a lot in advance