DEITY Magento 2 PWA Review: Empowering E-Commerce Excellence

The global e-commerce market evolves steadily. It introduces new features and trends, expanding the existing borders more and more. The latest software solutions accelerate its growth, improving the lives of customers, merchants, marketers, and developers. As a result, today’s e-commerce systems offer a broad diversity of features, opportunities, and experiences. And Magento 2 is not an exception. The platform has become a leading solution that provides robust default possibilities and at the same time, supports numerous customizations. Both these advantages can be combined and multiplied due to the headless approach: you can take the powerful Magento 2 backend and create any frontend on top of it. Use the native Magento 2 PWA Studio or third-party alternatives, such as Vue Storefront, to do that. If nither of these tools seem to be suitable, pay attention to DEITY Falcon – another Magento 2 PWA that offers comprehensive features and top-notch productivity. Below, we describe the key characteristics of this platform-agnostic progressive web app and shed light on the Deity Magento 2 PWA.

Brief PWA Explanation

Since PWAs, in general, are the main topic of this article, we’d like to describe this technology briefly. Progressive web apps are popular due to the following features and characteristics:

• fast load time, 
• engaging user experience, 
• accessibility in unclear network conditions,
• offline mode;
• extra reliability. 

Although Magento 2 lacks offline mode and may not be as fast as you want, you can easily make it accessible with no Internet and reduce page load time to a bare minimum with the help of PWAs. They let you leverage the platform’s almighty backend and create an entirely new frontend on top of it, which supports the features mentioned above.

Other new features, that progressive web apps introduce, include the ability to save a PWA storefront on a homescreen of any device as an application. Unlike traditional apps, such sites still provide the ability to share their content via URLs, just like regular store pages. 

Thus, progressive web apps may dramatically increase the Magento 2 performance, add more reliability to the platform, enable offline functionality, and still preserve the platform’s strong points. You just need to choose a PWA system that suits your project; and below, we shed light on the Deity Magento 2 PWA and DEITY Falcon.

Before going any further, let’s say a few words about a migration a PWA Magento 2 website. Unfortunately, it is impossible with the default platform’s tools. However, there is a third-party solution that supports all major entities and several mechanisms that dramatically simplify data transfers. Meet the Improved Import & Export Magento 2 extension. The module is frontend-agnostic so that you can use it along with all Magento 2 PWA solutions. We will return to the migration in the last chapter of this article. Now, let’s proceed to the DEITY overview.

DEITY Overview

The core idea behind every PWA system is to let you use a single e-commerce platform but create any frontend on top of it without changing the preferred backend. Thus, DEITY eliminates the necessity to replace e-commerce systems just because they lack some features or cannot be extended according to the growing needs of your enterprise. The PWA solution delivers enterprise capabilities on top of any existing platform. As a merchant, you can scale without limits, risks, or disinvestment. DEITY provides you with:

• Full control over your e-commerce system. You can build whatever you want, implementing the craziest ideas that cannot be created by default.
• A modular system that can be extended only where you need it. Thus, you reduce expenditures associated with growth and scaling. This also helps to prevent some risks.
• A comprehensive frontend experience that includes everything you and your customers need.

DEITY Products

The DEITY PWA solves crucial issues of e-commerce platforms that merchants face daily. It lets you extend what you already have, using high performing Service Applications. As a result, it is possible to achieve unlimited scalability and flexibility that covers both backend processes and everything that happens on the frontend. Let’s see what DEITY products may help you do that.

Falcon Frontend Platform

With DEITY Falcon, you don’t need to create a Magento 2 PWA website store from scratch. The powerful platform introduces the next generation of e-commerce experiences, being a fully packed hosted solution that offers top performance and unlimited flexibility. It is infinitely scalable and extensible with mobile-first nature. However, DEITY Falcon is device-agnostic, so customers on all screen sizes get the same top-notch shopping experience. And this is more than a PWA theme. Falcon is a platform that incorporates a decoupled headless architecture, providing not only the best attitude to store visitors but also developer-friendly experience.

Service Applications

To stay ahead of the curve, DEITY lets you empower your headless e-commerce with service applications. Designed to improve your enterprise excellence, they become an inevitable addition to any existing platform. The core aim of service apps is to empower merchants to assemble an enterprise platform and reduce disinvestment and deprecation. You can add them as standard Magento 2 extensions to enhance specific areas of your DEITY Magento 2 PWA website: inventory, order management, promotions, etc. The modular nature enables a plug-and-play experience. As a result, you can effortlessly manage multiple warehouses, stocks, users, etc. Just drag-and-drop a service app you need to enable the desired feature. Everything is already connected via API.

Service Integrator

Service Integrator lets you connect your DEITY Magento 2 PWA website to any data source or service within a drag-and-drop interface. The feature is 100% API-first and can stream any data flow continuously. The limit is 50K messages per second per thread. However, you can leverage multiple threads to exceed it. 

DEITY Falcon Magento 2 PWA

The DEITY Falcon PWA can turn any website into a progressive web application. Since it is fully platform-agnostic, Falcon works with Magento 2. At the same time, you can use it to create PWAs not only for e-commerce websites but also blogs, sites with your portfolio, or anything else. The connection is based on APIs. And there is no need to worry about traffic or scalability – DEITY easily handles the most intense loads. Like other PWA projects, it lets you create a DEITY Magento 2 PWA website with any number of customizations. 

And as we’ve already mentioned above, Falcon is not just a PWA theme. It is a complete platform that consists of a PWA UI theme, a frontend client, and a middleware server.

Let’s describe all three components. The Falcon PWA theme offers top-notch performance, offline mode, add-to-homescreen functionality, push notifications, full-screen experience, etc. Thus, you can add your DEITY Magento 2 PWA website to a home screen with Web Manifest. Web Caching improves the store’s performance, while Server Worker realizes offline capabilities with. Another productivity enhancement utilizes Server Side Rendering that uses dynamic meta tags to optimize Google indexing. Push notifications are sent right from your e-commerce website right to mobile devices.

The Falcon frontend client is a service responsible for handling various tasks related to your storefront. For instance, it participates in the user interface rendering. Besides, the Falcon frontend client is responsible for performance measurement and logging, dynamic routing, long term caching, automated code-splitting, various asynchronous components, state management, dynamic meta tags, payment integrations, etc. 

As for the Falcon middleware server, it is a layer between the frontend (Falcon Client) and the backend (Magento 2 or another platform). It offers partial schemas, components, and APIs. To achieve its outstanding functionality, the middleware server supports GraphQL Schema, configurable caching, cache invalidation, custom endpoints, dynamic route resolving, payment integrations, and other features. 

All these features and characteristics result in outstanding developer experience. Coders get a comfortable environment, where they can easily create a DEITY Magento 2 PWA website of any complexity. A set of tools aimed at smooth developer experience include:

• Hot Module Replacing;
• Webpack configuration + module overrides;
• 100% TypeScript
• Jest Testing;
• CSS and SCSS support;
• Mocking;
• ESLint;
• React-based UI components;
• Automated WebSocket server installation;
• Auto-restart via nodemon;
• Logging.

You can find more information here: DEITY Falcon.

DEITY Falcon Magento PWA Frontend

Home page

When you visit a home screen of a DEITY Magento 2 PWA website, a push notification displays. 

At the top part of the home page, you can open a menu with categories (1), use search (2), log in to a customer account (3), or check your shopping cart (4).

A menu section lets you proceed to categories and other store pages. 

A search icon transfers you to a search page, while a search field works right on the home page. The former show results right after you start typing. The letter doesn’t do that: you have to type a search query and hit Enter. 

After the section with top menus, the DEITY PWA offers a selection of categories.

There is also a promotional section with discounts.

Cross-sells, up-sells, and related products can also be displayed on the home page. For instance, you can leverage a section with best sellers or new arrivals.

There is also a section with articles, but you can configure any custom appearance.

Category page

A category page offers several sorting options as well as lets you filter out the content of the catalog. You can see a product name and price.

Product page

A product page doesn’t have any unnecessary elements. Just look at it:

Below, there are different sections with cross-sells, up-sells, and related products.

CMS pages

There is no information in the About Us section. However, DEITY PWA offers a selection of blog articles.

An article looks as follows:

Shopping cart

You can get to your shopping cart by clicking the icon on the top right corner of a page.  It is possible to edit it and view subtotal. 

However, there is also a cart summary section before you get to the checkout page.

Checkout

The checkout procedure is split into four steps: Customer info, Delivery, Payment, and Summary. Although this page looks fresh, it doesn’t look like a modern one-step checkout.

Don’t hesitate to explore the PWA storefront here: DEITY Falcon PWA Storefront.

Pricing

You can a fully packed hosted frontend platform for free. The corresponding version is available on GitHub: DEITY Falcon. Besides, DEITY offers a free trial. The price of other services and solutions is available upon request.

What People Say

What do other people say about the DEITY PWA solution? We’ve analyzed several reviews to provide the following extract. DEITY offers great PWA software that is easy to install, configure, and use. Even the first release was robust enough to satisfy some customers. The platform allows creating fast and feature-rich Magento 2 PWA websites. Furthermore, it offers a less time-consuming way to launch an online store than Magento. Since the overall architecture is well-thought-out, you can quickly adapt Falcon to your needs.

As for the negative moment, the developer documentation is still under construction. However, it is pretty comprehensive and well-written. Although some parts are missing, you can always rely on a support team which offers professional technical assistance. Also, the platform lacks some features, but adding them is only a matter of time. 

You can find more reviews here: DEITY Falcon Overview.

How to Migrate to DEITY Magento 2 PWA Website

The DEITY PWA is a powerful tool that provides the ability to take all the best elements of the Magento 2 backend and create a robust, safe, and reliable storefront on top of it. However, you cannot use the default Magento 2 tools to migrate to a brand new PWA store. 

As we’ve mentioned above, you should use a third-party solution, such as the Improved Import & Export Magento 2 extension. Our module is frontend-agnostic and perfectly suits the Magento 2 admin. It means that you won’t face any difficulties using it with a DEITY Magento 2 PWA website. 

The extension lets you freely transfer all entities from an old Magento 1 or Magento 2 website to a brand new PWA storefront. Furthermore, it is possible to leverage a free add-on for Magento 1 (2) to Magento 2 data transfers. You can also use our module to migrate to the DEITY Magento 2 PWA site from other e-commerce platforms. 

Note that our team offers migration services in addition to the extension. Ask our specialists to transfer your old e-commerce website to a brand new DEITY Magento 2 PWA store, and they will do all the dirty job. Contact our support to discuss the migration and follow the link below to discover more facts about Improved Import & Export: 

Get Improved Import & Export Magento 2 Extension