Decoupling Drupal commerce to multiply and scale the front end

Much of Centarro’s work is improving Drupal Commerce for merchants who need to accommodate multiple complexities at once. Some need to create a tailored experience for multiple types of customers within a single online store. Others need to build native mobile applications that interact with the website’s database for product catalog browsing and purchasing. Some of the most complex cases create multiple stores that sell products in multiple regions with custom availability, pricing, and marketing per store - all powered by a single application.The Commerce project and its primary contributed modules (e.g. Shipping, Price List, PayPal, etc.) enable rich functionality in the back-end, but when you need to multiply or scale your front-ends, you can’t just grab a module. You need to consider your high-level application architecture and development philosophy. Drupal Commerce affords you multiple approaches, including developing an API-first eCommerce back-end and freeing your front-end teams to use their frameworks and libraries of choice to deliver custom, scalable front-end applications.More than just reviewing a feature set, this session will detail when and how to adopt an API-first philosophy or “go headless with Drupal Commerce.” I’ll demonstrate and guide you to the tools we’ve developed to support real-world use cases described above and give you a taste for where we’re taking it next.