Should we use AEM SPA for the e-commerce CIF integration?

[stai]

Hi Experts,

My customer has decided to integrate AEM and Magento for the new e-commerce website using the CIF. I have a query. Should we recommend that the customer use AEM SPA Editor to create the new e-commerce Website? I am aware that our Venia demo site does not make use of the SPA Editor. I understand that using the SPA editor will improve the user experience, but it appears to have performance issues when there are so many product pages to load in the same request, and most of the OOTB commerce components cannot be reused. Could you please explain your recommendation and why you made it? I am looking forward your reply. Thank you very much!

Regards,

Jaman

[kautuk_sahni]

Whether or not to recommend the AEM SPA Editor for an e-commerce website using CIF depends on a few factors, including the specific requirements of the website, the performance budget, and the resources available to the development team.

Benefits of using the AEM SPA Editor

• Improved user experience: The SPA Editor provides a number of features that can improve the user experience of an e-commerce website, such as faster page load times, smoother navigation, and more engaging interactions.
• Increased agility: The SPA Editor makes it easier for marketers to update and edit content on the website without having to rely on developers.
• Better performance for large sites: The SPA Editor can help to improve the performance of large e-commerce websites by loading content on demand and rendering it on the client side.

Challenges of using the AEM SPA Editor

• Performance issues: As you mentioned, the SPA Editor can experience performance issues when there are a large number of product pages to load in the same request. This is because the SPA Editor needs to load all of the necessary content for all of the product pages upfront, before any of the pages can be rendered.
• Limited reuse of OOTB commerce components: Many of the out-of-the-box (OOTB) AEM commerce components are not designed to be used with the SPA Editor. This means that developers will need to create custom components for the e-commerce website, which can increase the development time and cost.

Recommendation

Based on the information you have provided, I would recommend that you discuss the following with your customer:

• What are the specific requirements of the e-commerce website? What are the most important factors for the customer, such as performance, user experience, and time to market?
• What is the performance budget for the website? Can the customer afford the potential performance hit that may come with using the SPA Editor?
• What resources does the development team have available? Do they have the skills and experience to develop custom components for the SPA Editor?

Once you have a better understanding of the customer's requirements, you can make a more informed recommendation about whether or not to use the SPA Editor.

If the customer decides to use the SPA Editor, there are a few things that you can do to mitigate the performance issues:

• Use lazy loading to load product images and other content on demand.
• Use a CDN to serve static content from servers that are closer to the user's location.
• Use a server-side rendering framework, such as Next.js, to render some of the content on the server side, before it is sent to the client.

I hope this information is helpful. Please let me know if you have any other questions.