Shogun Frontend: A Year in Review and a Sneak Peek Ahead

Brands today know that differentiation is key, but many seem to be running into a major blocker limiting their growth: default themes.

Early on, themes (or standard ecommerce setups) proved a golden ticket to get a DTC ecommerce channel up and running fast with minimal resources. But there comes a point in a business’s maturity where themes turn from an enabler of growth, to the enemy of growth.

We see that merchants outgrowing the standard themes or templated sites available need a way to simplify the creation of richer ecommerce experiences without compromising site performance. Enter Shogun Frontend—an all-in-one Frontend Platform that eliminates the complexity of a headless build, and delivers total design flexibility with unbelievable site speed.

In this post, I’ll share some of the key reasons multi-channel brands are turning to a flexible and unified solution like Shogun Frontend, and we’ll look ahead into the future of this trailblazing product.

Without further ado, in 2021, here’s what we saw…

1. Launching Shogun-powered frontends drove growth for innovative brands

We’ve seen a fantastic acceleration in the number of store launches in 2021 (in fact, we saw 250% growth in the number of launches in the second half of 2021!). We’re thrilled to have worked with several customers scaling multinational brands, with new sub-brands launched each month.

Below are three of the builds I’d like to share in particular and their exciting results at a glance:

Daring.com

• The plant-based protein brand increased average pages per session by 25% shortly after implementing Shogun Frontend!
• Our fastest implementation to date (going from idea to new headless site in just three months), the Daring team was well-equipped to re-launch in December 2021 with a stunning rebrand.

#cta-mini-fe#Learn more about Daring’s success Read the case study

TULA.com

• This prestige skincare brand increased their site speed by 35% by switching to a Shogun-powered frontend!
• A decoupled frontend has helped the TULA team stay agile, experiment, and offer the best shopping possible. They’ve now got creative control of everything a visitor sees, without compromises.
• Now, their page-to-page clickthrough is also 5x faster!

#cta-mini-fe#Learn more about TULA’s success Read the case study

TheFeed.com

• For this nutritional marketplace, vetting new products with near-constant site updates was proving hard to do at scale. They wanted their store to precisely match their creative vision, and get lightning-fast load times.
• Post-launch with Shogun Frontend, they saw ecommerce conversion rate go up 5.2%, and revenue per visitor jumped 10.3%!

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#cta-mini-fe#Learn more about The Feed’s success Read the case study

2. Brands built flexible frontends in record time (and with custom workflows)

By the end of 2021, we’re pleased to share that thanks to product enhancements, Shogun Frontend customers were able to publish their sites 40% faster and set up a new instance in just 10 minutes!

Here’s some of what made this possible:

Store Sync [Beta]

While still in Beta, Store Sync opens up the ability to clone storefronts fast. Businesses with international and/or sub-brand use cases can effortlessly create additional storefront copies, which dramatically decreases implementation times—a most recent customer example launched in under 2 weeks.

#cta-mini-fe#Find out if your store is a good fit for headless commerce.Take the quiz

The new Starter Kit

Shogun Frontend’s Starter Kit is built to give your store a head start towards building your new react.js-based storefront. With prebuilt product boxes, collections, accounts, search, and more, your teams are set up to recognize faster time-to-value. For merchants, this means you can get your new frontend up and running with your inventory and branding fast. For agencies, this means a higher volume of headless store implementations and a much smoother client experience.

Direct access to the CMS (for faster custom workflows!)

An often overlooked benefit of headless builds is the ability to create and manage more efficient workflows.

Announced in Q4, our Frontend API will give developers direct access to CMS data, putting your business in a position to maximize ROI of a flexible headless platform. For example, developers will be able to import custom content—such as blogs from external systems—into the CMS so that all of the site content is managed in one place.

Additionally, the Frontend API will mean development teams can automate common developer tasks, such as building and scheduling publish of the site, allowing your team to stay focused on initiatives that drive significant business value instead of pulling an all-nighter to press a button.

The use cases only get more creative from there, and we’re excited to work with our customers to expand what’s possible with the Frontend API in 2022.

3. Now, even more ready-to-go integrations at your fingertips

In 2021, we saw The Shogun Integrations Network continue its high growth driven by merchant advocacy and organic interest. In Q4 alone, the partner integrations network grew by 25%.

Here’s a look at three exciting integrations you can now include on your Shogun Frontend storefront:

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Rebuy

Shopify brands will recognize Rebuy as an omnichannel personalization platform helping you to increase AOV, accelerate sales, and grow quickly. Unlike other options, Rebuy provides a full suite of personalization, marketing, and retention services, white-glove support, and a customizable shopping cart.

Klaviyo

‍A hugely popular integration across the ecommerce space, marketing automation platform Klaviyo accelerates revenue for online businesses using email, web, mobile and SMS. Helping companies to leverage these owned marketing channels, Klaviyo allows you to easily store, access, analyze and use transactional and behavioral data to power highly-targeted customer and prospect communications.

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‍Okendo

Okendo enables 3,500+ fast-growing consumer brands like Netflix, SKIMS and Bite to leverage their most powerful asset; their customer reviews. Okendo has all the tools you need to capture and showcase customer-generated content including product ratings & reviews, photos and videos, and Q&A. Brands use this content to build shopper trust, drive conversions and maximize CLTV.

We’re excited to continue growing this network to provide Shogun Frontend merchants with partnerships they can trust.

#cta-mini-fe#Are you an integration partner looking to be a part of this growing network? Sign up here

3. We certified over 30 new agency partners for your headless builds

In September 2021, we officially launched the new Agency Partner Program! We had been working with leading agencies for some time. However, we invested heavily to expand the range of trusted options you have for your new headless builds.

Agencies in the program are eligible to receive client referrals from Shogun, get access to Shogun Frontend with a sandbox account, and get acquainted with our rockstar agency partner team to get resources, roadmaps, and support as needed.

#cta-mini-fe#Want to partner with us to stand up headless commerce services? Become an agency partner

Since the official launch, we’ve seen a great deal of joint success. Check out these featured agency partner implementations:

Digital Agency oBundle increased revenue per user for BigCommerce clients by 36.5%! 

• A BigCommerce brand for more than eight years, Discount Electronics teamed up with Shogun agency partner oBundle to transform their site with Shogun Frontend in July 2021.
• Just four months after the launch, the brand saw ecommerce conversion rate increase 40.6%, and revenue per user was up by 36.5%.
• Now their site’s first contentful paint (FCP) is an incredible 1.2 seconds on desktop and 1.7 seconds on mobile.

In 2021, Certified agency Form Factory helped brands like Nomad, FLEO, and TULA go headless.

• ClientNomad increased ecommerce conversion rate and revenue per session by 25%

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Now, a quick look into the future of Shogun Frontend in 2022!

Shogun Frontend 2022 Sneak Peak: Drag and drop, low code experiences for headless commerce!

We’ve named 2022 as the year that Shogun Frontend will take huge steps towards making headless commerce accessible to more brands.

Shogun’s identity sits atop drag-and-drop experiences, central to the success of our first product, Shogun Page Builder. We are now committed to bringing this expertise into the headless domain. This vision puts your ecommerce team in the driver’s seat, creating exceptional experiences for shoppers without page speed or performance tradeoffs.

A low code section builder—followed by a connector to add content directly from the CMS—will shorten implementation time as you go headless and remove countless barriers for your ecommerce team in their day-to-day execution of business objectives. 

Built for flexibility

This low code experience represents a meaningful step forward for non-technical users but also puts agencies and developers in a great position to focus on complex feature development instead of menial tasks.

Shogun Frontend’s low code solutions open new possibilities for teams to empower a wider range of contributors, but the platform remains 100% flexible for businesses looking to create custom experiences and code. 

Merchants and agencies alike can build pages and templates with any combination of custom-coded and/or low-code sections. The result is total flexibility and increased efficiency in implementations, redesigns, and day-to-day operations.

The early feedback from merchants and agencies has been tremendous.

As with all products we build here at Shogun, we are working closely with our partners over the coming months to create a merchant-centric, developer-friendly solution for the market, and we’re more excited than ever for what’s to come!

Want to exceed the limits of modern commerce?

2021 saw continued growth and innovation of Shogun Frontend, our team, and our partner relationships. We remain steadfast in providing businesses a best-in-class solution to recognize the benefits of unlimited design flexibility and crazy fast page load times while looking into the future of low code/drag-and-drop optionality for ecommerce businesses.

2021 was an exhilarating one for Shogun Frontend, with the accelerated growth of our solution, team, and partner network! Fresh off the heels of a $67.5 M round of funding, our team continued to execute our mission of making exceptional, performant storefronts accessible to businesses small and large. And we’ve got big things in store for this year too!

#cta-visual-fe#<cta-title>Ready to make exceptional your brand’s thing this year?<cta-title>See how Shogun Frontend can help you achieve the exact ecommerce experience you envision. Learn more‍