March 23, 2023

Sunsetting Shogun Frontend

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For three years now, our team at Shogun has worked diligently to deliver our packaged frontend solution for headless commerce, Shogun Frontend. We’ve made significant progress, launched over 50 storefronts, and were able to help many brands realize the benefits of headless without complex infrastructure.  But despite all we accomplished together—and the exciting promise of […]

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Finbarr Taylor

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For three years now, our team at Shogun has worked diligently to deliver our packaged frontend solution for headless commerce, Shogun Frontend. We’ve made significant progress, launched over 50 storefronts, and were able to help many brands realize the benefits of headless without complex infrastructure. 

But despite all we accomplished together—and the exciting promise of this space yet to come—we have made the difficult decision to retire the Shogun Frontend product.

This decision is in response to broader shifts in the current market environment, leading many merchants to need to be especially cost conscious. The wider macroeconomic trends of the last year that impact merchants have had downstream impact on our ability to deliver on our vision for this particular product. 

Despite these wide-reaching changes to the ecommerce landscape, we have seen continued, significant demand for our flagship product, Shogun Page Builder, and we will place our entire focus on this product moving forward. It fully aligns with our mission to empower merchants to build exceptional storefronts that scale.

Shogun Page Builder is a proven, powerful—and importantly, accessible, way—for Shopify and BigCommerce merchants to create high-converting, custom store content while reducing developer reliance and costs. Today over 35,000+ scaling brands use Page Builder—and it’s steadily growing. 

What happens now for Shogun Frontend customers

Over the past weeks, we’ve taken the time to speak one-on-one with each of our Shogun Frontend customers and are actively discussing tailored recommendations for each, alongside agency partners. It was extremely important for us to ensure our customers were the first to hear the information, and that each was supplied with not only recommendations, but also ample time. 

Importantly, Shogun Frontend will not sunset immediately—we will ensure our platform is fully operational for a period of 9-12 months while our customers migrate to other solutions. Ensuring our customer’s sites are supported while they remain on our platform in the meantime is top priority. 

Thanks to strong relationships with our incredible agency and technology partners—many of the stores we launched are now being migrated by phenomenal leaders in the headless space, including our recommended Shopify technology partner Pack Digital and our recommended Shopify agency partner Form Factory

We are pleased to highly recommend both of these partners for their expertise in the landscape. Each has been innovating with headless technology for some time, and will be helping many of our customers migrate from Shogun Frontend to their chosen platforms while retaining a high level of value from their current builds. 

Pack Digital is very well placed to execute on the vision of headless on Shopify without complexity. They’ve already launched with 25+ merchants and have gone further than Shogun Frontend in some key areas.

Form Factory has been a top Shogun agency partner for years, supporting many Shogun Frontend builds. More recently, Form Factory has specialized in Shopify Hydrogen development, with multiple live clients on the platform.

For our BigCommerce customers, we recommend our agency partner, Trellis. Trellis is both a BigCommerce Elite Partner and a Vercel partner, and has years of experience creating powerful digital experiences across the ecommerce space. 

Further, we’re happy that many of the stores migrating with these partners are planning to incorporate Shogun Page Builder into their newly-migrated, flexible setups. It will be a key way brands can maintain efficient content creation for their stores and continue enabling non-technical team members to make storewide changes.

The future of exceptional ecommerce 

Our team has learned so much about merchant needs from building Shogun Frontend over three years and—while the decision to retire this product was challenging—we are earnestly excited about the future and sustained growth of our flagship product, Shogun Page Builder. 

The entire Shogun team is now working with a singular focus to make Page Builder even better for you and we’re excited for what this will allow us to bring you next. We’ve shipped dozens of new Page Builder features in the last couple of months and we’re just getting started.

We’d like to thank the many partners, agencies, and customers that collaborated with us over the years on Shogun Frontend. Your support and trust as we explored an emerging and exciting space together is something our team and I will never forget. 

Our shared mission with you—to deliver exceptional ecommerce—is something we look forward to supporting you with on Shogun Page Builder for years to come.

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