We are excited to announce we’ve been awarded the Built for Shopify distinction. Built for Shopify status is the highest level of recognition and achievement that an app can reach.
Announced earlier this year, the goal of the program is to make it easier for merchants to choose apps that meet their businesses needs and exceed their expectations for quality.
We all worked at Shopify and spent many years building the tooling and infrastructure over the years. Being merchants ourselves, we had been burned by subpar apps on our own stores, and we knew we could bring the difference in quality and performance to the app ecosystem
We also knew performance was both a merchant and Shopify’s priority. Our goal from day one was to build from the strongest foundation so our merchants could stand behind our experience.
Some of the key things that Built for Shopify looks for are:
- Ease of use
- Performance
- Proven usefulness
While building Abra, we made deliberate decisions that made our platform more reliable, performant, and powerful.. Today we want to dig into some of those choices to help you understand why you can trust and rely on Abra when optimizing your storefront.
In case you are just learning about us, Abra helps merchants increase their conversions through storefront personalization. We built an app that allows merchants to dynamically update pricing and a developer SDK that makes anything possible.
When optimizing for performance, there were three major things we designed for.
Minimal External Dependencies
The simplest way of making something faster is adding less. From day one we were ruthless in avoiding external dependencies that are often used by other apps—such as jQuery, React, Angular, or Handlebars. Instead, we have developed a minimal liquid compiler that is 20kb in size, ensuring we don’t use a kilobyte of code more than needed.
Metafields and Reducing API Calls
Another area that can slow you down is making requests to a remote server. As Shopify has expanded its investment in metaobjects and metafields, we have had more tools at our disposal to load in data server-side from Shopify, rather than making requests to an external server after page load. We store our promotion logic in metafields in a way that is built for performance while maintaining the privacy of your promotions.
Efficient Change Implementation
Abra adopts a resource-efficient approach in applying changes. Unlike other apps that overwrite a vast amount of elements, potentially causing numerous browser content repaints and additional network calls, Abra employs a lightweight diffing algorithm. This algorithm identifies and applies the smallest set of changes necessary to transform elements on the page. It also ensures a quicker user experience by leveraging native browser capabilities.
All of this results in tooling that might feel invisible but delivers speed and performance where it matters most for your customers.
To learn more about how you can use Abra for Black Friday or our SDK.