Building a Marketplace App with Reaction Commerce: Benefits You Get
If you decide to build your marketplace with an e-commerce platform, make sure that you have studied all its ins and outs.
Check out if the platform suits your business needs and can be extended as your marketplace grows.
In this article, you will learn about Reaction Commerce - young, but already authoritative open-source e-commerce platform.
Let's see how why it can become a perfect solution for a modern, scalable, and user-friendly marketplace.
Reaction Commerce. General review
Reaction Commerce is a Meteor.js based open source e-commerce platform. It was officially launched in March 2017, however, in such short period of time, they have set up as a real-time reactive and 100% customizable e-commerce platform.
The main trigger point that has spurred Reaction Commerce team to create such platform was that most of the e-commerce businesses grow out of the ready-made platforms they use.
To keep up with the latest trends in the e-commerce industry, as well as technology evolution, retailers have to switch to another platform, as it becomes too costly and time-sapping to scale and customize current one.
Sara Hicks, co-founder and CEO of Reaction Commerce said: “E-commerce technology is still in the first inning and has a long way to go - we know because our team has spent decades building shops on platforms that we outgrew or broke all together. We’ve spent the past few years honing Reaction Commerce and turning it into a platform that both evolves with the industry and inspires further change".
The “highlight” of Reaction Commerce is that it is able to support your business at all stages: from the early start to further growth and development.
Feeling intrigued? Let’s review what benefits you get when you decide to build your e-commerce or marketplace app with Reaction Commerce.
Read also: Reaction Commerce: Pros and cons of MeteorJS e-commerce solution
Using Reaction Commerce for your marketplace app: main goodies for your business
The main motto of Reaction Commerce team is to support a flexible platform, that will forge ahead and grow together with your business, trends, and technologies. As the performance and scalability of your marketplace depend on the technology it's built on, let's start from the Reaction Commerce technical goodies.
Reaction Commerce is built with leading frameworks and technologies
Reaction Commerce is supported by a large open-source community, as it uses famous and flexible frameworks and technologies.
Its technologies include JavaScript, Node.js, npm, React, and MongoDB. It also uses NoSQL databases, that in comparison with relational, are more scalable and able to handle large volumes of data.
In addition, Reaction Commerce is based on Meteor node.js framework, which makes it real-time reactive and high-performing.
Flexibility and modern approach of this platform attracts thousands of developers from all over the world. It is constantly improved by an active community with over 7200 members, which makes it a top e-commerce open-source project on Github.
The community of Reaction Commerce constantly grows, which means that the platform will only flourish with new possibilities. In 2018, their goals are to significantly improve the performance, add new features, and grow their managed platform-as-a-service, so retailers and brands can easily deploy their stores and marketplaces.
It provides you with constant support and detailed documentation
Reaction Commerce has a real-time support channel, where you can get a quick answer to your questions. It also provides a detailed documentation with different guides, tutorials, and forums. So in case of any challenges, you may be sure that you will get immediate support.
You get 100% customizable platform
One more “highlight” of Reaction Commerce is that anything can be extended or changed according to your business needs. It is completely open-source, so anyone can download their codebase and extend it from there. Backed up by a supportive community and popular technologies, Reaction Commerce is a nice choice for building scalable marketplaces.
It offers real-time e-commerce and analytics
Reaction Commerce is built on Meteor framework, which means that information is updated immediately when a client requests it from the server.
Why does it matter for online marketplaces?
The primary goal of Reaction Commerce is to be a conversion-first platform. This means that every millisecond should bring your users closer to the purchase stage. That’s why Reaction Commerce offers products load, promotions, and pricing without page reloads or app updates.
Reaction Commerce is also a single-page app. It means that when a user visits a Reaction shop for the first time, the entire shop is loaded behind the scenes. As all the data is already available locally, the pages users visit are opening with a lightning speed.
When a user lands on your website, he or she performs a lot of actions (events), e.g. chooses a product, clicks on it, selects filters, adds it to the cart, etc. Reaction Commerce (that uses event-driven technology JavaScript) tracks all these events and immediately updates them. Here is an example of this process from the article “Why Reaction is real-time”:
“Let’s say a shopper has viewed a product for the 10th time over the last three days. Our platform will then know to send a promotion to that shopper in real time, with no page reload, on that 10th visit to entice him or her to make a purchase at that very moment. Cool stuff, right?”
We agree that this stuff is really cool, as it helps you to decrease bounce rate and get more conversions.
Reaction commerce is SEO optimized
Reaction Commerce uses the following tools for handling SEO:
- Iron-Router conducts both server- and client-side routing and sets proper titles for each site/document/URL.
- Kadira Flow Router provides client-side routing only.
- Kadira Dochead adds meta objects.
- Prerender.io - service, that allows your JavaScript website be crawled by search engines
These all confirm that a marketplace built with Reaction Commerce will be SEO friendly.
What projects Reaction Commerce is suitable for
Reaction Commerce is a worthy solution for both single-merchant stores and marketplaces. It also works well for both startups, middle-size businesses, and enterprises. The co-founder of Reaction Commerce said:
“We’re already attracting major brands, from Fortune 10 companies and businesses in the Internet Retailer 500, to vertically native startups, and everything in between”Reaction Commerce may be a good choice if you:
- Want to switch to another platform
The process of migration will be smooth and easy, as Reaction Commerce team has developed migration paths from Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce.
- Work as a e-commerce developer or own an e-commerce agency
Reaction Commerce offers partner program, joining which you gain developer resources, dedicated support, revenue-sharing opportunities, etc.
Reaction Commerce features
Here are the main features Reaction Commerce offers “out of the box”
- Product and Inventory management
- Universal tags to organize your products into a structured hierarchy
- Order management
- Customer profiles
- One step checkout
- Notifications
- Advanced search
- Flexible shipping rates
- Discounts
- Customized themes
- An open ecosystem that allows you to integrate thousands of open-source packages
Reaction Commerce integrations
Reaction Commerce is integrated with the following services:
Reaction Commerce payment gateway
It is integrated with famous payment providers such as Stripe, Stripe Connect, COD, PayPal PayFlow and Express, Braintree, Authorize.net. If it doesn’t include a payment provider you need, you may easily integrate your own.
Reaction Commerce mobile app
Reaction is out-of-the-box responsive and can also be configured to build a native iOS or Android app.
Reaction Commerce customization
As it was already mentioned, Reaction Commerce can be easily extended with new features. For example, here are some of the features Reaction Commerce doesn't have.
- Promotions and advertisements of the product
- Bidding
- Product reviews
- Affiliate program
- Custom commissions
- Keyword search
- Orders history
Reaction Commerce Pricing
The average price of developing a marketplace with Reaction Commerce starts at $5000. This price includes deployment of all out-of-the-box features and setting the server. If you want to customize it and enrich with wider functionality, the price will vary depending on your requirements. Feel free to drop us a line and get a free estimate for your custom marketplace with Reaction Commerce.
Wrapping Up
Reaction Commerce is rapidly growing and extending its functionality. Its flexibility and potential attracts both startups and already established marketplaces. If you have any questions about Reaction Commerce customization, feel free to leave a comment below.