What you need to know about Pack’s partnership with Shopify Hydrogen

Pack's mission from day one has been to help ecommerce teams tap into speed, growth, and shared innovation.

Our recent partnership with Shopify Hydrogen furthers that mission. 

As Shopify's toolkit for headless commerce, Hydrogen provides hooks, utilities, frameworks, and best-in-class examples for building dynamic and performant commerce applications — all on the React programming language. Pack was designed to help brands transform Hydrogen into a custom storefront that’s quick to spin up, and easy to use.

This partnership places Pack at the forefront of the headless commerce renaissance on Shopify. Together, we can help merchants bring Hydrogen-powered stores to life — bridging the gap between site speed, flexibility, and user-friendliness for both brands and devs.

"Hydrogen is the next major unlock for Shopify merchants that crave freedom and flexibility from a frontend standpoint." - Cory Cummings, Co-Founder and CEO at Pack.

The Hydrogen-powered future of Shopify

It's no secret that Shopify is the go-to ecommerce platform for any business owner looking to launch their store quickly and efficiently. But user-friendliness often means a trade-off in flexibility. As brands scale site content, add 3rd party apps, and design experiences that don’t fit perfectly within a Shopify theme, they need a way to tap into the flexibility of a headless stack, without sacrificing on ease-of-use or performance.

This posed a challenge to both mid-market and enterprise-level brands that rely on content-rich experiences to drive sales, as slower sites lead to lower conversion rates. 

To achieve speed and flexibility for their stores, many merchants opted for custom headless storefronts. However, that came with its own challenges, including:  

• Slow time to market — A custom headless storefront will often take 4-12 months of development time before going live. With Pack’s Hydrogen integration, that development time is slashed to 3 months or less.

• Less focus on growth — With a custom headless storefront, the burden of technology and maintenance falls on the merchant and its dev team. This often causes a major shift in focus from driving growth, to maintaining/improving site functionality.  

• Strain on developer bandwidth — Custom headless storefronts create a massive bottleneck for developers, who get bogged down with content-related tasks rather than improving the overall site experience.

• Slower marketing launches — More complex systems cause launch timelines to drag out as multiple teams have to get involved for every content launch.

With Shopify’s recent investments into Hydrogen, the ecommerce giant is taking a future-first approach to headless commerce—providing a stack that delivers a synergistic blend of convenience, site speed, and dev-friendliness.  

As part of every paid Shopify plan, Hydrogen helps merchants leverage all Shopify has to offer. And with Pack, developers can tap into a visual frontend for managing Hydrogen storefronts, as well as access Hydrogen’s frameworks, hooks and utilities.

How Pack's partnership with Hydrogen drives value for Shopify merchants and developers

Hydrogen is undeniably a potent toolset, saving developers from building extensive headless architecture from scratch, while also enabling merchants to seamlessly create and connect site elements.

But, it's far from a "silver bullet," especially when it comes to content management. That's where integrations like Pack come into play.

When combined with Hydrogen, Pack makes it easy to build and customize shopping experiences, leaning into a low-code approach that empowers both merchants and developers. Marketing teams get a user-friendly interface to manage content, while devs can focus on building new features that captivate audiences and drive sales.

Pack + Hydrogen for merchants

In addition to boosting site speed and conversion rates, here are a few benefits of Pack's Hydrogen integration for Shopify merchants:

1. Eliminates marketing bottlenecks via intuitive UI and low-code / no-code integrations

2. Reduces the risk + lift of implementing a Hydrogen storefront on Shopify

3. Unlocks the full value of Shopify

4. Keeps your store as easy to manage as a Shopify theme

Pack + Hydrogen for developers

The value of Pack's Hydrogen integration continues beyond merchants. Developers also benefit from:

1. React-based front end with a native GitHub integration

2. Support for Remix and Oxygen

3. Visual layer for meta objects and a session-like framework

4. Dev workflows for content management, local, and production environments

These benefits culminate into a purpose-built integration that conjoins functionality with flexibility — all within the Shopify ecosystem. Whether it be your headless CMS, dev tools, or CRO, Pack delivers everything needed to establish and scale a Hydrogen storefront.

"Whether you're deep in the weeds with custom Hydrogen development or still early in evaluating new tech, Pack streamlines a headless commerce approach from start to finish." - Cory Cummings, Co-Founder and CEO at Pack

Build the future of ecommerce with Pack + Hydrogen

As Shopify continues to pioneer ecommerce with a new take on headless architecture, our team is proud to stand at its side, as both a partner and solution for merchants and developers. 

But our work is far from over. With Pack's Hydrogen beta program now live, we've partnered with agencies and developers to work with and give us their constructive feedback.

If you're interested in building the future of ecommerce together, we'd love to set you up with beta access.