Helping Swell’s merchants provide unparalleled ecommerce experiences

Headless commerce, without the speed penalty

Swell runs its headless, API-first ecommerce backend on Vercel, with Next.js powering the storefronts of its merchants. The architecture gives Swell’s users the freedom to assemble their own stack from best-of-breed tools, while Vercel and Next.js supply the rendering and delivery layer underneath.

The payoff is measurable for merchants, many of whom migrate from legacy platforms. They can run more marketing campaigns and carry more SKUs without degrading site performance. That’s largely thanks to on-demand Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR) and hybrid rendering, which let dynamic content update without a full rebuild.

"We see merchants building these blazingly fast sites on Swell. And that's one of the powers of headless ecommerce—you can use best-of-breed technologies like Vercel and Next.js." — Greg Hoskin, Head of Solutions Engineering

Fast onboarding, faster sites

Time-to-launch is another differentiator. Using Swell with the Next.js Commerce starter kit, one recent customer stood up a full ecommerce site in about a month. On typical legacy platforms, that same process commonly stretches from four months to a year.

The combination also keeps the door open for deeper customization. Merchants don’t have to trade speed for flexibility: the framework is easy to adopt, yet extensible enough to reshape the storefront and the overall customer experience as the business grows.

"Our merchants can get up and running quickly with a framework that's fast and developer friendly, while also having the ability to really extend and customize their store and their ecommerce experience on top of that."

Developer experience that doesn’t get in the way

The benefits extend to Swell’s own engineers. When they migrated from their previous hosting solution, the move was frictionless — no troubleshooting, no stress. The team credits the Vercel dashboard with making it easy to add new platforms and manage subdomains. From the API and deployment pipeline to the user interface and overall ergonomics, everything “just works,” which they say leads to an excellent developer experience.