What Is Catalyst?
Catalyst is the fully customizable, composable storefront and framework for BigCommerce.
As a fully built storefront and toolkit officially engineered and maintained by BigCommerce, Catalyst jumpstarts your composable development, allowing you to omit the step of building the boilerplate ecommerce experience and move straight to making it your own with custom branding and features.
Catalyst is an open-source, practical starting point, built on the best modern tools and focused on giving you the flexibility to develop the way you want.
With the built-in, powerful visual editor Makeswift, Catalyst offers distinct lanes for developers and marketers. Rich and creative content designs can be accomplished without code, while developers still have the full power of customization to build new interactivity and integrations.
Catalyst Highlights
- A fully functional storefront within seconds
- Optimized for SEO and accessibility
- Fine-tuned performance, with market-leading Lighthouse scores
- Built on popular, best-of-breed tools that development teams love to use
- Instantly customizable, ready for seamless integrations for every business need
The Catalyst Tech Stack
The backbone of Catalyst is an opinionated set of tools that have wide adoption and popularity in enterprise web application development. This means developers can build on top of Catalyst with the frameworks and languages they already love to use. The Catalyst tech stack includes:
- Next.js - One of the most popular and fully featured web application frameworks
- React Server Components - Powerful and flexible UI components, enabling advanced data fetching and rendering strategies
- Tailwind - A CSS framework focused on rapid development
- GraphQL- Descriptive and performant API queries
- BigCommerce GraphQL Storefront API - GraphQL coverage for the most critical commerce data and operations
Out-of-the-Box Features
The current release of Catalyst provides a fully functional implementation of the most critical workflows for an ecommerce storefront.
Catalyst’s features include:
- Full integration with the Makeswift visual editor for both dynamic and static pages
- Product listing pages, powered by BigCommerce brands and categories, with faceted filtering
- Textual search
- Dynamic product detail pages powered by your BigCommerce catalog
- Customer registration and login, with customer-aware catalog visibility and product pricing
- Customer account features, including address book, password reset, wishlists, and order history
- Persistent cart, restoring a registered customer’s cart in progress when logging in on other devices
- Redirected checkout on BigCommerce’s hosted SaaS environment, which simplifies PCI compliance by making sure sensitive payment information is never transmitted through your headless storefront
- Multiple storefronts and multi-language content
- Built-in Google Analytics support
Catalyst and Makeswift
As noted above, Catalyst comes with built-in support for Makeswift, a composable visual editor designed to equip marketers to create rich, high-quality web experiences without the friction of steep learning curves or never-ending development cycles.
With Catalyst as a fully implemented headless storefront and Makeswift as a premier content editing experience, you have a truly powerful enterprise-level composable toolkit.
The built-in Makeswift integration can be included when installing your Catalyst codebase, as we’ll cover in detail in the following lessons.
If you want to dive deeper into custom development for Makeswift, see the dedicated Makeswift Core course.
