After spending quite some time using WordPress as a data source for Gatsby (by working on different projects including GatsbyWPThemes.com), I explored static eCommerce with Gatsby. This was the time we received an inquiry from a client who wanted to convert a traditional WooCommerce site to have a Gatsby frontend.

This project presented quite a few challenges, things that did not come up when we created standard blogs with Gatsby and WordPress. For instance, now we had to deal with a payment gateway and an events calendar, which pulled event details from a WordPress plugin.

In this talk, I would like to discuss what those challenges were and how we overcame them. In summary, we solved a lot of the data sourcing challenges using WPGraphQL and relevant extensions. The frontend problems, we solved using different libraries and sometimes Lambda functions.

This project was a great learning experience for the small freelance team that we were. I will be sharing why we chose WooCommerce and about those lessons we learned. I believe this is the time many folks are interested in giving a fast eCommerce experience to customers and I hope this talk will help those developers achieve that.