What is Pack? A Guide for Merchants

Tapping into site speed without over-complicating your tech stack—or your content management processes—can be a major hurdle as you scale. Pack is here to help.

What is Pack? A Guide for Merchants

As an ecommerce brand, you know blazing-fast shopping experiences are the key to attracting visitors and increasing conversions. Every second you gain in mobile site speed can translate massive conversion rates lifts (up to 27% more conversions!).  

However, tapping into that site speed without over-complicating your tech stack—or your content management processes—can be a major hurdle as you scale. 

That’s why we built Pack. 

As a digital experience platform, Pack combines the ease-of-use of a Shopify storefront with the speed and flexibility of a custom headless tech stack. Plus, Pack is built to speed up workflows for both marketers and developers—ensuring you get content out the door faster.

Your marketing team needs to create content quickly. Your developers crave the flexibility of custom builds. 

Pack gives you both. 

Historically, headless storefronts forced merchants to become developers

As a turn-key ecommerce platform, Shopify is tough to beat because you don’t need to spend any time worrying about your site infrastructure. While “going headless” helped merchants tap into more site speed and flexibility, building and maintaining a custom headless stack came with its own set of challenges:

  1. Maintenance — Developers need to build custom solutions and integrations from scratch. Your team can’t manage your site without developer intervention. As a result, every site update or content launch takes longer and costs more.

  2. Infrastructure — Each update or change your team and your developers make increases the possibility of something breaking. One wrong decision can have negative consequences across the board.

No matter how you slice it, building and maintaining a custom headless stack takes up entirely too much time for your developers. Meanwhile, your marketing team can’t respond to the mountains of data they’re collecting on your site visitors and customers. By the time content updates are complete, marketing needs more changes, and the cycle continues.

Custom headless builds encourage complex site architecture

Going headless means that instead of working with a turnkey platform like Shopify, where your site architecture is built and maintained for you, you’re stuck with DIY assembly. In other words, you’re left maintaining your entire stack: headless content management system (CMS), hosting service, custom storefront, page builder, data orchestrator, and tons of custom third-party integrations.

Plus, if your headless stack (with the add-ons needed for customization) isn’t implemented correctly, you may not see the faster page loads or boosted conversions you hoped for. Simply put: you’re not getting the full ROI of going headless. 

Marketing can’t iterate fast enough to keep up with the data flow

What’s more, a custom headless stack isn’t user-friendly for non-developers. Custom builds mean your devs spend too much time making content changes that could be easily handled with a more user-friendly CMS. 

By cutting marketing out of the loop, even the simplest tasks (i.e., launching sales, updating landing pages, publishing blog posts) require more planning and longer lead times. You lose agility when responding to incoming test data, market changes, supply chain disruptions, and customer demand. 

Pack empowers brands with custom functionality and ease-of-use

Pack gives you full control over your marketing and content management, without the learning curve of a traditional headless approach. Meanwhile, your devs maintain the flexibility needed to keep your customer experience ahead of the pack. 

Pack helps you:

  • Speed up your site. Boost revenue with better SEO, faster page loads, and higher conversion rates.

  • Maximize the ROI of Shopify. Pack unlocks the value of Shopify’s entire functionality by making custom Hydrogen storefronts accessible and easy to use, regardless of your technical background.

  • Keep content management simple. Pack uses a visual customizer and drag-and-drop components to make it easy for anyone to spin up a landing page, blog, or article.

  • Speed up development timelines. Pack frees your developers from tedious builds for basic features. Pack comes pre-loaded with code libraries in the modern frameworks devs use most, so they get the same results faster – and with less code.

  • Scale your content with no impact on site speed. Once you’ve done basic site speed optimizations, you can continue to add more apps and content without worrying about the impact on conversions due to slow page loads.

  • Focus on business growth. Pack eliminates the work associated with stitching together a headless stack (e.g., CMS, hosting, page builder, custom third-party tools), so you can focus on growing your business.

In addition to a site speed and conversion rate boost—we’ve seen double-digit conversion rate lifts on most custom storefronts—take a look at our customers’ real-world results:

  • Liquid I.V. saw a 24% increase in CVR with a 12% increase in AOV. 

  • Public Rec increased conversions by 26% with a 10% boost to AOV.

Best of all, you can connect Pack to Shopify in minutes, and get a landing page up and running in hours (or a whole storefront in a matter of weeks). No need to wait for developers to create additional landing pages, blog posts, and articles. You can easily make changes to your site on the fly.

🚀 Should you go headless? Here's what you need to consider.


As brands scale, they face issues with load times, conversions, and overall site performance. But it's not a growth hack, and it can lead to a nightmare of maintenance for lean teams. Luckily, Shopify is changing the game with Hydrogen. This step-by-step guide walks you through why headless used to be the wrong path to take, and why it's time to re-evaluate it.

What do you get with Pack?

Think of Pack as the missing link between a beautiful, custom storefront and the capabilities of your ecommerce platform. With seamless integrations to Shopify and other popular ecomm tools, you can access product data, marketing content, and more — right from your Pack dashboard. 

Pack’s platform includes three key feature sets: 

  1. A visual headless CMS

  2. CRO tools (coming soon)

  3. Developer tools

Let’s look at each one a little more closely. 

1. Visual headless CMS for easy content management

Pack combines the intuitive interface of a page builder with the flexibility of a headless content management system (CMS). 

  • Drag-and-drop editor with real-time previews for simplified content management

  • Reusable content blocks for flexible page layouts

  • Media management for easy access to digital assets (think: images)

  • Content scheduling for long-term planning and strategic campaigns 

  • Bulk editing capabilities to make sitewide content changes with a single-click

  • Deep Shopify integration so you can add content blocks and sell products on any page

Your team has full control to preview, test, and publish content in real-time without developer intervention.

Evaluating CMSs? Here’s how Pack compares.

Unlike a traditional headless CMS, Pack is built specifically for Shopify, easy to implement, and easy to use. 

See how Pack stacks up against other CMSs. 

2. CRO tools for optimizing the shopping experience (coming soon)

Testing is the lifeblood of a successful ecom business, and you shouldn’t need to invest in yet another tool to get signal on what’s working and what isn’t.

In the next few months, we’ll be adding A/B testing and other CRO tools so you can assign traffic to page variants and optimize for conversions—no developer required.

3. Developer tools for feature customization and full control

Pack’s modern frameworks, Shopify connector, native GitHub integration, and 3rd-party integrations are all designed to preserve flexibility, while speeding up the development process.

👕 Cuts grew 200% YoY with Pack

Cuts Clothing turned to Pack to simplify and streamline how they managed content for their rapid-fire marketing strategy. With Pack’s unified commerce platform, the clothing brand now creates content 10-15x faster and achieved 200% YoY growth. 

Read the full case study

5 reasons to choose Pack over a traditional headless stack

Pack is built to give your ecommerce brand full control over its website content without sacrificing site speed or custom features. We make this possible in five ways: 

  1. Pack integrates seamlessly with Shopify. Other headless approaches rely on tools that aren’t built specifically for ecommerce—so they’re not focused on features that directly benefit you. Our deep investment in Shopify means Pack makes every decision with eCom brands like yours in mind

  2. Tap into the speed and flexibility of your Hydrogen storefront without the hassle. You get the benefits of Shopify’s headless toolset (included in every paid Shopify subscription), without needing to own or maintain all the infrastructure.

  3. Anyone can update content with Pack’s intuitive visual page editor. Easily create landing pages, blogs, and articles with drag-and-drop components. Then, launch new content or updates with the click of a button, so you can iterate as fast as data flows in. 

  4. Pack offers a unified platform for managing your custom storefront. All of the tools you need to build and manage a custom storefront are in one place. So you’ll spend less time building and managing your systems and more time growing your brand. 

  5. You’ll rely less on highly technical resources. With Pack, you don’t need to worry about maintaining the complex architecture. And there’s no need to tap a developer every time you need a landing page, launch a promotion, or post blog content.

 

Traditional headless storefronts

Pack

Optimal speed and performance 

✅*

Customizable front end

Purpose-built for Shopify

User-friendly content management

Low-maintenance, low-risk

Anyone can manage content

Time-to-market

3–12 months

1–3 months

* Only true if headless is implemented correctly.

Start customizing a lightning-fast storefront with Pack today

No more choosing between a speedy site and an easy-to-manage storefront. With Pack, you get both.    

Pack’s Digital Experience Platform combines a headless CMS with an intuitive visual page editor to empower your entire team to do more. 

Developers speed up their workflows for the most common ecommerce features. They can spend more time customizing your site and less time writing basic code from scratch. 

Marketing teams launch content faster without the help of a developer. Pack’s visual headless CMS ensures fast content iteration using an intuitive interface that anyone can update. 

Create a free account and get a testable storefront up and running within minutes. 

Want to learn more? Book a personalized demo with Pack’s team of experts.

👀 So how does Pack work for developers?

Pack is opinionated for Shopify, so you can easily launch a new custom storefront in weeks, not months. Plus, our intuitive page builder eliminates the learning curve when you handoff to the marketing team. 

Find out more in our Guide to Pack for Developers.