Cloudinary and Alokai join forces to make your eCommerce fast and flawless as it should be

We were familiar with Cloudinary , a cloud-based media management company, long before becoming a separate company. Now, as we finally gained our own identity, we can make the partnership official. With Cloudinary, we can make sure your eCommerce site’s performance is better than ever, every time.

Read “Milliseconds make Millions,” a Deloitte’s study on how improvements in mobile site speed positively affect a brand’s bottom line

Cloudinary’s sharp focus on delivering fast and flawless rich media experiences have provided the company with a position that today - in the age of image culture - only strengthens. The demand for correctly displayed visual content keeps growing in every sector of the online industries, and the pandemic just speeds up these tendencies. No wonder, since poorly optimized images and/or videos definitely can be blamed for poor performance and lower engagement.

Cloudinary knows it and found a way to avoid it. This California-headquartered company delivers the AI-enabled products that help brands upload, store, manage, manipulate, and deliver images and video for websites and apps and - by doing that - take care of user engagement. Yes, content is still a king. 

As Cloudinary’s interest in frontend and - to be more precise - UX layer was always pretty clear, it can't be a surprise that our paths crossed a few years ago. Well, maybe not in a strictly business way, but still. We were familiar with each other, mostly thanks to Maya Shavin - who was Senior Frontend Developer at Cloudinary those days - and her work with Storefront UI, our open-source standalone code library based on Vue.js.

Read the interview with Maya Shavin

Maya Shavin is a well-known member of the Vue.js community , and - as we are also a die-hard advocate of Vue.js (Filip Rakowski, our CTO, are living proof; here you can see one of his speeches ) - we had to bump into each other at some point. 

Soon, Maya engaged with developing Storefront UI and quickly became one of the most significant contributors. Beyond this personal backstory, however, we have a lot more in common.

Cloudinary is also a MACH Alliance member and advocate of API-first, modular architecture, and so the partnership between our companies has a strong business foundation. What benefits will it bring? Essential. As performance is the core promise we made as a front-end, the media optimization tool in a bundle is a priceless complement to our offer. 

For years we have been watching with admiration how Cloudinary is growing. Their intense focus made it difficult to name a company that could compete with them in the world of media optimization, and - as we want to provide our clients with the best-of-breed tools, we couldn’t miss the opportunity to team up with Cloudinary.

Patrick Friday, CEO at Alokai. 

Powered by Cloudinary, all Storefront UI components (it is the library used to build the default Alokai theme) will be loaded instantly, which in eCommerce is more than crucial. This way developers are provided with a tool that will speed up the tedious process of optimizing images. This process must be done correctly and can be done manually, yet, there is no point in wasting time on it when a safe shortcut is available. 

Cloudinary’s primary goal is to deliver a tool that saves developers’ time (and merchants’ money). Thanks to its efforts, they don’t have to reinvent the wheel repeatedly by optimizing media with every implementation manually. Instead, they can reach out for the set of fully optimized and ready-to-use UI components, typically used in eCommerce sites. 

To make sure that the project will meet their expectation, Cloudinary extended the Storefront UI library with brand new, tailored-made UI components dedicated to eCommerce businesses, such as product gallery wishlist displayed item in a 360-degree view. All of them are already optimized and ready to use in any given webshop. 

Moreover, the integration - even though it is triggered with the Alokai in mind - will not exclude other front-end solutions. Storefront UI powered by Cloudinary can be used with other frameworks or with pure Vue.js.