Mastering eCommerce Store Design on Framer

If you're seeking a functional, efficient, and highly scalable eCommerce solution, look no further than Framer. In this article, we break down a tutorial by Omar Freak, who guides us through creating an eCommerce store using Framer's native CMS.

An Introduction to Framer

For the uninitiated, Framer is a robust tool that facilitates collaborative website creation with your team on an infinite canvas. It enables you to lay out all your screen sizes for an efficient design process. The best part? Framer is free to use.

The Basics: Setting Up and Navigating Framer

In his tutorial, Omar demonstrates how to design an entire eCommerce website swiftly using Framer's pre-made components. From basics like pages, sections, and navigation to creating the entire structure for your eCommerce website, the Framer CMS plays a crucial role.

The Power of Framer's CMS

The CMS, or Content Management System, is traditionally used for blog design and content management. However, in this scenario, Omar repurposes it to manage the entire product catalog. This allows for easy addition of new product items, editing previous ones, and overall, a fully scalable eCommerce solution.

Designing the Home Page

For designing the homepage, Omar recommends starting with a best practice width of 1440. He then generates mobile responsive sizes, tablet size, and font size from the add menu. Using Framer's pre-made components, he demonstrates how to flesh out the site by adding elements like top navigation, a hero section, social proof area, featured product section, reviews, FAQs, and a footer.

Customizing Your eCommerce Website

Omar emphasizes the importance of customizing the eCommerce website according to your brand and product. He shows how to edit element sizes, adjust alignments, and even change text properties to suit your design needs.

Creating Additional Pages: Store and Product Detail Page

After setting up the home page, Omar teaches how to duplicate the page to create the store page and the product detail page. He highlights how to effectively represent products on the store page using filters, and how to include essential product details, like pricing and a call-to-action button, on the detail page.

Connecting CMS to Pages

The tutorial culminates in explaining how to connect the CMS to the product detail page, which in turn automates the generation of product items. This CMS connection also allows for easy addition and editing of product details on the eCommerce store.

Managing the Checkout Process

To handle the checkout process, Omar recommends integrating your chosen payment system, be it PayPal, Stripe, or any other eCommerce solution. He highlights the need to add a custom field called 'payment link' to the CMS for this integration.

Establishing Dynamic Content and Product Cards

In this second part of our tutorial, we've delved into setting up dynamic content for your eCommerce detail page, creating the product cards, and establishing a link to your content management system (CMS). We’ve started with crafting the product card and assigning dynamic content for various components such as the product image, name, short description, price, payment link, and product category. By using a dynamic variable, we’ve successfully created a connection between each layer of the product card and the CMS.

Integration of Product Card with Homepage

The next step was to integrate the product card with the homepage, with the aid of the CMS collection list that contained the product catalog. After deleting the default styles and establishing the new product card component, we witnessed an automatic generation of four product cards, one for each product in our catalog. Some initial layout glitches were easily resolved by adjusting the main section settings to ‘fit content.’

Setting Up the Store Page

Our attention then turned to setting up the store page. This included creating and linking filters for different product categories, which allowed for separate viewing of products for women and men. On these pages, we saw a reduction in product listings, reflecting the filters applied.

Final Touches and User Experience Enhancement

The final steps involved linking the buy now card to the payment link and ensuring the product image redirects to the respective product detail page when clicked. We've also managed to add a hover state for the product cards, enhancing the user experience.

Feature Section Configuration

Remember, if you want a featured product section on your homepage, you need to configure this in your CMS. We achieved this by adding a 'featured' toggle to the CMS and then filtered the homepage product section to display only 'featured' products.

Conclusion

This tutorial has walked you through the creation of a comprehensive and responsive Framer eCommerce store, featuring a dynamic home page, product detail page, and store page with active filters. The tutorial concludes by pointing out the availability of a remix version of the file created in this tutorial in the description below.