Getting Started with Next.js Commerce and Storyblok

In this tutorial, we will implement Storyblok into a Next.js commerce site. Next.js Commerce is a front-end starter kit for your e-commerce site. For this tutorial, we will use BigCommerce as our eCommerce platform.

Starting point

We are going to follow this guide from BigCommerce. It takes you to the step-by-step guild on creating and deploying the site to Vercel. This will be our starting point and we will have a fully working e-commerce site with dummy data.

Now we can just clone the project from our own GitHub repo to our local machine to work on it.

Once the project is cloned locally do the following to run the project.

Create a Storyblok project

Sign up for a free Storyblok account. Once you're signed up you can create a new space.

Once the project is created, we can connect our Storyblok space to our project. You can also follow our Next.js starter guide to connect this Storyblok space with our project.

npm install @storyblok/react # run this command in the site folder
npm install local-ssl-proxy -D # run this command in the site folder

After installing the following packages, add this script to your package.json file in the site folder.

"proxy": "mkcert -install && mkcert localhost && local-ssl-proxy --source 3010 --target 3000 --cert localhost.pem --key localhost-key.pem"

The above script will proxy our dev site to run on https this is required to load Storyblok data.

Furthermore, we have to add the Storyblok access token to the env.local file.

NEXT_PUBLIC_STORYBLOK_ACESSTOKEN=YOUR_ACESS_KEY

Now you can open two terminals and run two commands npm run dev and npm run proxy. Now if you go to https://localhost:3010/ you will see the site is working as if nothing changed.

Now let's add the following code in _app.tsx file in your pages folder.

We will return to this file shortly and add all of our components but for now, the empty object{} is fine.

Breakdown of the Next.js Commerce Home Page

Before we design our components in Storyblok let's first quickly take a look at how our current Home page is structured.

If we breakdown the above code we can see we have

1. Grid component and this component take two optional props layout and variant and within this, we have three ProductCard components.
2. Next, we have a Marquee component and this component takes an optional prop variant and within this, similar to the above Grid it also has three ProductCard components.
3. Lastly, we have a Hero component that just takes two props headline and description.

Based on this now let's design our components in Storyblok.

Create components in Storyblok

To create new components let’s go to the Block library section in the Storyblok dashboard.

By default, four blocks come with an empty Storyblok project. We will delete all except the page block and then create new blocks to match our eCommerce homepage layout.

Create our first component "HeroSection"

This will represent the existing Hero component of our project. Based on this we will have two Text field headline and description. You can match the below screenshot.

Second component "ProductGrid"

Next, we are going to create a ProductGrid component. This will represent the Grid component and looped ProductCard within this. Let's create a new Nestable Block like the one above and name it ProductGrid.

After the block is created we are going to add a new field to this Block named variant and this will be a Single-Option field

Now we can edit this field and add two options. This will let us select between these two values.

We can learn about all the props our Grid component takes in the following path site/components/ui/Grid.

interface GridProps {
  className?: string
  children?: ReactNode
  layout?: 'A' | 'B' | 'C' | 'D' | 'normal'
  variant?: 'default' | 'filled'
}

Seeing that we can add the above two values as options in our variant Single-Option Field.

Next, we will repeat the above step and create a new field named layout with the following options. layout?: 'A' | 'B' | 'C' | 'D' | 'normal'

The last field for this component will be products and for this, we are going to select a new field called Plugin.

Now we need to edit this field and configure it as seen in the following screenshot:

Final component "MarqueeSlider"

This one will be pretty similar to the above ProductGrid component. It will have two fields

1. variant this will be a Single-Option Field with the following option variant: 'primary' | 'secondary'
2. products this will be a Plugin Field, with the same option as the above ProductGrid

Add the following components to our Home story

Lastly, we must add our newly created components to our Home story. For this tutorial, we are going to match the components to match our code base but with Stoyblok we are free to add new components if needed.

Create Storyblok components in our project

Next, we must create the following components in our Next.js project and reference these components in the _app.txs file. Let's create a new folder named storyblok inside the site folder and create the following files.

In the above component, you can see that we are looping through the products. Instead of passing the ProductCard we are passing a component called SingleProduct and this component takes only productID.

The reason for doing this is following

1. Incoming product details are very limited, and there is no way to get more info for each product from Storyblok (this is by design).
2. The data coming from Storyblok is static/cached in Storyblok CDN but for an eCommerce site always updated information is more desirable.

This is why we are going to only take the productID from Storyblok and then we will validate the data on our end and also get all the required info for ProductCard component.

First, create an API endpoint that gets the product info by ID

This will give us the formatted product information that will match what we need to pass as props in ProductCard component. Next, we can create our SingleProduct component as follows.

import useSWR from 'swr'
import { ProductCard } from '@components/product'
export default function SingleProduct({
  index,
  productID,
}: {
  index: number
  productID: number
}) {
  const { data }: any = useSWR(
    `/api/get-product/${productID}`,
    (apiURL: string) => fetch(apiURL).then((res) => res.json())
  )
  if (!data || data?.error)
    return <p style={{ backgroundColor: 'black' }}>Loading...</p>
  let product = data.product
  return (
    <ProductCard
      key={product.id}
      product={product}
      imgProps={{
        alt: product.name,
        width: index === 0 ? 1080 : 540,
        height: index === 0 ? 1080 : 540,
        priority: true,
      }}
    />
  )
}

Lastly, we have one component left MarqueeSlider. let’s create it.

import { storyblokEditable } from '@storyblok/react'
import SingleProduct from './SingleProduct'
import { Marquee } from '@components/ui'
interface Props {
  blok: {
    _uid: string
    products: {
      items: PItem[]
    }
    variant: 'primary' | 'secondary'
  }
}
interface PItem {
  id: number
}
export default function MarqueeSlider({ blok }: Props) {
  let { variant, products } = blok
  return (
    <div
      {...storyblokEditable(blok)}
      key={blok._uid}
      data-test="storyblok-marquee-slider"
      className="storyblok-marquee-slider"
    >
      <Marquee variant={variant}>
        {products?.items?.map((item, index) => (
          <SingleProduct key={item.id} index={index} productID={item.id} />
        ))}
      </Marquee>
    </div>
  )
}

Now, we have created all the components that we defined in Storyblok let's pass these into _app.tsx file.

import { storyblokInit, apiPlugin } from '@storyblok/react'
import Page from '../storyblok/Page'
import ProductGrid from '../storyblok/ProductGrid'
import HeroSection from '../storyblok/HeroSection'
import MarqueeSlider from '../storyblok/MarqueeSlider'
storyblokInit({
  accessToken: process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_STORYBLOK_ACESSTOKEN,
  use: [apiPlugin],
  apiOptions: { https: true },
  components: {
    page:Page,
    ProductGrid,
    HeroSection,
    MarqueeSlider
  },
})

Next, go to our index.tsx page and replace this file with the following code.

import { Layout } from '@components/common'
import type { GetStaticPropsContext, InferGetStaticPropsType } from 'next'
import {
  useStoryblokState,
  getStoryblokApi,
  StoryblokComponent,
} from '@storyblok/react'
export async function getStaticProps({
  preview,
  locale,
  locales,
}: GetStaticPropsContext) {
  let slug = 'home'
  const storyblokApi = getStoryblokApi()
  let { data } = await storyblokApi.get(`cdn/stories/${slug}`, {
    version: 'draft',
  })
  return {
    props: {
      story: data ? data.story : false,
    },
    revalidate: 60,
  }
}
export default function Home({
  story: initialStory,
}: InferGetStaticPropsType<typeof getStaticProps>) {
  const story = useStoryblokState(initialStory)
  if (story?.content === (undefined || null)) {
    return <div>Loading...</div>
  }
  return <StoryblokComponent blok={story.content} />
}
Home.Layout = Layout

We can already see how minimal our homepage code looks compared to before. Now let's visit https://localhost:3010/ and make sure our site works as expected.

We now don't have hard-coded products on our home page. We can easily change the products for each section and reorder components directly from the Storyblok Visual Editor and see the live preview. Once we publish it will reflect automatically on our site without touching the code.

Finally, by implementing Storyblok with our existing codebase we not only reduced the number of codes in our project but also added a lot of new possibilities. Now we can create new components and make all the parts of our site fully dynamic. We can reuse these components throughout our site to reduce development time and give the content creators much more flexibility.