Hi there! Are you looking to build an e-commerce platform and are searching for the best technological alternative? In this article, we will assess the power of Flutter e-commerce, so you can keep both your customers and your development team happy.
Why Flutter e-commerce?
Why is it worth it to consider investing in Flutter development, even when it means your whole team has to learn an entirely new programming language called Dart? Well, everyone who is working in the tech industry knows that the learning process never stops. You are never fully satisfied with what you know, and checking out new technologies is certainly a competitive advantage, if not a business survival issue.
When it comes to e-commerce, Flutter is certainly innovative and it has some great advantages for developers which can lead to excellent results in record time. Here are some of them:
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FAST DEVELOPMENT
Bring your app to life in milliseconds with stateful hot reload. Flutter’s rich set of fully-customizable widgets helps you build native interfaces in minutes.
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BEAUTIFUL UI
Quickly ship features focusing on native end-user experience. Its layered architecture allows for full customization, resulting in incredibly fast rendering as well as expressive and flexible designs.
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NATIVE PERFORMANCE
Flutter’s widgets incorporate all critical platform features such as scrolling, navigation, fonts and icons. On top of that, your code is compiled to native ARM machine code through Dart’s native compilers.
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WIDGET CUSTOMIZATION AND EXTENSION
Google Flutter also gives you the option to customize a widget’s default behavior. To do this, you just need to create a pull request to the class you are trying to modify and add the property or the behavior you need. This will get you an extended widget and a new way to customize your app.
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APP TEMPLATES
Flutter includes open-source templates that everyone can use freely. These templates include design implementation for hotel bookings, design courses, fitness sites, and a custom drawer and all of these can be of help to any Flutter developer.
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OPEN-SOURCE
Open-source is the future. Lately, web, mobile, and cloud solutions are built predominantly on open-source infrastructure. In some cases, data and analytic solutions are actually only available as an open-source option.
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DEBUGGING
There’s plenty of tools and features to help you debug Flutter applications. Some available tools include DevTools, Android Studio/IntelliJ, and the VS Code built-in source-level debugger.
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TESTING
If you want to have the same app available on two platforms, Flutter assures less testing! The quality assurance process can be faster as there is only one codebase. This means the developers write automatic tests only once.
Flutter allows you to do all of the following types of testing:
- Unit tests to test a single function, method, or class.
- Widget tests (in other UI frameworks referred to as “component tests”) to test a single widget.
- Integration tests to help you test all of your app or a large part of an app.
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PORTABILITY
Flutter apps are able to run on pretty much any device with a screen. There are Flutter apps available for Windows, Linux and macOS, so you can take full advantage of this tool no matter your choice of operating system. (The Flutter dev team has also recently released Flutter 2.0, which includes stable web development.)
PORTABILITY
Yes, we are doubling down on this point as it is a huge advantage. With just one Dart codebase, you can deploy apps for Android and iOS in the mobile market, for Windows, Linux and macOS in the desktop market, and you can build mobile-first progressive web apps for the great World Wide Web. Isn’t that incredible?
FLUTTER E-COMMERCE APP TEMPLATES
We finally reached the core of this article: Flutter templates. These are key when it comes to the time-to-market factor, because the templates include a basic purchase flow for your e-commerce project, with professional designs and, sometimes, even more than the basic flows, saving you lots of time.
So, here is a list of the most beautiful e-commerce templates, built with Dart, all easily customizable and adaptable to your specific purpose
1-FluxStore
Available features
- Compatible with top e-commerce frameworks: it includes full integration with WooCommerce, Magento, Opencart and Shopify
- Full e-commerce features: dynamic product variants, order tracking, refunds, checkout process, order notes, wishlists and address management.
- Powerful user settings: the ability to enable push notifications, view wishlists, order history, rate the app on the app stores, include dark themes and a smart chat setting as well as switch languages
- Push notifications via Firebase and message history are supported
- Google Analytics makes it easy to track users online as well as the number of registrations via Firebase in realtime
- Easy customization and while-labeling: supports full customization by getting the full source code package, design assets and free extra API.
- Offline image caching: you can speed up the loading performance with the caching image offline method.
- Messenger, WeChat, Whatsapp… and even Intercom service support.
2-Treva-Shop
E-commerce UI kit features:
- Clean code comments in all code
- Support multiple languages
- Cleanly designed
- Use of the animation controller
- Responsive design for any and all devices and screens
- Easily customizable layout
3-AirMart
Technical features
- Clean code with extracted Flutter widgets
- Implementation of Rive animations
- Uses the List View builder for all lists
- Ready to back end integrations
- Clear and smart UI/UX
- Ready navigation and business logic
- Fully customizable templates (colors, fonts, sizes, borders, paddings, margins, etc.).
- Easily change colors
- Easily connect any customize fonts
- Easily change size and layout
- Smooth (sliver) animations
4-Foodie
Food delivery features:
- Clean code comments in all code
- Clean design
- Use of the animation controller
- Responsive design for any and all devices and screens
- Easily customizable layout
5-Free open-source e-commerce template
Features:
- Minimalist design
- Clean and structured code
- Reusable components
Final thoughts on Flutter e-commerce in 2021
Considering all of the above, we believe Flutter is a very powerful technology that has great potential applications for e-commerce. It has the necessary tools and libraries to easily help you build your business all at once—for mobile, web and desktop—, and give more value to your customers. No matter whether you are a passionate UX/UI designer, an advanced mobile developer, or a newbie web developer, you will enjoy working with Flutter, and it will probably save you a significant amount of time. It’s certainly a game changer in the e-commerce business, and it can give your business the competitive advantage it needs.
