Approaches for building product discovery interfaces

This is for:

Developer

Coveo provides a number of libraries and REST APIs to build your Commerce product discovery solutions. Choosing the right library or REST API depends on your business needs, desired performance, and complexity.

Diagram showing where how the different libraries and REST APIs fit in the Coveo Commerce ecosystem

Headless library

The Coveo Headless library is a Redux-based toolset for developing your own UI component libraries. It provides the underlying functionality of the Atomic library without tying that functionality to a specific UI implementation.

We strongly recommend using the Headless library over working directly with the REST APIs as Headless abstracts the complexity of the REST APIs and provides a more developer-friendly interface.

For more information, see Headless for commerce.

Atomic library

Important

The Atomic library commerce components are in open beta and therefore under active development. Reach out to your Coveo team for support in adopting them.

The Coveo Atomic library is a collection of pre-built UI components meant to quickly create product discovery interfaces. You can theme and customize the Atomic components to suit your needs. Under the hood, Atomic relies on the Coveo Headless library to interface with Coveo and handle the application state.

REST APIs

The Coveo Commerce REST APIs are a set of APIs that allow you to interact with the Coveo Platform.

These APIs offer the most flexibility for interacting with the Coveo Platform, though they require more development effort and can be more challenging to use than Headless or Atomic.

To implement your product discovery solution using the REST APIs, you need to send requests to the following APIs:

  • Commerce API: This API allows you to query the Coveo Platform for products.

  • Event API: This API allows you to log commerce events using the Event Protocol.