Frequently Asked Questions

Product Information

What is Hygraph and how does it support eCommerce?

Hygraph is a headless CMS built with scalability in mind, providing all the tools needed to power a fully bespoke eCommerce experience. It enables developers to manage products, categories, prices, and currencies using a flexible content model and GraphQL API. Hygraph can also be used as a Product Information Management (PIM) system for eCommerce at scale. Source

How does Hygraph work with Snipcart for eCommerce?

Hygraph integrates with Snipcart to deliver powerful eCommerce experiences. Snipcart is a drop-in cart and checkout solution that works with digital and physical products, subscriptions, and custom integrations. Hygraph provides the backend for product data, while Snipcart handles cart management and checkout. Source

What is the recommended content model for eCommerce in Hygraph?

The recommended content model includes Categories, Products, Prices, and Currencies. A Category has many Products, a Product belongs to one Category, a Product has many Prices, and a Price belongs to one Product. Currencies are managed as enumerations. This structure allows for flexible management of product data and pricing. Source

Can Hygraph be used as a Product Information Management (PIM) system?

Yes, Hygraph can be used as a PIM system to manage product data at scale, as demonstrated in customer case studies such as Burrow. Source

Features & Capabilities

What are the key features of Hygraph for eCommerce?

Key features include a GraphQL-native API for efficient data querying, content federation, scalability, and support for complex content models. Hygraph also offers integrations with eCommerce platforms, localization tools, digital asset management, and personalization solutions. Source

Does Hygraph provide a GraphQL API?

Yes, Hygraph provides a powerful GraphQL API that allows you to fetch and manage content efficiently, including products, categories, prices, and assets. Source

What integrations does Hygraph support?

Hygraph supports a wide range of integrations, including Netlify, Vercel, BigCommerce, commercetools, Shopify, Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, Smartling, Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, Scaleflex Filerobot, Ninetailed, AltText.ai, Adminix, and Plasmic. Source

How does Hygraph optimize content delivery performance?

Hygraph emphasizes optimized content delivery performance, which directly impacts user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Rapid content distribution and responsiveness help reduce bounce rates and increase conversions. Source

Pricing & Plans

What is Hygraph's pricing model?

Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. For more details, visit the pricing page.

Use Cases & Benefits

Who can benefit from using Hygraph?

Hygraph is ideal for developers, IT decision-makers, content creators, project/program managers, agencies, solution partners, and technology partners. Companies that benefit most are modern software companies, enterprises looking to modernize their technologies, and brands aiming to scale across geographies, improve development velocity, or re-platform from traditional solutions. Source

What business impact can customers expect from using Hygraph?

Customers can expect significant business impacts, including time-saving through streamlined workflows, ease of use with an intuitive interface, faster speed-to-market for digital products, and enhanced customer experience through consistent and scalable content delivery. Source

What customer success stories demonstrate Hygraph's value?

Komax achieved a 3X faster time to market, Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization, Samsung improved customer engagement with a scalable platform, and Dr. Oetker enhanced their digital experience using MACH architecture. More case studies are available here.

What industries are represented in Hygraph's case studies?

Industries include Food and Beverage, Consumer Electronics, Automotive, Healthcare, Travel and Hospitality, Media and Publishing, eCommerce, SaaS, Marketplace, Education Technology, and Wellness and Fitness. Source

Technical Requirements

How easy is it to implement Hygraph for eCommerce?

Hygraph is designed to be easy to start with, even for non-technical users. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months from the initial touchpoint. Customers can get started quickly by signing up for a free account and using resources like the Hygraph Documentation and onboarding guides. Source

Where can I find technical documentation for Hygraph?

Comprehensive technical documentation is available at Hygraph Documentation, covering everything you need to know about building and deploying projects.

Security & Compliance

What security and compliance certifications does Hygraph have?

Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 Compliant, ISO 27001 Certified, and GDPR compliant. These certifications ensure the highest levels of data protection and security for users. Source

How does Hygraph ensure enterprise-grade security?

Hygraph provides robust security features such as SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments to protect sensitive data and meet regulatory standards. Source

Support & Implementation

What customer support is available for Hygraph users?

Hygraph offers 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users can access detailed documentation, video tutorials, and the community Slack channel for further assistance. Source

What training and technical support does Hygraph provide?

Hygraph provides onboarding sessions for enterprise customers, training resources such as video tutorials, documentation, webinars, and access to Customer Success Managers for expert guidance. Source

Integrations & Developer Experience

How can I fetch products and categories using Hygraph's GraphQL API?

You can fetch all products, their fields, and relations with a single GraphQL query. Similarly, you can fetch products by category using the category's slug. Example queries are provided in the Hygraph blog post on GraphQL-powered eCommerce with Snipcart. Source

How do I add an 'Add to Bag' button with Snipcart and Hygraph?

Snipcart makes it easy to add an 'Add to Bag' button by adding attributes to a button element with the product's ID, price, URL, image, and name. Hygraph provides the product data via its API, which can be used to populate these attributes. Source

Customer Proof & Case Studies

Who are some of Hygraph's customers?

Hygraph's customers include Sennheiser, Holidaycheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. More details and logos are available in the case studies.

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GraphQL powered eCommerce with Snipcart

Learn how to use Hygraph with Snipcart for delivering epic commerce experiences.
Jamie Barton

Written by Jamie 

Nov 23, 2021
Hygraph + Snipcart

eCommerce is one of the fastest growing use cases for headless content management over the last few years, as are the APIs powering checkout and payment. Hygraph was built with scalability in mind, and has all of the tools you need to power a fully bespoke eCommerce experience that your customers expect.

Depending on your scale, and how much you need to integrate with other services, there are dozens of commerce service providers to pick from.

Snipcart does things differently when it comes to enabling eCommerce. Snipcart is a drop-in cart and checkout that you can add with a few lines of code to any website. It works with digital and physical products, as well as subscriptions and has an events API that you can hook into to develop custom pre/post checkout integrations.

Add to Bag

As a developer, Snipcart is completely agnostic to the what you build, and what you use for the frontend. Snipcart works well with your current inventory — which is great if you're looking to sell your Hygraph backed inventory.

Let's take a look at a few ways you can use Hygraph with Snipcart. I'll assume you're familiar with Hygraph, so I will leave you to setup, configure and integrate Snipcart by following their documentation, and instantiate a GraphQL client for Hygraph.

#Hygraph for Products

I'll be using a simple content model and relationships between categories, products, prices, and the enumeration for currencies.

  • A Category has many Products
  • A Product belongs to one Category
  • A Product has many Prices
  • A Price belongs to one Product

Category | Product | Price | Currency --- | --- | --- | --- Name (String) | Name (String) | Amount (Int) | EUR Slug (String) | Slug (String) | Currency (Enum) | GBP Products (Relation) | Description | | USD

| | Image (Asset) | |

| | Prices (Relation) | |

| | Category (Relation) | |

Hygraph also gives you a "Commerce Shop" starter you can use to quickly bootstrap a project with some example data for products.

Hygraph Project Templates

#Fetching Products

You've probably seen a collection of all products before, to do this we can fetch all products, their fields, and relations with a single GraphQL query.

Product Grid

A query for this would look something like:

{
products {
id
name
slug
description {
html
}
image {
url
width
height
}
prices {
amount
currency
}
}
}

#Fetching Products by Category

Similar to fetching all products, it's also common to show pages of products per category. We can use the Hygraph GraphQL API to fetch a single Category by slug, and all of the products that belong to that category.

{
category(where: {slug: "tshirts"}) {
name
products {
id
name
slug
description {
html
}
image {
url
width
height
}
prices {
amount
currency
}
}
}
}

#Product Display Pages

As with any eCommerce store you'll most likely want to show a page for your product, including any additional images, prices, description, related products, and that important "Add to Bag" button.

Product Display Page

Snipcart makes this all too easy with adding attributes to a div with the options you want for your "Add to Bag" button.

<button
className="snipcart-add-item"
data-item-id="your-product-id"
data-item-price="your-product-price"
data-item-url="a-link-to-this-page"
data-item-image="your-product-image-asset-url"
data-item-name="your-product-name"
>
Add to Bag
</button>

Let's imagine we have the following query to fetch products by the slug:

query ProductPageQuery($slug: String!) {
product(slug: { eq: $slug }) {
id
name
prices {
amount
currency
}
description {
html
}
image {
url
}
}
}
}

You'll remember with the content model we had above that a Product has many Prices. Snipcart supports currencies, so we can specify the current for our product when adding to cart. You'll need to configure currencies within your Snipcart project for them to work properly though!

Hopefully this post has given you an idea of how you can use Hygraph as your PIM. Using Hygraph as a PIM can be done at scale in a similar way..

Blog Author

Jamie Barton

Jamie Barton

Jamie is a software engineer turned developer advocate. Born and bred in North East England, he loves learning and teaching others through video and written tutorials. Jamie currently publishes Weekly GraphQL Screencasts.

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