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The decision on the table is whether your storefront should move to this stack, and who carries it afterwards. The first build is visible in every business case. The cost that follows, keeping a customised React front end in step with Salesforce releases, is the part that decides whether the move keeps paying off.
What the PWA Kit is today
The Commerce PWA Kit (Composable Storefront) grew out of Mobify, which Salesforce acquired in 2020. Salesforce now sells the offering as Composable Storefront and still uses PWA Kit for the developer toolkit behind it. It separates the shop front that shoppers see from the commerce engine that holds products, prices, baskets and orders. The two talk through the Salesforce Commerce API.
That separation is what people mean by headless commerce. Front-end teams can change the experience without touching the engine, and the same engine can feed a website, an app or a kiosk. The wider business case for that architecture is set out in headless commerce with the Composable Storefront.
What comes with the PWA Kit
The Salesforce PWA Kit bundles a React-based storefront template, a set of tools for building and deploying it, and hosting on Managed Runtime. The template is a working retail shop with product listings, product pages, basket and checkout. Teams copy it and shape it into their own brand.
Managed Runtime, formerly Commerce Managed Runtime, is the Salesforce environment that serves the storefront, renders pages on the server and caches them at the edge. It removes the need to run your own servers for the front end. How that hosting layer works, and what it means for your team, is covered in what Managed Runtime takes care of.
The template is a starting point you then own
A team that starts from the template gets a shop in weeks. From that moment the code is theirs. Every customisation, from a new product page layout to an extra checkout step, sits in a codebase that Salesforce does not maintain for you.
That ownership has a cost that compounds. The more the template diverges from the original, the more work each Salesforce release takes to adopt. Teams that customise freely in the first year can find themselves a few versions behind in the second, and catching up then means a project of its own. Deciding early which parts you will change and which you will keep close to the original saves that project later.
