In an ecommerce store, the backend handles all the data from prices, promotions, product images to order details and customer information. Unlike the frontend, which manages the user's interactions and impressions of the store, the backend determines how these interactions will work and how the experience will be.

The backend uses a range of different features to make the user experience as seamless as possible on VTEX. VTEX IO is a proprietary VTEX technology, which supports several frameworks and programming languages familiar to developers, such as TypeScript, React, GraphQL, .NET, and Node. By removing several layers of software development, by using VTEX IO, the developer does not need to deal with servers, infrastructure, and scalability issues.

Backend apps allow you to create integrations between services using APIs to get data from custom React components. The developer can also leverage third-party solutions to implement new strategies and features quickly.

VTEX IO APIs are built with GraphQL— a query language that allows developers to submit queries with the specific data that needs to be fetched from a single endpoint via an HTTP POST request. Thus, GraphQL provides solutions to some of the biggest challenges when designing APIs for modern applications, and it is through GraphQL that VTEX can offer greater flexibility and efficiency.