Cafe24 said on Sunday it will officially support a “web component” feature that allows shopping mall products to be linked to external websites for sale. The feature allows shopping mall operators to use any external site that supports HTML script insertion as a sales channel, expanding customer touchpoints.

Web components are a general-purpose technology that runs consistently across various web environments based on World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. It is not dependent on a specific platform or framework and offers broad compatibility across the web ecosystem.

Previously, iframes or simple links were mainly used to expose in-house shopping mall products on external sites. But those methods had limits such as disruptions to the shopping flow due to page transitions, loading delays and instability in mobile environments.

Cafe24 said support for the web component feature addresses those limits. Built as responsive, it operates stably in both PC and mobile environments and uses asynchronous loading so it does not affect the speed of external sites. Product prices, inventory and images are always automatically kept up to date on external sites through an application programming interface (API). External sites support viewing products and adding them to cart, while payments are processed in Cafe24’s secure shopping mall environment to ensure safety.

The company also improved ease of use. It said the feature lowers barriers to entry so it can be used easily even without technical knowledge. Shopping mall operators can select the desired template and products without separate development, then copy automatically generated code and paste it into an external site to sell products.

It offers four template types: product detail, product card, product link and product collection. Operators can choose based on the characteristics of the external channel they want to connect. For example, they can use “product detail” for blogs, “product card” for communities, “product link” for text-focused content, and “product collection” for affiliate sites or event pages.

Cafe24 provides performance measurement and analysis features for external channels expanded through web components. Shopping mall operators can use Cafe24 Analytics to analyse traffic and purchase conversion rate data from web components to refine business expansion strategies.

Cafe24 Chief Executive Lee Jae-seok (이재석) said, “The web component feature will be a turning point that expands sales methods that were limited to the space of a shopping mall across the web.” He added, “We will continue to expand an environment where anyone can easily sell products across various channels.”