Vue Storefront mock API: which integration behaviors need real credentials?

Testing a Vue Storefront integration without production credentials

The goal is to build and smoke-test a storefront against a Vue Storefront Commerce Framework integration without touching a production commerce backend. The documented route is the mock API, which serves predefined JSON responses so local GraphQL queries resolve with no credentials attached.

The constraint is that these responses are static fixtures. Each integration adapter — commercet, Shopify, BigCommerce and others — maps its own backend schema into the framework's normalized model, and live engines add behavior the fixtures cannot carry: session and auth flows, promotion and pricing rules, partial failures, pagination edges. The GraphQL schema can also shift with the installed adapter, so a mock tuned for one integration may not line up with another, and the mock's exact surface appears version-dependent across releases.

That leaves an unresolved boundary. The mock is plainly sufficient for developing UI components, but how far it can be trusted for integration logic before a staging backend becomes mandatory is unclear.

• Which adapter behaviors are known to diverge from the mock responses — cart promotions, error states, pagination?
• Is the mock dataset maintained per integration, or shared across adapters despite schema differences?
• Where is the practical cutoff between mock-based development and a real staging backend?