Headless Commerce: Why Digital Merchants are Losing Their Heads

Today, be it online or offline, businesses are keen on embracing new and modern commerce channels and technologies to help them get more close to their customers and grow conversions.

For online retailers, to provide a more seamless, personalised, and unforgettable experience, they have to overcome four key roadblocks: i) constant need to innovate their digital customer experience at speed and scale; ii) designing logical and satiable experiences across multiple touchpoints and technologies; iii) curbing data silos to seamlessly harness data and drive real-time decision making;; and lastly iv) integrating new technologies while minimizing disruptions to existing business operations.

In order for eCommerce merchants to achieve this fine-tuned control and create rich and differentiated customer experiences, there are companies turning their heads to “headless commerce”. It houses an unlimited variety of web, social, mobile, IoT and in-store digital touchpoints and separates them architecturally from the commerce platform using APIs to deliver commerce services.

What this does is that it improves flexibility to provide thrust to a vast array of omnichannel scenarios, to commerce-enable any system, application or IoT device, and to effectively merge with any content management systems.

Understanding Headless Commerce

From the very beginning of eCommerce in the 90s, the websites have evolved from simple niche shopping experiences into huge branded digital landmarks aimed at capturing the attention of millions worldwide. The huge myriad of internet-powered touch points penetrate our daily lives today, be it from the smartphones in our palms to the computers embedded in our cars.

Let us understand the shoppers’ behaviour first in order to better understand headless commerce. Today, the shoppers are empowered by technology and they expect brisk digital experiences which have been designed to meet their specific interests and needs. They expect same-day delivery, loyalty rewards, social engagement, and much more from eCommerce businesses.

These are some of the most common, perennially occurring shifts in consumer behaviors and these expectations have created a need for modern approaches to digital experience management, like headless commerce. With the help of APIs headless separates the front-end user experience from the logic-driven back end.

The separation of the front and back end with headless allows for a faster, API-driven approach to web development, It offers competitive benefits right from accelerated marketing initiatives to true omnichannel experiences.

A headless architecture enables each, the frontend and the backend to operate independently in a way where the changes that happen on one end do not require reciprocal changes on the other.

In headless architecture, two applications communicate with one another through the use of APIs, experience managers, and different tools like Heroku. Headless has the ability to lessen the IT dependency majorly at the back end for user experience and user interface projects like front end. In this manner all those user-centric changes which mostly impact the front-end can now happen rapidly since they do not require changes to the backend.

In terms of adopting headless commerce architecture, most of the major players are large enterprises with huge development and IT teams. And this is obvious since the amount of custom programming which goes in to produce and build a separate front end and back end reliably can take the lion’s share of investment in terms of development hours. But once they are done, the technical teams can save even more time year after year as they would then leave the design and user interface to other departments to update themselves.

Benefits of Headless Commerce

The most suitable candidates for a headless commerce architecture are the enterprises who have a sinewyIT department and carry a do-it-yourself attitude. Such organizations carry months-long development queues and ambitious creative and marketing teams.

Here are some of the most important benefits of adopting a Headless Commerce for a business:

Better employee adoption: There are business users who can be sometimes reluctant to use new technologies since they have steep learning curves. Headless commerce presents a simplicity and solves this problem where every individual on the team can easily access and update the front end sans the need of possessing any advanced skills.

Time savings: In a headless eCommerce based architecture, even non-developers can commit changes to the front end. No need to submit any tickets to the IT team. Headless commerce helps developers save time on user interface changes, allowing them to focus on more critical work.

Easy and rapid front-end deployment: As a common practice, most of the front-end eCommerce website changes are routed through the IT team. Those who use headless commerce can easily skip this step and quickly deploy their own changes independently.

Time to market: As an eCommerce business you can rapidly launch new front-end experiences. Sometimes, Reacting to a new market trend can be done rapidly and with a minimum cost of back-end development.

Robust personalization: When you seek, you will see that customer data is easily available across every touch point which allows merchants to offer relevant promotions and offers to customers, meanwhile creating personalized, meaningful shopping experiences.

Scale your site faster: Once the developers are freed from operating constraints, they can work more efficiently while pushing down the operating costs and thrusting the site updates in the least amount possible with fewer resources.

Endnotes

As an online retailer when you consider headless as a viable commerce approach, you should keep the future on top-of-mind. Once such headless technologies mature, a larger congregation towards mainstream eCommerce becomes inevitable.

This puts the early adopters at an advantage. Since it provides a wide range of integration options, merchants can easily proceed at a pace which suits their organizational maturity, regardless of a focused migration or a phased approach. It’s time to hire magento developers and take your website to the next level.

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Albert Smith

Albert Smith, Marketing Manager at Hidden Brains, drives brand growth with innovative strategies in web, mobile app, and software development.