The eCommerce world continues to change rapidly, and headless commerce is becoming a progressively popular solution for eCommerce brands. The eCommerce market is expected to grow to $1.3 trillion. from 2022 and 2025. The growing record numbers of new eCommerce stores put brands under pressure to stand out in order to compete. Brands will have to focus on building loyalty by providing personalised and diversified experiences to cover the rising costs of acquiring customers. They will need to harness creative omnichannel experiences to gain shoppers’ attention, convert them, and maintain those relationships. It’s now time to get creative and build those personalised experiences without involving any third-party cookies. Here’s where headless commerce steps in. What is Headless commerce? Headless commerce system is separating of the front end and back end of an eCommerce application. The headless commerce architecture offers brands freedom of expression to build whatever and however they want. Most notably, it allows brands to enrich the customer experience with personalisation. The headless commerce approach makes use of APIs, experienced managers, and advanced tools such as Heroku and Mulesoft to keep pace with emerging touch-points and customer journeys and deliver new functionality and experiences that engage customers and stay ahead of their expectations. Headless commerce is an eCommerce solution that stores, manages, and delivers content and works independently without a front-end delivery layer. The front end which in most cases is a template or theme is decoupled and removed, leaving only the backend. Headless commerce is when a brand separates the frontend and backend of its online store. These two separate sides work independently and communicate via the Application programming interface API. Benefits of Headless commerce The benefits of switch to headless commerce will be worth the effort and will accelerate your business. · Better employee acceptance. Adopting to new technologies can be reluctant due to steep learning curves. Modern commerce platforms with headless commerce solve this problem since, without advanced skills, any developer teammate can easily access and update the front end. · Provides with right tools for the right job. Headless commerce provides brands with the APIs to ensure coordinated, reliable experiences across channels, with help of common commerce services like promotions, inventory, product information, and more. · Time saving. Developers can save time on user interface changes as the front end can be made agile. With headless templates and other partner solutions, developers with just a few clicks or little coding can jumpstart commerce apps and increase conversion. · Cost saving. With headless commerce, you can eliminate the expenses involved on development process for every storefront change. Headless involves cheaper licensing and hosting fees, and lesser infrastructure spending. · Prompt changes and optimisation. As soon as the business introduces any new content to its front end, the updates are reflected instantly. · Rich user experiences and interfaces. Headless commerce allows brands to control all the elements users interact with more easily, so brands can get more creative with the content they publish on their websites. Additionally, it ensures your website works seamlessly on all devices and viewing formats. · Flexible front-end development. With Headless eCommerce, front-end developers are set free to create a user experience from scratch which fits nicely with their business needs. Additionally, they don’t need to modify databases in the backend and can do it with a simple API call. · Customisation and personalisation. With headless platforms, since there is no front end, developers have more control over the look and feel of their commerce platform and you also have control over the user experience for both your customer and their admin users. · Flexibility and adaptability. As headless commerce decouples the front end from the back end, there are endless possibilities for customisation. You simply need to have a front-end developer who can make all the changes, from implementing a custom checkout flow to adding an extra field to a customer account. · Go omnichannel with ease. A headless content management system helps to propel your content anywhere and everywhere. So, it’s time to get ready to sell through Alexa Skills, digital signage, progressive web apps, and or even refrigerators with screens. · To remain competitive A headless commerce platform enables you to deploy rapid updates and easily make any changes to your front-end. Thus, you can deliver what your consumers wants more quickly and enjoy a competitive upper hand. · For agile marketing A headless commerce storefront can support new technology as and when they arise. This helps when designing new customer experiences. With headless eCommerce system, marketing teams can set up a new site in days instead of months. · For seamless integrations. Headless commerce solution has an API (such as GraphQL), that makes easy integration and communication with other platforms in just few hours. You can add your brand to any new device, expand your opportunities and outreach to more customers at the same time. · Better conversion optimisation. You can try and test different templates and approaches as headless commerce allows you to run continuous tests and optimisation cycles that ultimately help you get a better understanding of your customer. · Faster time to market. A headless commerce platform enables brands to emphasis building front-end experiences on different devices and touch-points, as the content and products are centrally collected and delivered via API anywhere. This enables faster time to market when adopting new channels, entering new regions, etc as compared to traditional commerce platforms. Popular headless commerce platforms to consider Many eCommerce platforms offer APIs that facilitate a headless commerce approach. Here are two top headless platforms that are most popular ones to consider in the space: 1. Magento 2 (Adobe Commerce) Magento 2 users can leverage Magento APIs, and can handle large quantities of content at scale. 2. Shopify Plus Shopify Plus users can also have access to APIs which can expose product information to third-party systems. Although a CMS may be needed to handle additional content at scale, headless commerce Shopify is good with integrations. Final thought– How do you get started with headless commerce? Adobe Commerce platforms provide APIs and tools for developers to build coordinated, brand-reliable experiences across multiple channels, optimise the user experience, and interface to improve customer engagement and conversions. By separating the front and backend platforms, brands can deliver a faster, more agile, unique, and consistent shopping experience for customers. The flexibility of a commerce platform ensures your developers can build with speed and full autonomy of tools, code, and APIs, page load times, and all third-party integrations and can create innovative experiences. Headless promises the freedom to create incredible shopping experiences at each customer touchpoint by unlocking every developer experiences. With headless commerce you can sell anywhere without design or development constraints. The eCommerce world is your storefront. References Grant, M., Boyles, R., Marcotte, M., Liu, F., Schwartz, C., & Dresden, H. (2022, August 9). Everything you need to know about headless commerce. The 360 Blog from Salesforce. Retrieved September 27, 2022, from https://www.salesforce.com/blog/define-headless-commerce/ Headless commerce: The Complete Guide to selling [2022 edition]. Core dna. (n.d.). Retrieved September 27, 2022, from https://www.coredna.com/blogs/headless-commerce Headless commerce: Ultimate explanation: Vue storefront. Headless Commerce: Ultimate Explanation | Vue Storefront. (n.d.). Retrieved September 27, 2022, from https://vuestorefront.io/headless-commerce What is headless commerce: A complete guide (2022). Shopify Plus. (n.d.). Retrieved September 27, 2022, from https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/headless-commerce GET IN TOUCH: Name * Company * Phone Email * Subject Message *
