The digital landscape continues to change, and there’s a major shift that might be coming to online stores very soon.
This time, this shift aims to tackle one major challenge that eCommerce brands face: creating consistent and positive omnichannel customer experiences. You see, with more customers using mobile devices and social media to buy, many businesses have a hard time adapting to these communication touchpoints.
Headless commerce represents the technology that enables merchants to make that shift. If you’re new to this term, this guide will explain everything in simple language.
In this post:
-
Headless commerce definition
-
Architecture required for headless commerce
-
Differences between headless commerce and traditional ecommerce
-
Business advantages of headless commerce
What is Headless Commerce?
Headless commerce means the separation of the frontend of ecommerce applications from the backend. This decoupling allows more flexibility to create more personalized and unique experiences for customers, which is essential for proper omnichannel marketing.
In other words, a business can make updates to the website user interface, social commerce, IoT, and other customer-facing channels (frontend) without making any changes in the backend (code). This capability is currently impossible in many traditional ecommerce platforms like Magento.
This means that ecommerce merchants can publish content from any platform (social media, website, etc.), instantly, without the frontend. As a result, they get full control over all the customer communication touchpoints, which allows them to create a cohesive customer experience regardless of how they interact with the brand.
Headless Commerce Architecture
So, we know that headless commerce can deliver content without the requirement of a front-end delivery layer. The content (products, customer reviews, blog posts, etc. ) is pushed to any platform through APIs. Web developers are responsible for doing that, while frontend coders work to ensure that the content can be delivered via any preferred framework.
Let’s demonstrate how this architecture works with a simple example. If a customer clicks a “buy” button after providing order details, the customer-facing layer of the headless commerce system sends an API call to the backend layer to process the new order. In turn, the backend layer also responds with an API call to show the latest status of the order to the customer.
This makes headless commerce perfect for marketing to clients on any device, including IoT devices.
A headless content management system (CMS), a distinct part of headless commerce architecture, is what makes the “headless” system special. It uses a separate inventory management system, just like the backend database, which is responsible for storing content.
Taken from this article. Can we design something similar, please?
Headless Commerce vs Conventional eCommerce
Understanding the difference between headless and traditional commerce approaches can be tricky. That’s why we're going to discuss several key differences in this section in more detail.
1. Frontend development
The main advantage of using a headless commerce system in terms of frontend development is a lack of design limits. A user just needs to create API calls to define changes they need to be made. There’s no need to modify backend databases or do many other complex processes.
On the other hand, the traditional ecommerce infrastructure is very constrained when it comes to design. Making changes requires major alterations in code, databases, or ecommerce platforms, which is very time-consuming. This makes changes and upgrades impractical in many cases.
2. Personalization
Developers of traditional ecommerce platforms define the experiences for business users and customers. Some customization is available, but you can’t change most aspects, which leads to businesses providing pretty much the same customer experiences.
On the other hand, headless commerce architecture allows more freedom in the personalization and customization of customer experience. A lack of frontend results in more opportunities to create features, flows, and appearances of ecommerce platforms.
The ultimate benefit is a unique customer experience that makes a brand more memorable in the eyes of potential customers.
2. Flexibility and Adaptability
As we know, making changes to headless ecommerce platforms is easier. Here’s an example. Let’s say you want to customize the checkout at your online store to increase conversions. In the traditional setting, you’d need to edit multiple code layers to implement any changes because the frontend is coupled with the backend.
But in the headless commerce infrastructure, all you need is to describe the task for a frontend developer. He or she can make changes without going through multiple layers of coding, which speeds up the entire process. Besides, the task will be much easier to execute for the developer, which means you’ll have your desired changes live faster.
Benefits of Headless Commerce
The basic idea behind headless commerce is to allow businesses to deliver true omnichannel experiences to customers. By adopting this approach, they can get the following benefits.
1. More Personalized Customer Experience
Making customer experiences more customized and personalized is a major goal of 70% of businesses. Shoppers need personalized product recommendations, easier checkouts, and unique experiences — and merchants that deliver those are going to win big.
Source: Ascend2
Businesses that use headless commerce don’t have to deal with the limited customer experience options of traditional platforms. Instead, they have greater opportunities to create and deploy customized experiences by making changes using APIs. For example, front-end notifications can take days or weeks instead of months.
2. Improve Lead Nurturing with Omnichannel Marketing
Omnichannel marketing is an approach that provides customers with consistent experiences across all communication channels throughout the customer’s journey with a brand. Shoppers now make product searches via multiple channels (social media, website, etc.), and they like to be contacted on specific ones.
For example, McKinsey found that up to 21% of customers switched to businesses that sent them relevant promotions and other marketing content in their preferred communication channel.
Headless commerce is an effective way to share content on different channels, and even include IoT devices like voice assistants and smart home products. The ability to conveniently purchase products and services on channels customers prefer will improve your business’s reputation and long-term goals.
3. Provide Consistent Customer Experience
Consistent customer experience is important to allow your target audiences to make their way down the customer journey. It does that by making their experience familiar, therefore, simpler.
For example, consistent customer experience means using the same designs, fonts, colors, and features across all communication channels (website, app, social media, third-party sources, etc.). This ensures predictability and familiarity, which improves customer experiences by making them feel more confident and comfortable using, say, your app or website.
4. Faster Innovation
Fast innovation remains a reliable way to stay competitive in ecommerce. Headless solutions help speed up the process of creating and deploying new features and tools without the cost of backend development.
This opportunity reduces the time to market, so businesses can launch new features quicker compared to traditional commerce solutions.
5. Faster and Easier Software Integrations
Integrations with other software apps allow online merchants to achieve their goals quicker. For example, adding a data management app to the ecommerce platform can help to manage customer data more effectively (say, automatically create datasets for further processing).
Headless ecommerce solutions make it easier to integrate with other apps, tools, and platforms, so they can streamline their processes faster.
Headless Commerce: Summary
Headlines commerce is a new way to create unique customer experiences, innovate, and grow as an online business. Going headless can help merchants to achieve their goals by removing many time-consuming processes from the equation.
With the right software partner, adopting headless commerce would be a fast and straightforward process. This technology is just taking off, so there’s an opportunity to get ahead, waiting to be capitalized on.