A headless commerce solution is designed for the headless commerce model. It operates as a modern, efficient system with its components decoupled from each other. This architecture separates the presentation layer from the commerce engine, allowing quick communication between different platform parts.
Lately, we have witnessed flagship technological evolutions in the eCommerce industry. And guess losing its head was the only thing left now. Pun intended! So, headless commerce, in fact, is the new future of the eCommerce industry. Headless architecture has been gaining much traction among big and small players alike.
Headless commerce is fairly a new technology and is still unfathomed to an extent, but what is known is it comes with various benefits like improved website performance, vivid customization, personalization options, and much more. The entire eCommerce fraternity including B2C, B2B, D2C, and Online Marketplaces are transitioning towards embracing it. Because of its adaptive and flexible nature, headless commerce has become or is becoming the holy grail for big names like Toyota, Tesla, Amazon, Nike, and McDonald’s.
With the advent of mobile commerce and the change in post-pandemic shopping behavior of the customers, about 86% of the online businesses face issues regarding rising customer acquisition costs. Customers are now looking towards better experiences more than anything else. Thus, the most significant strategical move for online businesses to stay ahead of the competition is to provide an unhindered and seamless customer experience (CX). And only an online store architecture that is agile, fast, and flexible can help businesses accomplish that.
What Is Headless Commerce?
From the dawn of eCommerce, since roughly 1995, it has become one of the few industries that reinvent itself every couple of years. However, in a relatively short time, the industry has gone from hard-wired integrations and monolithic systems to cloud-based services and everything unimaginable beyond that. Headless commerce is the latest and most advanced iteration of the eCommerce tech stack. Though not a new concept, cloud computing extends service-oriented architecture, SOA, at the internet scale. Headless commerce has turned eCommerce itself into service.
Headless Commerce continues down the same path as cloud computing and goes further to decouple the commerce engine from the CMS content. Currently, most legacy platforms have a built-in CMS that allows the content to be integrated into a single platform. This usually limits the stores’ content capabilities to the specific CMS system of the particular eCommerce platform. Here, design and content distribution across various channels become a substantial limiting factor for marketers. Also, augmenting the built-in CMS system to tailor fit the specific business needs, catering to mobile formats, and more can be challenging and expensive. Here is where Headless Commerce looks towards solving this problem.
The headless commerce separates the CMS system, takes off the head, and leaves the commerce engine and API. This changes the way the eCommerce store operates. The CMS system manages the content, which communicates with the commerce engine via a simple API call. The commerce engine carries out all the other functions of the business as usual. The rest of the integrations of the store remain the same as they are. The biggest advantage is the removal of design limitations of the CMS.
In a nutshell, as placed by Wikipedia, “Headless commerce is an eCommerce architecture where the frontend is decoupled from the backend commerce functionality and can thus be updated or edited without interfering with the frontend, similar to a headless content management system.”
What are the Different Models of Structuring eCommerce?
There are distinctively three different models through which the eCommerce structures abide by.
- Monolithic
This was the OG of eCommerce structures. Like when back in the days, the hardware and the software were indistinguishably linked, something analogous went on with the commerce engine and the CMS system.
- Commerce-led
This structure uses a commerce platform front end for the user experience, UX, and checkout, but the APIs for data orchestration and the infrastructure are more robust. Businesses typically following this model are usually SaaS or open source technologies. - Experience-led
This model of eCommerce structure, i.e. the Headless structure, decouples the presentation layer from the eCommerce platform enabling the businesses to use popular CMS systems to develop custom frontend solutions to render unparalleled CX that increase brand value perception and drive conversion.
With that, let’s move on to a section where you’ll learn why headless commerce is considered to be the future of commerce.
What are the Benefits of Going Headless?
1. Higher Flexibility and Adaptability
A decoupled architecture enables businesses to respond pro-actively to dynamic situations. For instance, during and post-pandemic, most companies had to revise their business strategies, front ends, and the various touchpoints. With headless commerce in play, the developers can individually tweak the components and innovate outside the traditional boundaries of CMS, gaining greater flexibility, agility, and adaptability to respond to evolving situations.
2. Empowering the Marketers
Marketing teams can leverage the headless architecture to tweak the presentation layer, distribute content at a faster rate, and roll out most updates without the development team’s involvement. They can also add various integrations and functionalities to the e-store much swiftly compared to the traditional CMS.
3. Going painlessly omnichannel
Businesses can now amplify their brand presence across the omnichannel multiverse, effortlessly leveraging the headless architecture. Frontend developers can develop multiple tailor-made front ends from scratch while reaching as many touchpoints as needed with a faster time-to-market. This allows the businesses to surpass the constraints felt in traditional eCommerce stacks.
4. Scale Effortlessly
A decoupled approach is best suited for businesses aiming to put their brand on the global market. It enables the developer to create as many micro-sites as they need. Launching campaigns is also easier and quicker, with the content being delivered in multiple languages as and when required. With complete control over the stores’ architecture, businesses can unlock enormous growth potential.
5. Better Store Performance, Faster Loading Times
Over 53% of mobile visitors abandon websites if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This is no secret that slow websites and delayed loading speeds can be detrimental to any eCommerce business. The headless eCommerce architecture helps create fast eCommerce websites. As the webpage is pre-rendered while developing, there is no need for compilation when the customer goes on the website. Also, because many of the extra dependencies are usually compiled into a single bundle, there are way fewer requests, hence faster load times.
6. Enhanced CX
Headless commerce gives businesses an easy way to deliver personalized content to their customers. With the ability to provide relevant content to the customers, fast load times, and better site performance, businesses can consistently render superior CX. The decoupled architecture also enables companies to leverage advanced technologies like AI, ML, and AR, VR to elevate the eCommerce experience to a whole new level.
7. Seamless Integrations
Communicating via API call has its benefits. A headless commerce architecture works on the API and makes it easier to interact and integrate with other platforms. Integration is quick and seamless. It also helps businesses streamline their workflows without diving into the deep end of the code. This saves time and effort while keeping eCommerce brands at the forefront of delivering superior CX.
8. Cost-Effective and Worth
It has been established that headless commerce helps decrease customer acquisition rates, increase the overall conversion rate, and retain customers more than ever. The primary factor contributing to this corollary is that businesses can deliver enjoyable CX across various touchpoints leveraging the headless approach, also called the experience-led approach.
How can Krish Help Businesses Embrace Headless Commerce?
Krish is a digital commerce solution provider with an impeccable track record for delivering unified eCommerce solutions to brands across the globe. We are here to help brands who want to dip their toes in the deep waters of headless commerce and unlock massive growth opportunities. We can help change business narratives across industries by implementing seamless headless commerce and taking the game up a notch.
Our digital commerce development team has over ten years of experience. The team will work tirelessly to help businesses build their headless commerce stores from scratch, migrate to the new technology from old legacy platforms, and provide ample support and maintenance while already on headless architecture to keep the stores running glitch-free.
Krish has integrated various frameworks like Vue Storefront and headless commerce platforms like Commercetools, VTEX, Magento PWA Studio, Shopify, and more to leave no stone unturned.
If you have any queries or want to discuss your headless options, feel free to contact us, and our headless experts will be happy to answer your questions. Also, to know more about Headless Commerce and the potential the technology holds for the future of the eCommerce industry, keep checking our latest resources.
As the relevance of Headless commerce continues to grow in the eCommerce landscape, we have brought our simplified version of the concept. Do read our free eBook, “HEADLESS COMMERCE: A DEFINITIVE GUIDE,” to crack the complexities of headless technology.
A Definitive Guide on Headless Commerce
Understand the basics and leverage Headless at full
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Minal Joshi is a content marketer at Krish with a flair for eCommerce and Digital Commerce aspects. She is a MarTech fanatic with a knack of writing with which, she helps brands to curate, create, & commence digital brand positioning. Sharing insights via articles, case studies, eBooks, Infographics, and other forms of content creation is what she lives for. Being an ardent traveler, when not writing, you'll find her sipping coffee into the mountains or petting a stray.
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From Monolith to MACH Series – Headless (4/4)
12 July, 2023 “Headless architecture” is a part of the MACH approach. It was first introduced by commercetools founder Dirk Hoerig in 2012. In this architecture, the presentation layer is decoupled from the backend, which enables greater flexibility and scalability. It helps in delivering content across multiple channels and devices. Traditionally, people followed the monolithic approach. In this setup, websites and applications have a tightly coupled architecture with interconnected frontend and backend. As a result, any changes to the frontend require modifications to the backend. On the other hand, a headless architecture keeps the two layers separate so that they can evolve independently. The term "headless" refers to the removal of the head, which refers to the frontend or user interface. This is a Monolith to MACH series of 4 informative articles, each explaining different components of the MACH architecture - Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless architecture. Read on…
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