Headless Ecommerce

How can you keep up in the fast-changing and highly competitive eCommerce environment, and what is headless eCommerce?

In times of in-store interfaces, IoT, Amazon Dash buttons, and voice assistants, there are many new options to shop online, which is fantastic for customers. But this presents even more challenges for eCommerce businesses, which are already struggling with changing technologies, monolithic systems, countless new features, relaunches, conversion experiments, performance, usability, and the list goes on and on.

To stay successful, you need to meet your customers' expectations of an integrated, flawless, and personalized shopping experience across many channels and touchpoints. New ways to shop online keep popping up, so merchants continuously need to rethink their eCommerce strategy to stay competitive and profitable in the long run.

All these challenges led to the rise of headless eCommerce!

What is headless eCommerce?

The term 'headless' refers to a software architecture that is capable of functioning without a graphical user interface. For an online store, that means the frontend is separated or 'decoupled' from its backend. In other words, the presentation layer (website, app, etc.) is separated from the commerce/functional layer.

The headless architecture leverages the power of modularity to give store owners more flexibility in delivering rich content and brand experiences across many channels while staying future-proof, even if technologies change. With this approach, developers and optimizers gain more flexibility to create a tailored shopping experience, because the back- and frontends are no longer tightly tied together.

In case you didn’t know, we released our very own open-source headless e-commerce foundation: VELOX

Headless vs. traditional eCommerce

Traditional eCommerce Systems

A traditional website is constrained by its predefined design and database, because the business logic, infrastructure, and presentation layer are usually tightly connected. So, if your developers want to make changes, they not only have to edit the frontend but also the database and its code. Especially if several layers of code between the database and design have to be edited, it can get time-consuming very fast. In some cases, this can even break your platform's warranty, and upgrades can become a massive task.

There is always a tradeoff between eCommerce and CMS functionality. If you use an excellent eCommerce platform, it usually comes with limited CMS functionality, and if you use an excellent CMS, it usually lacks some important eCommerce features.

With a headless approach, you are free to choose best-of-breed solutions and connect them.

Headless eCommerce

Headless software architecture, by contrast, is an API-first, modular, and decoupled solution. Data is pulled into the presentation layer via an API to design the frontend with maximum independence. Therefore, you can modify or add to the frontend without knowing much about the backend logic. You are also free to easily connect your products to external systems like marketplaces, as this is just another way of presenting them.

For example, if you want to run conversion experiments or change the user experience in any way, you only need a frontend developer. This reduces the time to market and also makes the process a lot less complicated, as they don't need to conform to an existing design or template.

Of course, you need developers and designers for this to work out. On the other hand, it gives you a lot more flexibility and freedom to tailor the customer experience to rising demands and changing technology landscapes. This massively benefits you in the long term.

8 Benefits of headless eCommerce

- Seamless integration of CMS, webshop, backend (ERP, CRM), supplier and vendor portals leads to a single entry point for customers and can be an alternative to portals.

- Single identity and single sign-on can be implemented more quickly and are not restrained by systems that cannot communicate with each other.

- Decoupling all components increases flexibility and drastically reduces the cost of exchanging specific systems in your software architecture, for example to follow future trends in the frontend as well as in the backend.

- Rapid experimentation and optimization processes are finally realizable in time.

- Avoidance of redundancies and overheads caused by monolithic systems.

- Achieve the optimal performance of your site.

- Low infrastructure costs through cloud / cloud-native services that run on self-service hosting providers, e.g. Amazon AWS, as opposed to the high cost of local cloud services on big servers.

- Real, horizontal scalability of many systems.

Summary

If you want to stay ahead of your competition, you should invest now in a headless eCommerce approach, especially if you are in the B2B market. With all systems tightly tied into a monolith, the technology landscape gets complex and slow to change very quickly.

With a headless approach, you can modularize the critical parts and therefore stay future-proof against changing systems or technologies, as well as easily integrate marketplaces, supplier portals, voice assistants, in-store interfaces, IoT devices and many more to come. Your eCommerce system will also be faster and easier to maintain and optimize, and it will deliver a customized customer experience.

We're huge fans of headless systems, which is why we developed VELOX, incorporating all these benefits into a code foundation for tailor-made ecommerce implementations.

Give us a call or drop us a line to find out how your business can benefit from a headless eCommerce implementation. Our experts boast more than 25 years of experience working with large-scale eCommerce projects. The first consultation is always free. We are keen to bring your eCommerce business to the next level!