What Is Headless Commerce & Why You Should Use It?

The ecommerce world is continuously changing, and it may lose its head. Yes, you heard it right, headless commerce could be the new thing and can be the future of ecommerce. Headless commerce is gradually increasing its popularity. Although it is a new name in ecommerce, it has provided many benefits for both shop owners and customers, including faster website load, more personalization choices, and a lot. Headless commerce can become a norm for both B2B & B2C businesses. As per a survey, 86% of business owners are saying that they are experiencing rising customer acquisition costs. Thus, businesses have to create an online experience that can bring customers in. The strategy many retailers are using to accomplish a content-led online store is headless commerce.

What Is Headless Commerce?

Headless Commerce simply means that the front-end presentation layer has been decoupled from the back-end solution which was responsible for all the features and functionalities of the ecommerce application. Due to this decoupling, the developers or shop owners can easily make changes without affecting the customer’s experience. The CMS store manages and delivers the content without any front-end layer.

Mostly the head or the frontend is a template or a theme that is decoupled or removed, leaving the only backend. For delivering content like products, blog posts, reviews, and ratings, on a screen or device, front-end developers focus on how to represent that content using any framework they wish.

How Can Headless Commerce Help Your eCommerce Store?

As the expectations of customers are continuously increasing, every time a customer is exposed to a better shopping experience, it raises their expectations for other brands quite high. It ultimately implies that the ecommerce landscape is shifting and the ecommerce owner must need to maintain the pace to stand in the market. It gives you the agility to move faster. Here are the primary ways headless commerce can help your ecommerce business:

• Flexible & Customizable: It is easy to manage the content and deliver it to any channel. The developers can create UX from scratch without any limitations. It is unachievable with traditional platforms where templates and pre-packaged modules determine the UX. The developers can also easily implement solutions like PIMs, OMS, ERPs, shipping logistics; modification, enhancement, extension via apps; as well as adding a custom checkout flow or a new field to a customer account.
• API Delivered Commerce: In headless commerce, as there is no presentation layer, you can decide where the commerce will take place using APIs. Data is made available, no matter what device or channel users are on. There are many omnichannel networks from web applications to IoT, which can be enabled to integrate with CMS. Mostly REST APIs and GraphQL are used.
• Highly futuristic: As there are no interdependencies, shop owners can easily implement and develop new solutions at a faster pace. There is no need for reconfiguring any back-end logic. Headless commerce also supports newer technologies so that innovation always drives up.

How Does PWA Technology Relate To Headless Commerce Technology?

Progressive Web Applications or PWAs are the best way to implement Headless Commerce solutions. The true potential of headless commerce is realized when the content delivery to different UIs doesn’t pose any problem. But how do PWA and Headless Commerce make it happen?

Headless commerce updates the info real quick and delivers instantly. It provides cloud features to run the app. It also gives complete liberty to include features in an app, and the coding language is no bar w.r.t app development. When the PWA gets headless, the term coined is PWA headless. In PWA headless, the data fetch through API makes it more advanced. With headless PWA, the app owner gets the advantage to maintain proof of their builds. It will allow them to refresh the design without re-implementing the whole content. PWA already comes among the best solutions in the web & mobile app platform, and adding the headless feature would be another feature in the cap.

• Standardization: A headless PWA with its trending techniques allows a faster development. This, in turn, will allow the achievement of a standard.
• New Architectures: You can achieve a lightning-fast frontend with the new architectures of microservices using headless PWA.
• Latest Technological Stack: PWA employs ReactJS which provides flexibility to the developers to develop faster ecommerce stores in minimum time
• Headless Mechanism: The API connection through a headless approach and decoupling will allow backend modification with no effect on the frontend.

What Is The Difference Between PWA & Headless PWA?

Also Read: Why Develop PWA for Your Magento eCommerce Store?

What Are The Benefits Of Headless Commerce?

After understanding many of the things of Headless commerce, now let’s dive deeper into why this tripartite structure – frontend, API, backend – becomes very relevant for your business and leaves the realm of the too-technical.

1. Truly Omnichannel

A headless CMS lets you propel the content anywhere. For ecommerce, it means delivering your products, videos, blogs, reviews, etc. It also allows you to sell through digital signage or even PWAs. Using APIs you would be able to connect your ecommerce platform to different sales channels.

2. Highly Competitive

Using headless you can do rapid updates without much impact on the back-end system. Thus, make changes in your front-end to coincide with the pace of consumer demands. For e.g. you can easily provide a highly optimized mobile browsing experience as the number of mobile users is on the rise. Since your frontend doesn’t depend much on the backend, you can add a rewards program without the need to do many customizations in the backend.

3. Powerful Agile Marketing

Do you want to design a new customer experience or want to promote your channel on a new social media platform? You can easily do this with headless commerce. The major ecommerce platforms such as Magento, Shopify, and BigCommerce lets you sell and promote products on different social media platforms. Hence, you can do campaigns within weeks on headless commerce.

4. Freedom to Experiment

You can do new experiments on the customer user interface without fear of risking the whole system. For e.g., if you want to A/B test specific parts, you can build a PWA you can create some errors in the process without affecting the backend operations you can create some errors in the process without affecting the backend operations.

5. Scalable

The developer can scale up both frontend and backend individually. Even though there is a lot of traffic on the front, it doesn’t as such affect the backend as they are loosely coupled. Thus it results in a reduced operational cost, and stabilized availability.

Best Headless Commerce Platforms

1. Adobe Commerce Platform For Headless Experience

Nearly a year ago, Adobe Commerce Cloud launches a Headless offering to serve the high customer experience needs of enterprise customers. It is a robust and highly flexible infrastructure for continuous integration and delivery processes and also empowers customers for quick and agile iterations of their code.

2. Headless Commerce With BigCommerce

Using Bigcommerce, you can power multiple stores on multiple platforms. You have the freedom to simultaneously run multiple stores across various front-end solutions all from a single BigCommerce account.

3. Headless Commerce With SAP Hybris

Hybris headless commerce is innovated with Angular JS on the SAP Commerce Cloud. It simplifies and speeds up development using a modern JS storefront. It is extendable and the storefront communicates with the commerce platform using REST APIs. It can be customized for business needs.

4.  Go Headless With Shopify

Shopify Headless Commerce engages customers through innovative and creative storefronts, like kiosks, billboards, smart mirrors, wearables, and vending machines. It experiments with agile marketing and A/B testing to update your campaigns.

5.  Headless Commerce With Magento 2

Magento is a really good fit for the back-end of a headless build, be it via a separate framework or a headless CMS. Magento’s page builder or content staging and preview are good examples of features that fall under this.

Also Read: Magento 2.3 PWA Installation – The Complete Guide

6. Headless Commerce With Drupal

Drupal Commerce allows you to implement headless commerce and helps in monetizing the moment of heightened emotion as most of the time, the inspiration, which is potent at the moment, diminishes to a fleeting whim.

7. Headless Commerce With Salesforce Commerce Cloud

The Salesforce Headless Commerce Cloud approach will increase customer lifetime value (CLV) because it enables brands to meet customers across owned and third-party platforms.

Top Frontend Frameworks for Headless Commerce

The best frontend frameworks for headless commerce are:

• Vue.js: Vue.js is amongst the lightweight and progressive JS framework
• React.js: React.js is the declarative JS library for building spectacular user interfaces
• Angular: A TypeScript-based open-source framework best for developing highly-interactive web applications
• Nuxt.js: It is an open-source high-level framework built on top of Vue.js
• Inferno.js: Inferno.js is a highly fast JS library for developing modern user interfaces
• Next.js: It is an open-source JS framework based on the Vue.js framework
• Express.js: It has been called the de facto standard server framework for Node.js

Also Read: How to Develop eCommerce Mobile App?

Middleware Orchestration Layers For Headless Commerce

One way or another, the front end needs to get all the data from the headless commerce application programming interface. Rather than call the commerce APIs directly from the front end, we prefer to add a middleware orchestration layer that provides various services like caching, and allows us to consolidate responses from multiple external systems via reliable high bandwidth connections. In addition to presenting commerce data, most of our implementations also interact with a CMS.

We prefer to write our orchestration layers in Node.js, mainly because we find it to be highly efficient and productive. Node.js has a thriving development community with oodles of libraries and continually improving development workflows. The compatibility with our front-end Javascript is another advantage, making it possible to share code between the client and the server (similar to what we do with isomorphic server-side rendering).

Best CMS For Headless Commerce

The best CMS for Headless Commerce are:

• Amplience: Amplience is an enterprise-level platform mostly used for headless
• Acquia: Acquia is a drupal based CMS platform for the headless
• Butter CMS: ButterCMS is an API-based or “headless” CMS which allows you to do the same things as WordPress in terms of enabling your clients
• Cockpit: Cockpit is a very simple content platform for managing any structured content. It is a self-hosted headless and API-driven CMS
• Contentstack: Contentstack brings business and technology teams together to deliver personalized, omnichannel digital experiences
• Contentful: Not exactly a CMS, yet Contentful can do everything a traditional CMS can do
• Core DNA: Core DNA is a headless SaaS CMS and Commerce Platform. It can empower your team to quickly launch eCommerce sites and implement digital marketing
• Craft: For using Craft as a headless CMS, it should act as a content API instead of (or in addition to) a regular website
• DatoCMS: DatoCMS is a headless CMS. It can create the online content at scale from a central hub and distribute it easily via API to websites and any other digital experience
• Deity: Deity is a React.js based API-first headless commerce platform
• Directus: Directus 8 is a data-first headless CMS that wraps custom SQL databases with a dynamic API, and provide an intuitive admin app for managing its content
• Gatsby: Gatsby is a static site generator based on React and GraphQL. A headless CMS offers a read-only API, that can be read by your static site generator

Best Static Site Generators Platform For Headless Commerce

Top 10 Examples of Headless commerce

1. Nike

Nike has gone headless with its PWA for its advantage of more conversion rate. The shoe manufacturer giant has increased its conversion rate from 15-30%.

2. Venus

Venus Fashion went headless and reduced its median mobile web page load time to 320 milliseconds. It increases the page loading speed from 15% to 73%.

3. Koala

The highest-rated mattress brand in Australia, Koala decoupled the content from the code to free the engineers and writers from each other dependency. Thus, now they can create new pages, products, and content much faster.

4. Target

Target is another leading ecommerce player in the US. It adopted the headless to reduce the bounce rates and higher ROI from SEM.

5. Amazon

The biggest ecommerce giant Amazon has also adopted headless for its captivating site speed which is the new competitive battleground for ecommerce.

6. Walmart

Another biggest example of headless commerce is Walmart which has increased website improvement velocity through simpler/reduced code.

7. United Airlines

Not only ecommerce, but aviation sites like United Airlines have adopted headless for their PWA.

8. Lancome

Lancome is a luxury cosmetic brand and comes under Forbes’s most valuable brands in 2019. It is also adopted headless for its PWA benefits.

9. Carnival Cruise Line

If you are a traveler then you must have heard this name, Carnival Cruise Line is one of the world’s largest travel-leisure agencies. They adopted the headless and find it is good for booking management.

10. Feel Unique

Feel Unique is Europe’s leading retailer of beauty products. They developed the React PWA with the headless approach.

What Are The Drawbacks Of Headless Commerce

Regardless of how many the pros of a platform are, there are always a few cons that should also be noted. So, let’s know about the drawbacks of headless commerce as well.

Costing Of Development

As you are separating your frontend from the backend, now you have to spend on two separate environments i.e. the cost will become twice. There could be upfront costs as well for setting up headless commerce.

Increases Complexity

Now you will deal with multiple vendors & technologies having their own set of bugs & security issues plus they have their ways of installing, configuring, troubleshooting, and also in support. All these tasks require more work and increase complexity.

Loss Of Native Ecommerce Functionality

It depends on your current ecommerce platform you can also lose native frontend features after separating it from the frontend. Features like Page building, previewing (WYSIWYG), and also merchandising wouldn’t be further available.

Conclusion

Headless commerce solutions assist you to rapidly adapt to change while attaining a low cost of ownership, a fast time to market, perfect security, and everything one needs to deliver a top-class online shopping experience.

Headless commerce is the best way to accomplish all these with extra flexibility and options when we need to choose a frontend.