Considering headless commerce? This guide covers everything you need to know about headless architecture, its benefits, and business impact.
In the online landscape, user experiences tend to change fast, and these changes in customer experience also impose new business needs, market trends, and customer expectations. Since your e-commerce platform must make the most out of the available resources, you need to extend your operations to meet the ever-growing demands of your target audience.
That’s why many business owners are considering investing in a headless solution. Such solutions give you the agility, flexibility, and scalability you need to meet these new needs. Today, we’ll discuss how adopting headless commerce architecture can benefit your e-commerce business and the advantages of including a headless approach in your tech stack.
Before we delve into headless commerce and explain how this approach helps you tailor digital experiences with APIs (application programming interfaces), let’s first assess the current state of e-commerce.
Today, e-commerce businesses face a lot of dramatic changes and market fluctuations. A traditional commerce platform must invest in content management systems to establish a brand presence across all digital channels to ensure every customer receives a personalized experience.
Marketing teams face the heavy challenge of tailoring the e-commerce experience to make it customer-centric on desktop and mobile devices. Traditional platforms find it hard to meet all these ever-increasing demands and challenges.
Luigi’s Box data shows that most people prefer using desktops for searching. However, mobile usage is also high. This highlights the need for flexible solutions that work well on any device, ensuring a smooth shopping experience whether customers browse on a desktop or mobile.
In addition, current market and e-commerce trends continue to set new standards that require business owners to change their business logic and embrace a new business model to stay afloat.
Customer acquisition costs are always on the rise, forcing digital businesses to rely on personalized shopping experiences to build brand loyalty and improve their lead generation, conversion, and customer retention rates.
In such an overwhelmingly competitive and fast-paced market, building a personalized and diversified omnichannel e-commerce experience is becoming increasingly challenging. Why? Because the numbers of new monolithic commerce platforms continue to grow, making it harder and harder for brands to stand out.
That’s where headless platforms come into the picture. Embracing the headless commerce architecture empowers your brand to build customer-centric user interfaces and presentation layers to deliver an unmatched online shopping experience to each customer.
Headless commerce is an innovative, modern e-commerce model that allows you to separate frontend (head) and backend processes. The headless architecture enables your front-end developers to make independent alterations and updates to the head without disrupting the backend.
A headless commerce platform operates much like a headless content management system. Headless or composable commerce gives you more flexible front-end experiences by disconnecting the head from the backend, thus giving you operational flexibility to go about your customers’ needs.
A headless solution empowers your monolithic platform and frontend developers to tailor personalized customer experiences for your target audience. It also allows you to quickly update your frontend without tampering with the backend.
Digital experience managers, IT partners, and APIs are critical parts of a profitable and productive headless commerce platform. Your digital business requires these resources to expedite time to market, build new sales channels, upgrade the digital storefront, and launch customer-centric marketing campaigns that exceed customers’ expectations.
Here are the two essential concepts of headless e-commerce to keep you in the loop:
The consumer-facing digital storefront, also known as the presentation layer or the front-end presentation layer, that includes multiple channels like a website, social media, internet-enabled devices, mobile devices, etc.
All the tools, workflows, processes, and systems that run in the background of your headless e-commerce platform to ensure it’s running smoothly. The backend layer supports operations like checkout, data storage, monolithic architecture processes, fulfillment, and merchandising.
The disconnection of front-end and back-end layers is vital to delivering a seamless experience across available communication channels. Though this composable architecture gives you many advantages, many traditional e-commerce platforms still lack the vision to see how separating these two elements can benefit their headless storefronts.
Adopting a headless e-commerce solution helps you disconnect the front-end layer from the backend to custom-tailor unmatched customer journeys across all devices and channels.
The API or application program interface is at the core of every headless commerce platform. It connects the front-end and back-end, ensuring both layers receive information in real time. The headless commerce approach empowers your teams to manage consumer-facing content on a backend platform, such as a content management system (CMS).
Headless storefronts empower your teams to tap into multiple backend solutions, such as:
Compared to traditional e-commerce platforms, headless businesses rely more on software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to build as many touchpoints for target audiences as possible. Whenever a prospect interacts with your headless commerce storefront, your back-end team receives that data via an API.
One of the most obvious headless commerce benefits is putting your brand everywhere. Since we’re talking about a flexible and innovative business model, upgrading your digital commerce platform allows you to position your brand in the leading market position.
It helps you keep your business up to date with the latest market and industry trends. With that in mind, here’s how a headless model can benefit your e-commerce strategy and help you achieve your business goals.
A headless commerce platform empowers you to adjust your brand image according to your customers’ needs. It allows you to make your content presentation layer more customer-centric to deliver a consistent and seamless customer experience with each interaction.
Compared to traditional e-commerce platforms, headless commerce helps you customize everything according to your needs. For example, you can focus your customization efforts on optimizing the user experience to ensure every prospect receives a consistent experience from day one.
In return, you’ll see an increase in your conversion rate. The headless commerce model also helps you mitigate most cybersecurity vulnerabilities while making changes to the frontend presentation layer. You won’t see any downtime or impact on your frontend platforms and backend systems in any way.
An average attention span of an online shopper is around eight seconds. That means you have less than that to grab a customer’s attention from the moment they land on your e-store.
According to the latest study, your customers have great expectations regarding your e-commerce performance.
The study found that:
of online shoppers will look for what they need elsewhere if your site isn’t good enough.
of mobile customers expect your e-store pages to load in less than four seconds.
of modern-day consumers won’t wait longer than two seconds for a page to load.
Since traditional commerce architecture doesn’t prioritize site speed, traditional e-stores need more time to load, which can cause target audiences to turn to competitors, abandon their carts, and lose interest. A headless commerce functionality can prevent these problems by speeding up your page loading times across mobile and desktop devices.
When your frontend presentation layer doesn’t depend on the heavy back, your customer-facing pages load faster, giving your shoppers a good boost to explore your website and interact with your content.
Here’s an eye-opening statistic to get you on board with headless commerce: a one-second web page speed-up can increase your conversions by 7%. Let’s translate this to real numbers. If your site makes $100,000 daily, a one-second page boost will result in an additional $7,000 daily.
Since headless commerce speeds up your page loading times and makes your brand more customer-centric, it can help you expand your operations to international markets. The separation of frontend and backend services allows your IT teams to save time, effort, and resources on maintenance and updates, empowering your organization to spread its brand vision across new markets.
In addition, development teams can streamline the process of adapting your commerce systems to multi-language and multi-currency options. Switching to headless makes your e-commerce business more adaptable to changes and ever-growing customer expectations. It also makes your platform more resilient to constantly changing SEO practices and high-traffic challenges.
The traditional approach to legacy systems supports various programming languages, which can prevent vital integrations, even the ones that can improve the customer experience. You won’t have that problem with the headless architecture.
Headless APIs empower your organization to develop customer-friendly commerce systems that can integrate easily with your tech stack. More importantly, they allow you to tailor a customer experience using your preferred coding tools. That also gives you the flexibility to scale your operations at your own pace and adapt quickly to oncoming changes.
Going headless significantly improves your time to market due to empowering your developers to work on front and back-end systems independently. Since they don’t have to wait for the other team to finish the job, your teams can deliver e-commerce services continuously to beat competitors without depending on each other.
No. 1 E‑Commerce Search Software in Europe
Here are a few common headless commerce use cases to help you address your business requirements.
The headless architecture allows you to take the API-first approach and upgrade customer interactions across every stage of the buyer journey. It empowers your application layers with custom-tailored multi-channel experiences for various devices.
You can seamlessly integrate different communication channels and ensure each delivers an unprecedented experience with each customer interaction. More importantly, a headless strategy also upgrades your front-end layer and back-end processes to ensure seamless content delivery across all channels in your sales funnel.
Do you know what the best part is? Your teams won’t have to spend additional time, effort, and resources on managing experiences through each channel.
Checkout security, fraud prevention and protection, and compliance with the latest PCI (payment card industry) standards are primary concerns for e-commerce businesses these days. They are also among the biggest challenges that most digital businesses face.
Thankfully, going headless empowers your organization to tap into third-party solutions and SaaS services to streamline the effort of staying secure and compliant. It also helps to reduce the operational load on your internal IT team, giving your team members more time and resources to focus on the core mission.
When cooperating with SaaS providers, you leave the product information management, compliance process, and risk assessment to them to handle everything for you.
Embracing a headless stack with multiple API endpoints gives you access to an open architecture that gives you a massive competitive edge. You can personalize every aspect of your operations using pre-built integrations with solutions like customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and more.
Here are a few leading headless commerce platforms and software solutions to help you understand how this business model surpasses traditional architecture in almost every way.
Shopify Plus is a powerful and fully integrable headless solution for digital businesses. It seamlessly integrates with leading front-end solutions like CMS and upgrades any platform into a profitable digital storefront.
Shopify headless commerce gives you a storefront API that allows you to build optimized customer-centric storefronts for video games, mobile applications, web services, etc. In addition, the API works with every e-commerce system you can imagine, including CRM, PIM, and ERP. Examples of brands using Shopify Plus include ILIA, Babylist, Kotn, and Allbirds.
Adobe Commerce is your go-to solution if you need unlimited customization options. Though it costs money to customize every aspect of your operations, you can rely on Adobe Commerce to deliver app-like experiences across multiple channels, like AR/VR, IoT devices, multi-web apps, mobile apps, etc.
Adobe Commerce can also speed up your page loading times and ensure every visitor receives an interactive customer experience.
Designed to help e-commerce businesses adopt headless architecture, BigCommerce provides pre-built headless commerce integrations to popular front-end frameworks, DXP services, CMS, and more.
The integration options include:
Now, let’s take a look at some of the leading headless commerce examples:
Aside from helping you improve your business, headless commerce can also benefit your customers. Nowadays, you must pivot swiftly to cope with growing consumer expectations. Some companies change operating models, while others adopt customer-centric solutions.
Whatever path you choose, you must address customer preferences regarding innovative ways of interacting with your brand. Here’s how your target audience can benefit from a headless e-commerce website and application.
As soon as you move fresh content to your front-end layer, those updates instantly impact every vertical of your e-commerce platform. In other words, your customers won’t have to wait for hours to interact with your website’s latest design. Aside from reducing downtime, this can also help increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
Going headless empowers your brand to seize control of user interactions by getting ahead of every e-commerce component consumers interact with. This control allows you to tap into innovative ways to redesign your e-commerce platform and transform content publishing.
Since headless commerce offers unprecedented compatibility on a universal level, your e-commerce platform will work seamlessly across all devices regardless of the traffic it receives. Instead of struggling with downtime and losing customers to slow page loading times, going headless gives you a chance to expand into new communication channels to attract more customers.
In addition, the headless architecture also helps you mitigate the risk of content displaying incorrectly or disappearing on different devices.
It’s easy to use and has robust features. I especially like AI-powered search and personalized recommendations. Our average order increased by over 10%. I recommend Luigi's Box to anyone who sells online.
Good search engine and recommender, can be tuned up by individual settings in the back office. It is very helpful, especially when you have very large product offer.
Management system with many functions, dashboards and monthly summary in e-mail, great support (fast, good recommendations, communication, etc.), stable.
Recommender is a useful and inspirational resource for our customers to discover Powerlogy's products. How do we know that? Our average shopping cart value has been rising dramatically.
Luigi’s Box massively streamlines shopping for our customers. Moreover, they developed several features for us that help manage products in our e-shop.
The most significant contribution of Luigi’s Box to EXIsport is improving customer experience. The quicker customers find what they search for, the higher the chance they will complete the purchase.
Luigi’s Box is a very progressive tool that complements our existing analytical data. Its usage led to higher conversion rates and helped us maintain high customer satisfaction standards.
Luigi’s Box was an eye-opener for us. E-shops often forget about customer experience and invest too much in advertising. Luigi's Box showed us what we can gain when we care about search.
Luigi’s Box is a guarantee of a professional approach. As the search specialists, they lead us to our goals much faster.
Given our size, Luigi's Box brings us over €100,000 a year without much hard work for a price that was immediately returned multiple times.
There are two ways to develop a headless business strategy for your e-commerce. You can either use a third-party service provider (such as Shopify Plus, BigCommerce, or Foxy) to lend you their headless architecture via integrations or build your own from scratch. If you decide to go DIY, here’s what you’ll need.
If you’re running a small business, try adding headless APIs to your e-store directly, as it may be the easiest way to go headless. However, we recommend testing your platform before making any changes to ascertain whether it can support such an upgrade.
If adopting a headless architecture on an existing platform isn’t an option, you can turn to trustworthy SaaS providers to ensure efficiency, flexibility, and scalability. If your business is already on a headless commerce platform like Shopify, integrating headless APIs in your commerce functionality won’t be a problem.
Going headless requires a headless CMS to ensure your content reaches your target audience across multiple channels. An HCMS allows you to personalize your content according to specific consumer preferences for each channel, thus ensuring each customer receives a personalized shopping experience.
A headless API will keep your front-end and back-end in sync at all times to ensure the right content delivery to every point of interaction. Though you can opt for an open-source CMS, freemium solutions have a steep learning curve and require specialized skills to build and deploy your CMS.
That’s why going with premium SaaS solutions is the best way to transform your traditional commerce platform into a headless money-making machine.
Once you prepare your e-commerce website for the headless approach, the last thing to do is to integrate your frontend and backend layers. Start by integrating basic parts of your CMS with headless APIs, like a landing page or a blog post. Test your new build to optimize its performance. Once you’re satisfied with the results, scale up to go headless in full.
Whether you’re running a well-established business with cutting-edge infrastructure or still working on your e-commerce systems, going headless might be the best solution to address your business needs and challenges. While you can lower your prices to get ahead of the competition, that trick won’t always work.
On the other hand, modern times demand modern business solutions. Everyday operations are now more complex and challenging, making it hard to stand out in an overwhelmingly competitive market.
Headless commerce solutions can help you streamline your operations, cope with fast-paced changes, and ensure your target audience receives a seamless customer experience across every channel. If you’re still not hopping on a headless commerce train, perhaps it’s time to weigh your options and seize the opportunity to differentiate your brand from your competitors.
Are you thinking about choosing an e-commerce platform for your business? Constant thinking is over. Here's how to choose the best.
What is digital commerce? Learn its definition, examples, current trends, and strategies for implementing it to drive measurable business growth.
Learn the differences between monolithic, headless, and composable commerce, and how MACH architecture helps make composable commerce the best option.
Increasing e-shop revenue is the initial goal of every e-commerce business. So what are the best ways to maximize it?
Martina is a caffeine-fueled content writer with a background in tech and creative writing. When she's not crafting content for Luigi’s Box, Martina enjoys exploring nature, reading, art, all things geeky, and making wonky crochet and knitted items.
More blog posts from this author
English
