A Guide to Headless Commerce

With customers getting accustomed to using content and making purchase decisions through different touchpoints—from web apps and IoT devices—legacy eCommerce platforms are struggling to keep pace with the demands of the consumer.

Therefore, many online retailers like Amazon—with their dash buttons—are offering their consumers a new way to read reviews, look for product information and place orders. In simple words, consumers are now able to embrace the IoT experience.

Moving with this, some eCommerce brands are reaping the benefits of headless commerce.

However, there are also some merchants still not sure how they can bring it in action without having to invent their IoT device or draft some solution from scratch in the backend.

So, let’s dive into what, why and how headless commerce can help you grow your business online.

What is Headless Commerce Architecture?

Headless commerce is an eCommerce architecture where the front-end is separated from the backend, and they both are able to function independently. This allows you to seamlessly connect various touchpoints or heads to the backend through APIs, providing you the flexibility to scale the customer-facing experience without depending on the backend.

In other words, headless commerce is built for the IoT age.

Think of it like this, headless commerce offers you to build your frontend with a separate web storefront while the backend functionality can be called on through APIs from different platforms like Oracle, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or Adobe. By joining these two pieces together through an API, one can get a headless commerce solution.

Why Should You Care About Headless Commerce?

Digital experience is the cornerstone of eCommerce success today.
Customer expectations are growing constantly. Therefore, every point of friction in the visitor’s journey is a chance for the customer to get distracted and step out of the site. This signifies that the landscape for eCommerce is shifting completely and brands and retailers need to keep up with the changing trends. Headless commerce offers you the agility to move faster.

How Headless Commerce Works?

A headless eCommerce system works by sharing requests between the application layers and the presentation layers through API or web services.

For example: When a user clicks on “Buy now” on their mobile device, the presentation layer of the headless commerce system passes an API call to the application layer and processes the order. Then, application layers pass another API call to the presentation layer to display the status of the order to the customer.

Key Benefits of Headless Commerce

The decoupled consumer-facing experience and the backend business logic offers flexibility to make continuous iterations and fosters a culture of innovation and regular improvement.

Amazon is at the forefront showing us the exact value of including a headless commerce platform and how it can help retailers avoid the frustration related to traditional commerce platforms. In fact, it is stated that 60% of consumers want an Amazon Prime-like service which is certainly not achievable with a traditional eCommerce solution.

This shows that there are multiple advantages of using both commerce-led or a content-led eCommerce strategy.

Using headless commerce strategy can offer brands:

1. Increased business agility
2. Omnichannel digital transformation
3. Marketing efficiency for innovation without touching the backend processes
4. Site customization and personalization options
5. Conversion rates and decreased customer acquisition cost

In addition to this, headless commerce opens up a wide area of possibilities with brands looking forward to content-led strategy to start with. There are no limitations to the customizations that may occur in the digital eCommerce space.

Future of Headless Commerce

The thing is, the future of headless commerce is now!

The continuous growth in the adoption of connected devices and various digital touchpoints has resulted in decoupled customer experience. And to discover the opportunities from this major shift, organizations should pay attention to unifying the user experience across different touchpoints.

This headless approach came into existence with the idea of rectifying disconnected experiences. The power to learn, adopt, and experiment with recent web innovations, and then make changes in the storefront without changing the whole ecosystem allows you to deliver engaging digital experiences. Hence, it may lead to increased conversions and customer loyalty.

The best thing about headless commerce is that it brings together the best of the solutions that are independent of one another but at the same time can merge seamlessly.

Are you ready to map your migration path to a headless approach?