Headless commerce is an ecommerce architecture that decouples the frontend of an online store from its backend to ensure independent functionalities without interfering with one another.
This includes decoupling an online store’s presentation layer that includes text colors, styles, images, buttons, graphs and tables and similar elements, from the backend functionalities like pricing, infrastructure, checkout, etc, to make updates easily.
As per Forbes "With over $1.65 billion in funding raised for headless technologies over the last two years, the architecture is soon to see higher adoption rate across the eCommerce industry."
Benefits of headless commerce
There are a number of advantages of using headless commerce for your online store. Some of them being:
Advanced technologies to create unique, visionary and fast websites
Flexibility and familiarity for frontend and backend developers
Complete ownership over site architecture for customizations
Marketing effectiveness for innovation without interfering with backend processes
Enhanced speed to market for international and omnichannel GTMs
Higher degrees of personalization for online shopping journeys
Higher conversion rates and lower customer acquisition costs
PCI compliance mitigation
Checkout security and fraud protection
Open architecture for easy scaling and extensibility
Headless commerce systems meet online business requirements with frontend and backend functionalities by enabling them to deliver API-driven experiences through a CMS, DXP, application, device or custom interface.
Before making the move to headless commerce, our eCommerce experts recommend taking the following steps:
- Determine what platform suits your needs
- Choose a headless content management system
- Sync your APIs with the headless commerce CMS
- Customize frontend experiences unique to your brand
- A/B test frontend and backend functionalities
- Go live, monitor performance and optimize
Analysis of business needs and required customer touchpoints
- Collaborative evaluation of headless commerce CMS and technologies
- Technology recommendations to meet business goals and resources
- Solution architecture and functional specifications
- Mapping out project budgets and timelines
- Development team structure, skills and roles required for the project
Headless commerce infrastructure setup
- Back-end development (platform-based, API-based or microservices-based)
- Front-end development for different customer touchpoints and customizations
- API connections setup between the front-end and back-end layers
- Integration with third-party business systems and ecommerce solutions like CRMS, ERP and similar