E-commerce sales are predicted to hit the trillion-dollar mark by 2022 end, with online orders covering 25% of total retail sales by 2024. Headless commerce is a kind of e-commerce architecture that separates your back-end infrastructure from the front-end customer touchpoints. Here we are discussing the complete details of Headless Commerce which required for business.
The headless commerce architecture offers freedom to sell anywhere eliminating any design or development constraints. This just involves a sort of creativity and a willingness to reimagine the architecture. Data reveals over 60% of big scale enterprises are building a bespoke solution to advance their e-commerce strategies. It is estimated that over 76% brands plan to adopt Shopify headless commerce within the next 1-2 years. Headless has gotten plenty of headlines recently, but it is worth for everyone. To ensure if it is the right architecture, it is important to understand everything about headless.
What is headless commerce?
Headless commerce is a core architecture behind an e-commerce solution. It works to decouple the front-end experience from the back-end technology. It separates the e-commerce storefront from the underlying systems that drive your business. Brands that seem restricted from templated front ends are given liberty to offer customers a highly personalized shopping experience.
With a headless architecture, merchants can easily turn latest technologies mentioned below into a digital storefront having commerce functionality.
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Mobile apps
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Social media
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Smart mirrors
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Vending machines
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Voice-assisted technology
What is the working style of headless commerce?
Headless e-commerce connects customer touchpoints with the back-office operations with the help of a storefront API. Content accessed by the customers is managed outside of the headless platform. It is simple to use popular CMS, progressive web apps, customer relationship management, and other digital platforms without needing one e-commerce platform to manage them all. These additional SaaS tools build touchpoints for customers, including a mobile app or vending machine. They usually take place outside of the headless commerce platform. Every touchpoint passes data to the back end using API. It’s perfect for retailers to manage orders, inventory, save credit card details, and update product details as well.
In its simplest form, headless commerce is a separation of the front end and back end of an ecommerce application. This architecture offers brands freedom of expression to build whatever and however they want. Most importantly, it enables brands to enrich the customer experience.
What’s the difference between headless commerce and other CMS architectures?
A headless architecture aids merchants with latest tools to reach the growing number of customers than a conventional e-commerce platform. Headless commerce separates front and back ends of an e-commerce store. But each side is a winner in itself, since customization can be made without impacting the other. This saves time and allows delivery of a better customer experience across multiple customer segments.
Separating the front and back ends brings several opportunities to convert customers on the website. The most common use case would be to push content to the front end using an existing CMS rather than the commerce platform. This gives liberty to alter on-site content without going through the commerce back end. Customers don’t see anything from the headless back end—just the front user interface you’re using to deliver shopping experiences.
Benefits of Investing in Headless Commerce
Headless commerce is somewhat similar to commerce. It assumes commerce will surely evolve and positions your brand to new heights.
1. Faster time to market
Experiments and customizations can be performed when you go headless. This improves the age-old concern of developers who are unable to work on both front and back-end systems. With headless, customer-related work can be done separately, without needing to wait for back-end work, and vice versa. It means copy can be separated from the code and allow each team to keep going without depending on the others to complete first.
2. Better Control with Fast Scaling
Headless works well with everyone. Existing systems coded in different languages can address crucial integrations, even ones that negatively impact the customer experience. Data reveals 55% of e-commerce leaders said their existing platform would be capable to support their business for not more than one year.
With strong APIs, headless permits integration of the existing systems to build a shopping experience using the desired programming language. Not only it secures you from technology changes, headless also offers the power to move at your own pace with adoption of commerce.
Once a brand scale, UX and technologies becomes perfect tools to accelerate growth. We find brands that rapidly grow on their Shopify theme to find new challenges that must be addressed and uncover latest requirements that would boost continuous growth.
3. Increased Personalization
Headless commerce provides developers additional flexibility to serve data to customers, regardless of which device they’re using. Headless allows split test what you build so you can optimize the customer experience as well as conversion rate. It becomes easy for the developers to deploy changes to the storefront your consumers are shopping, passing data through to each and personalize the whole customer journey.
Shoppers prefer spending more than planned when they have personalized shopping experience. Choosing to opt headless affords agility necessary for a brand to keep up with changing customer engagement trends.
These are reasons why teams may want to transition from traditional to headless ecommerce. At the same time, companies interested in improving their user experience should also know how headless can help them deliver even better customer satisfaction rates.
Wrapping Up:
Leading E-commerce businesses have opted for headless architecture. Above all, it is guiding them and has numerous advantages as discussed in the blog earlier. It might require additional efforts, but the results will stay for longer period for overall business success. Conventional approach is still admin-friendly enough to work with, but then again, change is the only constant.
Author Bio:
Chandan is working with a top-rated E-commerce Development Company as a senior research analyst. Having years of experience and expertise in website development industry, you can avail latest information on trending technologies. Share your comments and feedback to improve our blog.
