How Headless Commerce Can Transform Your Online Fashion Store

What makes your buyer shop from your online fashion store? If you say phenomenal and fast online customer service and personalization, you are right. 

Now, are you seeking a way to implement personalization in your fashion ecommerce store? Do you want to deliver a seamless digital experience across all touchpoints and devices? Then, there is one answer to these i.e. headless ecommerce technology. 

This framework has introduced a novel way of delivering content, products, and payment gateways across multiple channels and devices, to offer extreme personalization and omnichannel experiences. 

Gartner says ~ In 2021, the primary focus of retailers would be delivering an omnichannel experience across various customer touchpoints(on devices and digital channels). Why? Because customer preferences are changing and they want more personal attention from brands. Even a survey by Gartner proved that retailers are leveraging AI technologies to accomplish their business goals. (Gartner)

Why headless ecommerce is critical to the success of your online fashion store? 

The emergence of new devices like mobile phones, tablets, voice-controlled IoT devices (Alexa, Google Assistant), smartwatches, digital gaming consoles, etc; have given customers endless ways to explore the internet and shop. Not only this, they also made your customers more demanding in terms of shopping.

Now everybody wants to buy things online with minimal effort and more convenience. Hence, ensuring a phenomenal experience on all channels and devices is important to bring and retain customers. No technology does it better than headless ecommerce solutions.

5 ways headless ecommerce can transform online fashion store

1. Enhance shopping personalization

With headless commerce, developers get complete liberty to tweak the storefront design, prices, product content, product recommendations, offers based on customer’s previous purchases, browsing history, demographics, etc. in an urge to address their need on an individual level. I know you might be thinking that personalization takes time. It’s true in the case of traditional CMS where everything is tied together, but in headless the personalization is quick and only takes a few minutes. 

2. Offer omnichannel experience

Why should a customer love your brand? The clear answer is because you promise seamless customer experience wherever they go (website, app, Facebook page, marketplace, offline store). The benefit of headless commerce here is that it binds all the channels together, using an API-based technology, to offer a frictionless experience to customers whenever they interact with your brand. Thereby multiplying the capacity to build loyal consumers, causing customers to stick with you for their fashion needs.

Another benefit of Headless commerce is to developers. IT allows them to design and manage the user experience freely by building personalized storefronts, landing pages, and checkout pages. With the ability to create multiple frontends that are attached to one backend, they can support a wide array of screens and devices.

3. Keeps brands ahead of market changes

Market Changes refer to changes in customer shopping behavior, changes in buying journey, changes in the volume of competition, a shift in customer brand preferences, and many other things. As we already know how competitive the ecommerce fashion industry is, it is crucial to prepare your store to conquer market fluctuations. 

How headless can save you from market changes?

Headless uses API-based architectures which simplifies the integrations and retailers can avoid cumbersome traditional CMS. Thus, evolve their digital strategies as market updates. 

Fashion retailers can build their best-in-class stack, support it and scale it. In case of any new trend introduced in the market like a better personalization engine, you can simply do changes via a headless commerce ecosystem. So, you’re constantly evolving and staying nimble.

4. Endless customization

Adopting headless ecommerce brings you the advantage of doing unlimited updates to the front-end without disturbing the entire code in the backend. This also lessens the burden of front-end and back-end developers. 

How Headless Is A Better Traditional Ecommerce System For Customization? 

• In a traditional ecommerce system, if any backend developer wanted to change a small block of code, they have to change the entire database, front-end code, making even the smallest change is a business risk. But headless ecommerce allows front-end developers to create unique with flexibility that business exact needs. Hence, headless ecommerce offers limitless customization and personalization

• A traditional ecommerce platform offers limited features to online fashion stores that want to personalize their customer purchase journey. On the other hand, headless ecommerce lets you design the frontend UI of your choice from scratch. Store admins and other users (like developers) have full control over the UI and UX of the site

• When the frontend is decoupled from the backend, you can develop a customized checkout flow that best fits your niche, products, and brand

5. Accelerate consumer purchase cycle

Headless allows us to deliver commerce functionality as a service that can be injected into any user journey. This means businesses can deliver richer narratives and seamlessly interweave content with commerce throughout the customer journey.

Customer journey crosses many apps and platforms from website and mobile to social media and beyond. The ecommerce marketing team needs to be flexible enough to design, build and deploy storefronts to support all these channels.

Headless commerce makes this easy thanks to its adaptable infrastructure. Many integrations and changes can be made seamlessly without disturbing the backend.

Data protected in the backend knows what a customer has purchased. The system can use this data for the personalization of CMS, mobile apps, and social media. And personalization across multiple channels is something that’s becoming a standard requirement for users.

Benefits of headless: Real-life example of online fashion store 

A leading fashion retailer known for providing women’s apparel was hurting their revenue and brand reputation due to bad online shopping experience.

Site was very slow to load with only 15.25% of web pages loading in under a second. 

• A very high cart abandonment rate due to poor checkout experience on mobile devices

• Low conversion rates and customer retention rate

But soon after Venus adopted the Headless Commerce approach and converted their storefront into a PWA site and followed a decoupled backend & Frontend framework. These radical, high-risk high return initiatives from Venus did bring positive results such as the percentage of site pages loading under one second jumped from 15.25% to 72.75%, which is an increment of over 50%. With this increment, Venus was able to see a 24% increase in conversion rate, hence turning to Headless approach proves to be fruitful for them. 

How can headless ecommerce platforms like StoreHippo help?

1. Omnichannel features

Integrate all your channels like social media, website, app, offline store, payment gateways, shipping solutions, with the help of in-built API infrastructure in the StoreHippo ecommerce platform. 

2. PWA

StoreHippo has inbuilt Progressive Web Apps (PWA) technology which is the biggest lever to provide fast shopping and checkout experience on mobile devices. 

3. Marketing tools

Easily create highly targeted landing pages within minutes for various types of customers across multiple locations and using different devices with StoreHippo inbuilt templates and SEO tools. 

Bring your customers back to your online fashion store by sending personalized push notifications, emails, and SMS right from the dashboard; or start creating digital ad campaigns.

4. Seamless integration

Make your ecommerce operation management more powerful and functional by adding a host of integrations like CRM, Accounting software, ERP, live chat, email marketing tools, advertising tools, analytics tools, etc.

5. Payment gateways

Get 60+ international and national payment gateways that support fast payment processing on any devices via APIs, which, in turn, inflates the conversion rates of your online fashion brand.

6. Mobile apps

Build a native iOS or Android app to offer mobile commerce with StoreHippo headless commerce framework.

As you can see from the examples above, Headless Commerce is capable of delivering an app-like experience that works flawlessly on both desktop and mobile devices.

Let's summarize the benefit of headless commerce for online fashion stores

• Increase revenue with increased customer engagement 

• Better Customer retention rates

• Steep Returns on investment 

• Long-term cost-savings

• freedom to create personalized shopping experiences

• Give high-speed content delivery across devices

Want to try headless technology before you implement it in your store? Get started with a 14 days free trial of the StoreHippo ecommerce solution that offers an advanced headless framework for you and online fashion buyers.