What Is Headless Commerce?
Headless Commerce is a special software architecture that separates the frontend and backend of any given ecommerce application or platform. This decoupling gives brands better creative control and flexibility to build nimble and agile solutions.
Using headless commerce enterprise businesses can easily make changes to their content layer and functional layer to quickly adapt to the changing market dynamics and customer expectations.
Understanding Headless Commerce Architecture At A Glance
The decoupled architecture of headless commerce allows ecommerce businesses to offer faster and immersive customers experience by adding many customer touchpoints. These customer touchpoints( website, mobile apps, marketplaces, social platforms etc.) work as different “heads” while the backend works as the “body” which handles the logic and flows for each of these heads.
Headless commerce architecture makes it easier for businesses to implement new functionalities and personalized customer experiences for better customer engagement and conversions.
How Does Headless Commerce Work?
The aim of the decoupled headless commerce architecture is to make your data or content available to any type of platforms/ frontend applications using simple commerce APIs. This decoupled architecture focuses primarily on background processes. Backend functionalities like connecting to accounts, pricing, shopping cart, security validation etc. for various frontends run in the background. The different front ends can use simple REST API calls to connect and communicate with the backend.
For example, a customer is browsing a product and clicks the “Buy” button on her Android phone. Now the front end(presentation layer) of the headless commerce architecture sends an API call to the backend or the application layer to begin order processing. After the completion of the transaction, the backend is updated by the API call. This includes logging the financial exchanges, inventory update and storing complete customer details. The frontend once again sends an API call to the backend to request the “order status” and finally shows the order status as “confirmed” to the customer.
Advantages Of Headless Commerce Over Traditional Commerce
Headless commerce solutions offer a host of benefits over traditional commerce as shown in the table below:
Headless Commerce Vs Traditional Commerce
Evidently, headless commerce architecture offers a free-hand to ecommerce businesses to rapidly adapt to the new trends in less time. Implementing similar changes in traditional legacy software can take ages and also lots of resources. The decoupled architecture helps them offer tailor-made customer experiences to their buyers resulting in better customer engagement and conversions.
Benefits Of Headless Commerce Architecture For Ecommerce Business
Ecommerce is changing at a rapid pace. Enterprise brands can no longer expect customers to reach them in the stores. Instead, brands have to establish their presence at every touchpoint where the customers are. Also, customers are now expecting even greater personalization. Online retail is all about “Me-tailing” in this era of extreme personalization. Headless commerce systems help ecommerce businesses achieve this.
With the headless approach, businesses can add numerous selling points to engage their customers. Following are the benefits of using decoupled headless commerce systems for ecommerce:
Engage customers better by implementing extreme customizations for maximum personalization
Quickly and easily make changes to adapt to the changing ecommerce requirements
Simpler and easy to implement microservices approach that enables developers to implement best functionalities without the tedious coding of legacy software
Flexibility to use a variety of frameworks or languages which allow delivering exact solutions for unique business requirements
Affordable headless commerce solutions by implementing microservices that scale up or down based on your requirements
Seamless integrations with best tools and services based on the requirements of enterprise ecommerce businesses
Omnichannel selling made possible by adding transactional capabilities to your apps, blogs, product pages or any other possible selling point
Better performance with fast, easy to maintain and upgrade decoupled architecture
With so many benefits, future-ready online stores need to adopt headless commerce architecture. These benefits will not only keep brands ahead of their competitors but would also help them with better customer retention and ultimately more conversions.
Why StoreHippo Is The Best Headless Commerce Platform For Next Generation Online Stores
StoreHippo headless commerce platform is designed to help you build your unique brand identity. It offers 300+ API endpoints to create the most personalized, immersive and unforgettable omnichannel buying experience for your customers.
StoreHippo’s scalable ecommerce platform helps you scale your frontend as well as the backend as per the demands of your growing business. You can go to market in record time by building new front-end touchpoints for marketplaces, social platforms or any type of mobile devices.
StoreHippo integrates seamlessly with a variety of custom ERP, CRM, shipping, payment, marketing and other best-in-class products to help you create new opportunities for your business.
Along with offering headless ecommerce solutions, StoreHippo comes with 300+ inbuilt features to help you build an omnichannel experience for your customers. Online stores powered by StoreHippo are PWAs which means they look, feel and work as mobile apps. The inbuilt marketing solutions help you create personalized discounts and offers to your customers.
StoreHippo also offers enterprise-grade features like multi vendor marketplace, multi-store ecommerce, multilingual online stores to help you grow your business to new markets.
Ready to win the ecommerce battle? Check the most amazing B2B and B2C online stores powered by StoreHippo headless commerce solutions and how they are reinventing their business. Explore our platform by starting your 14-day free trial now!
