What is Headless Commerce?

Headless Commerce is an architectural design where the front-end and the back end of an ecommerce platform are decoupled. Simply put, this means greater flexibility and allows you to make independent changes to both the content presentation layer and the functional logic/ coding layer. 

The backend layer is also called the “body” which takes care of the logic and flows of your business. To this body, you can add many customer touchpoints that form the “head”. For example, you can sell on your online portal, through marketplaces, Facebook stores etc. using the ecommerce system offered by StoreHippo.

How Did Headless Commerce Evolve?

Ecommerce is growing at a rapid pace and is expected to touch US$2,208,508m in global revenue in 2020 (Source: Statista). In the early days of electronic commerce, the majority of traffic and revenue came from desktops. The solutions were also designed to serve customers on desktops. These ecommerce systems built online stores that had front-end and back-end coupled. 

However, over the years, online buying went through a sea-change. The increased penetration of smartphones and internet tipped online buying towards m-commerce. To sell customers on the go a new architecture was needed that could offer multiple customer touch points.

This type of business needed flexibility which was difficult to achieve with the traditional front-end and backend coupled approach. To cater to the changing requirements the new approach of headless commerce evolved.

Why Is Headless Commerce Becoming Popular?

Online commerce is where the customers are. While both the number of online shoppers and online stores is increasing, keeping your customers loyal has become tougher than it ever was. In such a scenario user-experience plays a crucial role in attracting, engaging and retaining the customers. 

To give the best buying experience to customers it was necessary that the ecommerce systems were designed in a way that they could. Headless commerce brings a welcome change by offering an easy solution that can be quickly tailored to improve customer experience and hence conversions.

Headless commerce’s universal compatibility enables us to use the existing logic and offer rich and seamless user experience across various interfaces. It eliminates the need of building entirely new websites optimized for various devices or touch points thus making it easier to sell on multiple channels rapidly.

What Are The Benefits Of Headless Commerce?

Headless commerce allows you to add or swap many heads or selling points to the body of logic that runs your business processes. This cannot be achieved on traditional monolithic architecture where frontend and backend are closely tied. 

To implement the decoupled architecture we need a next-generation technological approach offered by ecommerce systems like StoreHippo. Headless commerce gives you the following benefits;

1. Easy To Make Rapid Changes

Adapting to the dynamic and rapidly changing ecommerce environment becomes faster and easier using the decoupled architecture of headless commerce. It is easier to innovate and make changes to your ecommerce systems based on the changes in the market or technology. With the help of APIs the time and efforts needed to implement changes goes down substantially. 

2. Maximizes Customization And Personalization

Enables you to customize and personalize the layout and themes for your frontend without any fuss. This makes it much easier to connect with various audience segments and gently nudge them towards a frictionless checkout.

3. Smooth Learning Curve

Headless commerce makes development easy using any framework or language known to the development team. It also allows us to experiment with and use the languages where the learning curve is smoother. This enables developers to envision and deliver solutions that are cut for the exact requirements of a business.

4. Affordable

Ecommerce systems built on the decoupled frontend and backend approach offer economies of scale and can be less costly than traditional platforms. Microservices help in scaling to meet the peak season demand without the need to plan your configuration based on handling peak demand. 

5. Seamless Integrations

A successful ecommerce system needs an architecture tailored for its unique requirements. This requires strong inbuilt capabilities along with seamless integrations with best third-party tools that can help you grow your business. Headless commerce allows you to seamlessly glue together the best-in-class tools for your business and also gives you the flexibility to replace these tools with their better version without disturbing your flow. 

6. Faster And Easier Optimization

Headless commerce makes it easier to make changes to your system based on the changes in the technology landscape. Unlike the traditional systems it's easier to tweak your ecommerce store based on the inputs from fast changing consumer behaviour patterns. The decoupled approach allows you to test and optimize customer experiences by rapidly deploying new changes.

7. Sell Anywhere, Everywhere

Adding multiple selling points to your customer interface becomes easy with headless commerce. You can easily add a user interface layer with transactional capabilities to your blog, your social channels etc. and build a multi-channel buying experience for your customers.

8. Improved Performance

Headless commerce solutions not only work faster but also are easier to maintain and upgrade. This is made possible by the decoupled architecture of backend and frontend. 

How To Build A Headless Ecommerce Solution?

Ecommerce is growing at a rapid and noticeable pace. It’s evolution over the last decade has necessitated many changes in the way we perceived business and customer behaviour. Headless commerce is the best solution to make the most of this favourable tide of online selling. 

To develop headless ecommerce solutions for their business brands and entrepreneurs can choose a turnkey ecommerce platform like StoreHippo. Designed  for the next wave of online commerce StoreHippo is equipped to offer multiple customer touchpoints for a business along with offering a gamut of tools to build, run and grow the business.