Discover the top headless commerce solutions for success in 2024

Highlights:

You’ll learn about:

• How headless solutions use various functionalities to separate the front end of an e-commerce platform from the back end.
• The difference between traditional e-commerce solutions and a headless one.
• The numerous benefits of headless commerce architecture include flexibility, scalability, enhanced e-commerce development, and omnichannel user experience.
• Top 7 headless commerce platforms like Contenstack and their pros and cons.
• The features to consider when choosing an e-commerce platform.

Embrace the future of retail with headless platforms that drive growth. 

Keep reading to explore more!

With the global headless commerce market likely to reach $3,811.3 million by 2030, understanding what the top headless commerce solutions are is paramount to future-proofing your business. 

This guide explores the top headless e-commerce solutions and details the difference between headless commerce vs traditional commerce systems. 

What are headless commerce solutions?

Headless commerce solutions use various back-end functionalities to decouple the front end of an e-commerce solution, including texts, styles, images, graphs, and tables. These functionalities include pricing, checkout, shopping cart system, checkout, tax calculations, and infrastructure. With this separation, you can easily deliver content across multiple channels, enhancing the user experience. 

Many e-commerce platforms prefer to go headless because of their ability to provide flexible solutions. It helps you bring a unique approach to your e-commerce store. Today, offering a cookie-cutter shopping experience does not trigger users to buy from a platform. They need a consistent omnichannel experience. 

That’s where headless solutions like Contentstack come into the picture. 

With 92% of companies delivering a consistent content experience by adopting a headless technology, these platforms are slowly seeping into the retail and e-commerce sectors. 

How does traditional and headless commerce differ?

Traditional commerce platforms couple the front-end and the back-end layer. Such a setup limits your flexibility because the architecture is complex and intertwined. As a result, adopting a traditional e-commerce platform makes it challenging to adapt to market trends, creating a rigid user experience. 

Another downside is that these solutions have high development costs, potentially hindering innovation. Plus, traditional e-commerce platforms lack design and personalization opportunities. Even integrating different features is challenging.

On the other hand, a headless commerce approach helps you customize your online store, which ensures faster updates and provides a unique shopping experience across multiple touchpoints.

Headless e-commerce covers all the drawbacks of traditional e-commerce. It gives you control over how you present your products at various touchpoints.

Additionally, it future-proofs your operations by providing a flexible, scalable, and innovative solution.

Because of this, you meet customer preferences and market trends, enhancing your competitive edge in the e-commerce marketplace.

With a headless solution, you can deliver experience through a headless content management system (CMS), digital asset management (DAM), digital experience platform (DXP), device, or custom front end. 

How does a headless commerce platform work?

A headless e-commerce platform uses application programming interfaces (APIs) to deliver content to various platforms. The API bridges the front and back end and facilitates communication. These APIs trigger when a customer performs any action on your e-commerce store. 

For example, a customer wants a new computer from an online store. They go to the e-commerce powered by a headless commerce platform like Contentstack.

Upon finding their product, they add it to their virtual cart. The customer provides their personal details and payment information. After giving their payment details, the order management system confirms the purchase and starts fulfillment.

The company packs and ships the computer from the warehouse to the customer’s address. Throughout this process, the customer tracks their order through real-time updates provided by the platform's interface.

Benefits of headless commerce in retail

Understanding and implementing top headless commerce platforms can be a game-changer for retailers. Some headless commerce benefits are:

Enhanced customer experiences

The independent nature of headless systems provides a unified, branded experience for your customers throughout your touchpoints. Additionally, companies moving to headless architecture observe increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Unmatched flexibility

With headless commerce, you control the front-end presentation layer, which helps you create a highly personalized, dynamic, and seamless user experience. This level of personalization guarantees that you adapt to the dynamic market trends. In addition, it makes your businesses more agile and adaptive.

Did you know that 49.7% of customers expect marketing messaging and product recommendations to be personalized to them?

Seamless omnichannel capabilities

Headless commerce helps you facilitate omnichannel retailing, providing a unified shopping experience on different devices and channels. This integrated approach provides customers with a uniform way of interacting with e-commerce brands, irrespective of their preferred interaction points.

Increased e-commerce development

The flexible nature of headless architecture helps you rapidly develop and deploy new features. As a result, you ensure faster time-to-market for innovative solutions and improved competitive advantage. This agility helps you meet the dynamic customer and market demands. 

Improved scalability

With a headless e-commerce solution, your business becomes more scalable and capable of handling high traffic volumes and expanding product catalogs without affecting performance. This headless approach guarantees a smooth and responsive user experience regardless of the traffic volume, improving customer satisfaction and retention.

Increased page load speed

One of the neglected advantages of headless e-commerce is the page load speed. Since the front-end presentation and back-end data management layers do not connect, you can change your e-commerce platform design or content without affecting its performance. 

This enhances page load speed, ensuring a pleasant browsing experience for your customers. 

Fast-loading a fully customized e-commerce website increases your user engagement. It also contributes to improved SEO rankings, driving increased traffic and conversions.

Features to consider in a headless commerce solution

With many headless commerce systems available, each boasting of bringing a revolutionary change, choosing one that makes a difference to your bottom line is challenging. We provide a few factors to help you select the right headless commerce solution:

Robust APIs

The decoupled commerce system provides robust APIs that allow smooth integrations with front-end and back-end systems. With these APIs, sharing content through different channels while managing user experience, including personalized recommendations and targeted marketing, is easy.

Scalability and agility

Search for a solution that grows your business operations. This helps you deal with changes in traffic and product catalogs without compromising your e-commerce performance. Your platform should grow your business and make it agile. As a result, you can easily integrate new features and functionalities without disrupting the user’s experience.

Customization

Customizable in e-commerce can help you personalize the front-end experiences based on your business logic, brand guidelines, and customer preferences. This helps you design and innovate without any back-end limitations. So, front-ends have rich user interfaces that speak about your brand.

Omnichannel capabilities

To offer a consistent shopping experience across different devices, mobile apps, and channels, the best headless Commerce platform ensures omnichannel retailing. This ensures consistency in customer engagement regardless of the channels they select. You can launch integrated marketing campaigns and loyalty programs across all channels.

Security

Security is a primary concern, especially for e-commerce sites and platforms that use customer data and transactions. Ensure your commerce solution has the latest security features. These include features like strong encryption, secure payment gateways, and adherence to industry standards such as PCI DSS, which provides the highest levels of data security.

Speed

Your solution should support faster e-commerce website loading. A headless architecture improves your website’s speed by caching and CDNs and uses responsive design. 

This enhances your user experience and creates better SEO rankings, leading to more traffic, conversions, and reduced bounce rates.

Integration capabilities

A headless commerce platform ensures third-party integrations. This includes a payment gateway, inventory management, customer relationship management (CRM), and content management system. 

Integrating with different data sources and applications ensures a personalized user experience by sharing, evaluating, and using customer data from multiple sources and applications. As a result, you strengthen your customer-focused business strategy.

Ease of learning

An efficient headless commerce should be easy to navigate and user-friendly, reducing the learning curve for technical and non-technical team members. Ensure your solution offers detailed documentation, tutorials, and support to help users learn its functionality.

This makes the adoption process easier, ensuring a comfortable transition and enabling optimal use of the headless commerce functionality. 

Continuous learning materials and updates help you respond to changes in user needs. You even ensure your team is updated with the latest trends in digital commerce.

Customer support

Superior customer support is one of the most important features when selecting a headless solution. Depending on whether you have a technical problem, need help regarding features, or need prompt support during system upgrades, reliable customer support enhances your overall platform experience. 

A robust solution provides various support channels like live chat, email, or telephone, knowledge bases, FAQs, and user forums. 

Companies worldwide benefit from 24/7 support availability. In addition, timely and efficient customer support provides quick solutions and builds trust and long-term association between the solution provider and your business.

7 Top headless e-commerce platforms

Here are some of the best headless commerce platforms:

Contentstack

Contentstack is a leading headless e-commerce platform that provides unparalleled customer experiences across digital channels. It works on a headless architecture to separate the front-end presentation from the back-end data management.

As a result, you can adjust and adapt as market demands change while ensuring a consistent experience across multiple touchpoints. 

Moreover, Contentstack provides advanced tools for content management, workflow automation, and omnichannel content delivery. Consequently, you get a holistic solution to stay competitive in the digital arena.

Let’s understand how Contenstack’s headless e-commerce system helps companies like Emma launch omnichannel campaigns and overcome legacy issues.

The hyper-growth and legacy system challenges that Emma was dealing with required a content management system that aligned with their business model. After thorough research, Emma shifted to headless e-commerce to eliminate legacy issues and improve the efficiency of operations. As a result, Emma witnessed 8 times faster speed in launching their campaigns.

They also observed a phenomenal increase in the cooperation between its technology and business groups. This transition reduced Emma’s procedures, improved its workflow, and increased the overall effectiveness of its operations.

After using Contentstack, Andreas Westendörpf, Chief Technology Officer at Emma, said:

“The beauty of headless commerce is that it not only delivers short-term results but also that it opens an elegant, logical long-term set of options for the future. This is what we have found with Contentstack and MACH-based technologies.”

Read the full case study here. 

Pros:

• Seamless customer experiences
• Adapt to market demands
• Omnichannel experiences across multiple touchpoints
• Rich content editing tools
• Uses headless CMS architecture
• Latest security features to safeguard customer’s data
• Robust tools for content management and workflow automation
• Friendly user interface

Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus is another headless commerce system that provides a highly flexible and scalable platform with an API-first approach. This helps you create a customized front-end for creating personalized online experiences. 

Shopify Plus's scalable platform and its ability to handle a high-growth e-commerce business make it a prominent headless solution. This e-commerce architecture provides features for complex catalog management, high-volume transactions, and personalized experiences for your customers.

Pros:

• Versatile and robust platform with an API-first approach
• Fully customizable front-end for tailored online experiences
• Scalable and offers support for high-growth businesses

Cons:

• High subscription fees
• Customization limits
• Platform lock-ins

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a scalable and customizable headless platform that helps you easily create online stores. It provides an easy-to-use interface equipped with impressive built features, helping you develop rich and interactive online environments. 

BigCommerce also supports many integrations and apps that extend the platform’s functionality.

Pros:

• Scalable and flexible
• Simplifies building and growing online stores
• User-friendly interface
• Powerful built-in features
• Wide range of integrations and apps

Cons:

• Advanced development skills required
• Initial costs are high
• Maintenance demands resources
• Performance hinges on implementation
• High learning curve
• Risk of platform lock-in
• Integration requires vigilance

Adobe Commerce

With numerous features, including the separation of front-end and back-end systems, Adobe Commerce offers functionality, flexibility, and performance. It helps you craft customized customer journeys.

Moreover, Adobe has many extensions and an active developer community, making it popular among online retailers requiring control and customization.

Pros: 

• Flexible front-end development
• Integration capabilities
• Advanced API support

Cons:

• Complex implementation
• Resource Intensive
• Steep learning curve
• Higher development costs
• Integration challenges
• Potential for increased complexity in SEO

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Another headless commerce architecture is Salesforce. This commerce cloud offers a unified multi-channel platform integrating e-commerce, order management, inventory management practices, and predictive intelligence into an integrated customer experience.

With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, you create personalized experiences everywhere. Moreover, it provides effective merchandising, marketing, and customer service tools.

Pros:

• Unified customer experience
• AI-drive personalization
• Global reach and multi-site management
• Comprehensive integration capabilities: 

Cons:

• Higher development cost
• Steeper learning curve
• Difficult to allocate resources for maintenance
• Higher dependency on the ecosystem

Sitecore

By merging e-commerce, content, and data into a single platform, Sitecore creates immersive and seamless customer experiences. The headless architecture design and API-first approach of the platform offer flexibility to create and deploy innovative experiences across multiple touchpoints.

Sitecore real-time analytics, personalization based on machine learning, and omnichannel marketing make it different. 

Pros:

• Omnichannel delivery
• Integration of customer data and analytics
• Advanced content management capabilities through a headless CMS
• Use of APIs for flexible and scalable e-commerce architectures

Cons:

• Limited ecosystem flexibility
• Scalability concerns
• Implementing features is time-consuming
• Requires technical expertise

Acquia Drupal Commerce

Based on the Drupal content management system, Acquia Drupal Commerce provides you with a flexible and scalable e-commerce platform. As a result, you can easily incorporate it into your content strategy.

You can create attractive product catalogs, manage orders and inventory, and customize customer experiences using the tools offered. The platform also provides powerful tools for SEO optimization, social commerce, and multilingual sites.

Pros:

• Open source
• Flexible API architecture
• Highly scalable

Cons:

• Steep learning curve
• Requires development expertise
• Significant developer effort to tailor the platform to specific needs.
• Issues with performance optimization

FAQs

What is headless commerce? 

A headless commer separates an e-commerce platform's front and back-end. This provides your platform with greater flexibility and customization and ensures rapid development in e-commerce.

Why should businesses transition to headless commerce? 

When transitioning to headless commerce, you deliver personalized shopping experiences, enhance your e-commerce functionality, and adapt to dynamic market changes.

What are some top headless platforms? 

Contentstack, Sitecore, and Acquia Drupal Commerce are among the leading headless commerce architecture and platforms.

Is headless CMS good for e-commerce?

Yes, a headless CMS is advantageous for e-commerce. It offers flexibility, scalability, and ease of use, helping you manage content and products. It also integrates seamlessly with various platforms. This system simultaneously allows updates across multiple platforms, streamlining operations and potentially enhancing customer experience.

Is headless commerce the future?

With its future-proofed, change-friendly architecture, Headless commerce is the future of e-commerce. The separation of the front end and back end facilitates easy updates and changes, making it popular.

Learn more

Headless commerce platforms represent the future of e-commerce businesses. They offer flexibility, enable rapid development, and deliver personalized experiences across various channels. A headless commerce platform can help your business stay ahead of the competition. 

Are you ready to explore the advantages of headless commerce for your business? Schedule a free demo to discover how Contentstack can up your e-commerce strategy.