Why enterprise headless commerce is the future of ecommerce?

Highlights

You’ll learn about why you need a headless commerce:

• Enhanced flexibility: Decouple front and back ends for tailored customer experiences
• Scalability and speed: Rapidly deploy updates and scale effortlessly
• Broader reach: Consistent experiences across all channels and devices
• Cost efficiency: Lower long-term maintenance costs and improve performance

Your customers will purchase from your brand when you provide the best possible experiences. They want a fun, personal and frictionless experience.

With 2.77 billion customers expected to shop online by 2025, you need a platform that reaches customers across every channel, in any context, with personalized and relevant messaging. So, what options do you have?

Enter an enterprise headless commerce.

Such a headless architecture efficiently meets customer expectations and provides the best possible omnichannel experiences without risk. As a result, you meet your customer expectations while achieving omnichannel experiences. 

But what is enterprise headless commerce, what are its benefits, and what will be the top commerce platforms in 2025?

Let’s explore.

What is an enterprise headless commerce?

Enterprise headless commerce is an advanced e-commerce architecture that separates the front-end presentation from the commerce platform. Such a decoupling produces impressive customer experiences across mobile apps, IoT devices and websites without the issues of a traditional e-commerce platform.

A headless commerce system connects all your tech stack, including marketing analytics, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) using application programming interfaces (APIs). This creates a more flexible and scalable system for your business, meeting market changes and delivering unified and continuous experiences across every channel. 

Enterprise headless commerce vs traditional e-commerce

Benefits of an enterprise headless commerce

Improved website performance

When customers reach your e-commerce website, you have only a few seconds to capture their attention. Only when your page loads quickly will your customers stay and browse. With the chances of bounce increasing by 32% when page load time goes from one second to 3 seconds, a headless commerce platform comes to your rescue. With a headless architecture, you create faster-loading pages across mobile phones, tablets and desktops, reducing the likelihood of customers losing interest in your website.

Broader customer reach 

A headless commerce platform delivers a consistent customer experience across various digital channels. You can customize your digital presence to fit different platforms. This adaptability helps you engage with a larger audience, addressing their unique preferences. You can reach your customers anytime and on any platform using new technologies and third-party services.

Faster development

When you adopt a headless approach, you enjoy the benefits of faster development and deployment. You can deploy and update features more rapidly than traditional systems. Because of the decoupling, you can roll out marketing strategies, product launches and website updates, helping you respond to customer demands.

Complete creative control

Going headless creates the e-commerce platform your brand envisions. Such an architecture chooses best-of-breed technologies to provide bespoke experiences of any complexity level. With headless commerce, there are no more design sacrifices, and you can customize everything you imagine using the preferred tools. 

Improved website agility

Adapting a headless commerce architecture helps you update and innovate on customer interfaces without the hassle of overhauling your entire system. This setup lets your team independently tweak changes and enhance the user experience with creative content and engaging features. Using APIs makes integrating new technologies and third-party services easy, speeding up the rollout of updates and new offerings. With headless commerce, reacting to market trends, adapting to new consumer behaviors, and grabbing emerging opportunities are becoming possible.

Lower maintenance cost

Enterprise headless commerce reduces the complexities of traditional e-commerce platforms. Its decoupled design helps you update and change individual components without disturbing the system. This approach reduces the demand for extensive IT resources and lowers maintenance costs, freeing up funds and team members for strategic innovations.

Higher performance and scalability

Enterprises often witness fluctuating transactional volumes and traffic spikes. A headless architecture leads to quicker load times, better responsiveness and enhanced overall system efficiency. Moreover, such systems are designed for effortless scaling and managing growth and seasonal demand spikes. As a result, businesses can offer a seamless shopping experience regardless of the transactional volume and traffic increase.

Top enterprise headless commerce platform

Contentstack

Contentstack is a headless commerce solution renowned for its user-friendly interface and integration capabilities. It facilitates content management and delivery across multiple channels, ensuring you can innovate without hassle. Its robust API framework provides real-time scalable solutions and customization to meet specific needs.

Contentstack is flexible and compatible with your existing technical stack compared to other headless architectures. It allows you to meet your customer’s requirements, ensuring your business can scale without compromising the quality of your services and the user experience.

Sitecore

Sitecore offers a suite of tools designed for digital marketers. Its headless architecture creates personalized customer experiences and develops and deploys targeted campaigns. While Sitecore is powerful for marketing, Contentstack excels with its streamlined approach to integration and flexibility, offering an array of customization options that enhance various business functionalities beyond marketing.

Contentful

Contentful provides a flexible content infrastructure that supports extensive customization. It enables developers to create and manage digital content across any device or channel. Its modular approach allows teams to build dynamic, adaptable experiences. 

But Contentstack offers better integration capabilities and support for varying business needs. As a result, you offer more streamlined implementation and a faster time to market for new initiatives.

Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce suite includes creative tools and comprehensive solutions for enhancing digital retail experiences. Its headless capabilities meet the demands of modern content delivery across various touchpoints. 

Although Adobe offers a rich set of creative tools, Contentstack's advantage lies in its superior ease of use and cost-effectiveness for implementing complex headless e-commerce setups. This helps retailers achieve high-level functionality without overwhelming resource requirements.

Case study: How did Contentstack help Wavin build its e-commerce capabilities?

Wavin, a traditional B2B company in infrastructure and construction, embraced digital transformation by adopting a MACH-based approach and partnering with Valtech. After realizing the potential of direct-to-consumer sales during the pandemic, Wavin developed an online "webshop" and selected Contentstack as a headless CMS to enhance its online capabilities. The migration allowed Wavin to expand its e-commerce operations to 36 countries, improve order processing times, accelerate customer acquisition and gain insights into diverse markets. 

After using Contentstack, Stephanie Devine, Global Product Owner for e-commerce, Wavin, said:

“In a traditional and risk-averse industry, we made a bold decision to embrace MACH and go beyond the suite approach, trusting the API interaction to give us the freedom to choose what is needed to build a stack that can grow with Wavin.”

Read the complete case study here. 

How to choose the right headless commerce solution

Business feature offered

Instead of adding to your worries, e-commerce solutions should simplify your life. So, ensure it's packed with plenty of business features. Look for the following features:

• Analytics

How many potential customers find your products? How many convert into paying customers? What is your conversion rate? What are the demographics of your customer base? Which products are popular? 

• Inventory management

Look for headless commerce platforms that track your inventory, preventing stockouts and stockovers. If you’re using an inventory management system and running low on products, your marketing team can pull them down for replacement within minutes. 

• Order management

Ensure the platform tracks all your orders and answers customer questions. Using an order management system makes managing your orders easy. When you provide an omnichannel experience, you cater to your customer's needs while keeping up with the latest trends.

Integrations available

Look for a headless platform that integrates with your existing systems and third-party solutions using an API. This compatible nature allows for streamlined operations and enhanced productivity by enabling different software and tools to communicate and work together, reducing errors and improving workflow efficiency. 

User-friendly interface

With more than 80% of your marketers understaffed and overloaded, the last thing you want is to choose a headless platform with a non-user-friendly interface. So, ensure that the e-commerce platform has an exceptional user interface. It should be user-friendly for everyone, including non-developers and developers.

Platform customization

When choosing a headless commerce platform, customization is critical. It fits your specific business needs. A platform offers unique experiences and features that align with your brand and customer expectations. Look for platforms with a modular setup to make changes without overhauling the entire system. Your platform should support custom APIs to add new functionalities. A flexible headless e-commerce platform innovates and tailors the user experience to meet market demands.

Support and security

When picking a headless commerce platform, search for one offering support and security. Good customer support helps you get the most out of the platform, sort out issues and keep things running, ensuring happy customers. Look for platforms that offer top-notch technical support, like having dedicated account managers, 24/7 services and active forums to guide you.

Overall cost

When you implement a headless commerce solution, you’ll witness higher initial costs and long-term benefits. Despite needing specialized resources upfront, headless systems provide scalability, reduce expenses and ensure targeted upgrades without costly overhauls. This approach enhances cost-effectiveness over time, leading to a higher return on investment.

Steps to implement a headless commerce solution

Know your goals

Define your goals for headless commerce. Whether it's enhancing customer experience, improving scalability or speeding up time to market, having clear goals will guide your decisions.

Evaluate your current setup

Look at your existing e-commerce platform to see what is working and what needs improvement. Check how well your current systems can integrate with potential headless solutions to ensure smooth operation.

Pick the right platform

Choose a headless commerce platform that fits your business needs. Consider factors like scalability, integration capabilities and customization options. Platforms like Contentstack have unique strengths that can align with different objectives.

Plan your architecture

Design how the front and back end components will interact. Develop a solid API strategy to manage how data flows between these parts and any third-party services.

Develop and test

Kick off the development phase by creating a user-friendly front end and linking it to the back end using your chosen API framework. Conduct thorough testing to ensure that all components work efficiently before going live.

Connect third-party services

Integrate services like payment gateways, CRM systems and marketing tools to enhance your platform's capabilities. Focus on secure and efficient integration to keep data safe and reliable.

Launch and monitor

Roll out the solution, starting with a smaller audience to observe performance and fix any issues. Expand while monitoring performance and gathering customer feedback to make improvements.

Train your team

Train your team on using and managing the new system. Ensure everyone involved understands the new processes and tools.

Refine and improve

After launching, assess the system's performance against your initial goals. Use the insights to refine the platform by adding or changing new features.

FAQs

What is the headless concept?

Headless commerce decouples the front and backend systems, allowing for greater flexibility in delivering digital content across different channels.

Why is it called headless commerce?

The term "headless" refers to the separation of the "head" (front-end presentation layer) from the "body" (back-end e-commerce functionality).

Is headless commerce worth it?

Yes, headless commerce brings flexibility, scalability and enhanced customer experiences.

Why is headless commerce faster?

By decoupling systems, headless commerce allows for faster updates and iterations, helping you respond to market demands.

Learn more

Before moving to a headless architecture, you will want to know with certainty whether migrating makes sense for your business. Only if it brings financial benefits or provides an omnichannel experience is moving to headless e-commerce platforms a viable option. 

To reshape your retail landscape, adopt a headless commerce strategy and implement a headless platform that meets your customer expectations. Talk to us to learn to know how Contentstack can help.