Why the headless approach is your e-commerce game changer

Highlights

You’ll learn about the benefits of headless architecture:

• Rapid development: Separating the front and back end of your e-commerce platform reduces your development time.
• Customization: Using the headless architecture, you can customize your offerings depending on your business and customer requirements.
• Superior user experiences: As customers receive consistent experience through every digital touchpoint, you provide a superior user experience.

For growing your e-commerce business, adopt a headless platform today.

Keep reading to learn more!

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What is a headless approach?

A headless approach separates the front end from the back end of your e-commerce website or content management system. It ensures agility, personalization, flexibility, and rapid development.

You’re decoupling the part that stores the content (content repository) from where you display the content (the presentation layer).

You deliver consistent digital content experiences across different heads, such as websites, IoT devices, native mobile apps, and store displays. Adopting a headless architecture delivers a superior digital experience, irrespective of the platform a customer uses.

Despite its name, adopting a headless system helps you choose the number of heads (outputs) you want to display your content. Providing customers with more output options helps you achieve success, as you don’t restrict them to a single platform. 

What are headless commerce solutions?

A headless commerce solution is a powerful software that runs on a decoupled approach. Adopting a headless solution gives you the creative freedom to build unique storefront experiences. A monolithic e-commerce solution lacks these features.

Brands using headless platforms provide dynamic and personalized shopping and customer experiences using various front-end technologies. These solutions offer a better experience without the limitations of the back-end capabilities.

Headless commerce's flexibility helps you adapt to new market trends and streamline content delivery across diverse platforms.

Through the application programming interface (API), you deliver content and products to any channel, offering a consistent and engaging user experience.

Headless CMS explained

A headless CMS is a content management system that arranges and controls content with the front-end or presentation layer. This CMS is essential to the headless architecture and digital experience platform (DXP), a modular framework of customized software solutions. 

With a headless CMS, you can reuse the content across the web, mobile and other platforms. It works by disconnecting the content on the back end from the front end. Here's a headless CMS explained video:

Strategies and benefits of implementing headless commerce platforms

Strategies for implementing a headless commerce solutions

When integrating headless commerce platforms, you leverage a strategic approach that aligns with your business objectives and technical capabilities. Successful implementation involves:

Evaluating business goals

Understand the specific goals, such as increasing conversion rates, improving customer experience, or expanding to new channels. This helps you define the scope and priorities of a headless commerce project.

Choosing the right tech stack

The next step is to select technologies and frameworks that work with your headless commerce platform. This ensures that developers can effectively build and maintain the front-end experience.

Investing in developer talent

When you use a headless system, you require skilled developers. Hire a developer team knowledgeable in API use and modern development practices to exploit the platform's capabilities.

Creating a robust API strategy

APIs are the lifelines that connect the front-end and back-end systems. So, design a secure, scalable, well-documented API infrastructure to achieve success.

Providing customer experience

Design your front end, keeping your end customers in mind. As an e-commerce business, provide an accessible and engaging user interface (UI).

Ensuring integration

A headless commerce system integrates with existing business systems such as:

• Customer relationship management (CRM),
• Product information management (PIM),
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP),
• Marketing automation tools.

Benefits of headless commerce

Dropping your monolithic architecture is challenging, especially if you have used it for a long time. Being headless can be a breakthrough for your e-commerce business’s online presence. Some benefits of headless commerce are:

Faster time to market

By separating the front-end from back-end processes, a headless platform allows your developers to work faster. As a result, you increase efficiency and accelerate the delivery of new features or updates.

You even improve your development, testing, and deployment time, eventually reducing the time to market.

Full creative control

Going headless gives you the power to decide the look and feel of your brand without any limitations. Unlike traditional CMSes, there’s no design constraint. You can customize your functionalities based on your imagination. You do this with the new technologies and tools of your choice.

What separates the headless platform from others is that it helps you perform split testing of features you build. This improves user experiences and optimizes your conversion rates.

Additionally, as the front-end system is separate, the changes you make to the front end don’t impact the back end.

Greater freedom for developers

The headless commerce frees up your developers from the conventional monolithic architecture. You enjoy control over your content and user experience, allowing developers to integrate new functionality.

Additionally, with many available tools, your development team can experiment with new ideas and create creative solutions.

Improves website performance

When customers reach your website, you have less than 4-5 seconds to attract their attention. 

These statistics will show you why site performance, particularly page load time, matters so much for your e-commerce platform:

• Pages with a load time of one or two seconds have a bounce rate of 9%.
• When the page load time is five seconds, the bounce rate increases to 38%. 
• Nearly 70% of e-commerce customers say site speed impacts purchasing decisions.
• If an e-commerce store earns $100,000 daily, a one-second page delay can cost up to $2.5 million in lost sales annually.
• Every one-second delay in page load time reduces user satisfaction by 16%.

Because of these reasons, headless commerce is becoming popular, and modern companies are going with the flow. With headless commerce, your business can easily reach the 2-3 seconds page load speed mark. As a result, you reduce the instances where a customer leaves your website because of slow page speed. 

Makes your store scalable and flexible

A headless architecture makes your online store more scalable and flexible. This helps you manage content delivery across various channels and platforms without reworking the entire system.

A scalable and flexible online store accommodates your business needs and growth and allows you to adapt to changes. With a headless commerce approach, you remain competitive in the ever-evolving digital market.

Ensures omnichannel experience

With headless architecture, online stores give customers a consistent experience. By using this technology, you provide personalized engagements and customized messages through various touchpoints, improving customer satisfaction.

Provides a cost-effective solution

Over time, headless commerce reduces your development costs. Using existing infrastructures, you optimize your resources and allocate them more efficiently. 

This leads to a cost-saving method and makes your business more agile. Choosing a traditional e-commerce platform over a headless one makes your business flexible, increasing your ROI.

6 Best platforms for headless commerce

Headless commerce systems have been around for a while simply because of their benefits. From making your business more flexible and scalable to customizing your offerings, these platforms can be a game-changer for your online store. Here are some headless commerce platforms comparison:

Contentstack

Contentstack is the best-of-breed headless CMS with an API-based platform to facilitate content delivery across multiple channels. With Contentstack, your developers can develop agile and modern applications. Your editors manage and deliver content in real time without being required to submit a ticket to the development team.

The platform's features go beyond content management, allowing you to build a consistent customer experience across digital channels and touchpoints.

Let’s understand how Contentstack’s headless CMS helped Freeletics achieve flexibility and future growth.

Freeletics, a fitness company, faced limitations with its CMS and sought a more flexible solution. They found Contentstack’s headless CMS, which helped them grow and experiment with different tech stacks. With Contentstack as their content hub, Freeletics reduced publication and translation time from 22.5 days to 4.5 days, increased developer productivity by 58%, and achieved 60% cost savings. Contentstack's support and features impressed Freeletics, making it their preferred CMS.

Happy with the results of Contentstack, Christie L. Cleveland-Callanan, Senior Product Manager at Freeletics, said:

“Contentstack features and flexibility allow us to grow the way we believe we need to grow. Contentstack gives us the freedom to try things we previously hadn’t considered.”

Read the full case study here.

Key features:

• Powerful headless CMS
• Multichannel publishing
• Highly scalable
• Superior user experience
• API first approach
• Developer friendly
• In-depth analytics and insights

Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus offers a robust API and numerous developer tools. With Shopify Plus, you balance customizability and ease of use. It allows you to integrate with various front-end systems, making it ideal for omnichannel experiences.

Key features:

• Scalable platform
• Advanced API integration
• Multichannel selling

BigCommerce

With its API-first approach, BigCommerce provides the tools required to build a headless e-commerce platform. This commerce engine helps your business grow and adapt to market changes without facing platform restrictions.

Key features:

• API driven architecture
• Scalable and flexible platform
• Pre-built integration

Adobe Commerce

Adobe Commerce offers flexibility and ensures a powerful headless implementation. As a headless CMS solution, Adobe Commerce creates unique front-end experiences and ensures a strong back-end system.

Key features:

• Mobile centricity
• Integrated B2B functionalities
• Sell products across multiple platforms

CommerceTools

CommerceTools is a cloud-native, API-centric platform designed for modern commerce architectures. It provides your business with modular commerce services that integrate with existing systems.

Key features:

• Microservice architecture
• API first approach
• Multi-channel selling

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based e-commerce solution. It helps you build consistent shopping and user experiences across multiple channels. You can handle customer interactions, transactions, and insights in a single integrated environment.

Key features:

• Flexible content configuration
• Composable storefronts
• Monitoring and analytics

How do front-end and back-end separation work in a headless CMS?

Front-end and back-end separation in a headless content management system improves your platform’s functionality. In traditional CMS setups, the front end (presentation layer) and the back end ( content repository)—are tightly intertwined. 

A headless CMS decouples these two elements. The back end becomes a content storage hub, which you can manage using an API.

The front end retrieves this content through API calls and presents it to a website, mobile app, or IoT device. Because of the decoupling, developers can use any framework or programming language to create a customized front-end experience.

Meeting omnichannel market needs with a headless architecture

An omnichannel market integrates multiple touchpoints to provide a consistent user experience. This demands that content and functionality are consistent and accessible across web, mobile, and social media.

However, you may find it challenging to balance these varied interactions without establishing customer data silos or bad experiences.

That’s where a headless architecture comes in. It helps you solve the segments of the omnichannel market. Separating the presentation layer from business logic improves your user interface without disrupting the back-end system. It also enables a quick response to new market trends and introduces new technologies without rebuilding the digital infrastructure.

The decoupled architecture creates a vibrant and flexible environment where the front-end development team creates superior user experiences. It also personalizes your interfaces, allowing you to address individual channel needs. 

The back-end system provides a unified platform for handling critical e-commerce business functions such as inventory management, order processing, and CRM. As a result, you drive an agile omnichannel strategy. This helps you adapt and grow as your customer demands change, helping you satisfy the market needs.

FAQs

What is the difference between headless and traditional e-commerce?

Traditional e-commerce couples the front-end interface and the back-end infrastructure. On the contrary, a headless e-commerce decouples the front and back end and communicates using an API. This ensures greater flexibility and customization in user experiences.

What does going headless mean?

Going headless is a software development process that separates the front-end interface from the back-end infrastructure. It delivers content to your users, irrespective of the platform they use to access it.

Why use headless commerce?

Headless commerce helps companies choose e-commerce platforms while working with the front-end interface, be it a CMS or DXP.

Why is headless commerce faster?

Headless commerce is faster because of its decoupled architecture. The architecture allows simultaneous backend and frontend development, leading to efficient content delivery. Its API transmits only necessary data, reducing server load and resulting in faster load times.

Who uses headless CMS?

Programmers use the headless CMS approach to make it a part of their existing tech stack. Global brands, businesses across various sectors, and content creators interested in streamlining their content management strategy use this CMS.

Is headless CMS the same as headless commerce?

Although headless CMS and headless commerce are integral components of headless architecture, they serve different purposes. A headless CMS decouples the front end and concentrates on content authoring, management, and delivery.

Learn more

The headless CMS and e-commerce offer numerous benefits. From making your website or e-commerce platform flexible to improving user experience, going headless helps you meet omnichannel market needs. 

To deliver omnichannel services to your customers, stay competitive in the digital landscape, and watch your business expand, schedule a free demo.