Headless Commerce: Bring More Customers with Unique User Experience

published by arjun on 1 year ago
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Due to the high demands with fewer resources amidst the supply chain crisis, businesses must change their course of action in day-to-day market trends and rising customer expectations.

Want to know how you can scale your resources to bring more customers?

You can do just that with the help of headless commerce. You must’ve heard about it, but most of us have the least understanding of this buzzword.

Let’s briefly understand headless commerce and its advantages in the current market to get on the same page.

What is Headless Commerce?

The e-commerce sector has experienced rapid change throughout the last decade, including the headstart of social commerce, the burst of mobile commerce with market giants such as Amazon, and the ever-changing customer expectations.

Amidst all this, one can use headless e-commerce platforms to keep up with the trends and customer demands in this modern era.

Headless commerce can be defined as a division of the front end and back end side of an e-commerce application. The Headless commerce architecture provides freedom to express and build however we want while optimizing user experience.

When it comes to planning any company’s innovative strategies, tools like APIs and e-commerce resources could be of great importance. Doing this keeps you ahead of your customer’s expectations while delivering great functionality and an experience.

If you understand the market the slightest, delivering functionality AND a unique experience as emerging checkpoints is very challenging. Generally speaking, showcasing new experiences requires a lot of work on both your system’s front and back ends. But you can do all the tedious tasks flexibly using headless commerce.

Headless Commerce VS Traditional E-commerce

Traditional E-commerce: This is fundamental to all the e-commerce mentioned above. Usually, many companies used the monolithic model before the concept of headless commerce, while agencies recommending it to all of their businesses.

On the bright side, the monolithic model provides full control for the development team, easing the required front-end customizations. Therefore, setting up systems and using default tools became easy with the package.

But speaking of the cons, the monolithic strategy comes with a huge price for development and initiation, while the market timelines are considered slow. Additionally, less room for integrating robust merchandise and design opportunities leads to doubts about the overall model.

Headless Commerce: The most useful system for businesses needing flexible commerce functionalities. Using headless commerce, companies can provide API-driven experiences through applications, DXP, CMS, and custom frontend.

Powerful Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) can help bring unique experiences through Headless commerce.

Simply speaking, core components of SaaS platforms are open to connecting and scaling with other environments to boost functionality.

With the help of highly customized angular / React.js websites, we can integrate such complex commerce environments with staggering outcomes.

The number of usable API calls on a SaaS platform is necessary to ensure the functionality of Commerce-led models. This data orchestration can be performed through a dedicated IT team for infrastructure connectivity.

In the Open SaaS platform architecture, you’ll be provided with the following:

  • Unlimited API calls
  • In-depth developer documentation
  • Multiple endpoints
  • Product roadmap construction revolving around API development.

Benefits of Headless Commerce

Headless Commerce can be adopted by big enterprises and teams of developers with a ‘Do It Yourself’ mindset.

System development and integration take a dedicated amount of time since programmers must find custom ways to produce separate code blocks for the front and back end, which is a major investment for the company.

The company has to have an ambitious team of creative marketers to queue months-long development with rapid design tests.

Since speed-to-market is often tied to boose cash flow, every second of the development team is valuable to bring innovation to its frontier.

If you’re patient enough to accelerate your business dramatically after efforts, you can consider the below benefits to switch to headless commerce:

Greater employee adaptation

Many organizations are reluctant to use new technologies due to versatile market demands. That’s why having an everyday commerce platform with headless commerce systems integration can easily solve many problems.

Perfect tools for your business

Headless commerce provides business tools that are used to customize user experiences. One can argue that such tools cannot be found elsewhere in the market.

Along with the custom APIs, headless commerce can help ensure coordination between brand-consistent experiences across channels fueled by common commerce.

Cost efficiency

With headless commerce, businesses don’t need to rely on long, tedious development processes for every customer’s demand. Meaning you can eliminate all the unwanted expenses in your way.

Also, headless commerce requires fewer hosting fees and licenses with less infrastructure layout.

Time & market

Headless commerce can help keep up with market demands with quick version launches. This can help bring new market trends with little to no cost required in backend development.

Since the front-end changes are agile in nature, developers can save valuable time and jumpstart with minimum code to boost conversion.

Headless commerce applications

Headless commerce can have many use cases, whether using WordPress, Adobe Experience Manager, Bloomreach, or having a customized system like Gatsby JS.

The best solution is to decouple the platform’s presentation layer through an API and plug it into your preferred system.

Using a decoupled SaaS platform for e-commerce can be due to a couple of reasons:

PCI compliance mitigation: Reduced work efforts for the development team, as the SaaS provider is responsible for the risks.

Open and scalable architecture: You can make use of default integrations with CRMs, and ERPs or create your own custom API & SDK.

Checkout security & fraud protection: All these tasks are carried out by the SaaS provider without needing to worry about your IT staff.

You can see the most common use cases of headless commerce down below:

1. Customized Solutions

One of the plausible reasons to choose headless commerce is because you have an idea that no singular system can support or offer right on the table. Or you could’ve found that custom solution to your problem through years of work in open-source platforms, and you know just the right way to skip the long and tedious development life cycle.

You can skip the additional cost and maintenance by keeping the customization through headless commerce.

2. Content Management System (CMS)

Headless commerce and Content Management Systems (CMS) are powerful together. In this headless application, the presentation layer is decoupled from the used platform so the company can use other popular CMS(s) such as WordPress, Drupal, DXPs, and/or customized frontend and backend systems.

You can create channel-tuned content with many user experiences by combining headless commerce with CMS, especially when taking an omnichannel approach to power your frontend and backend.

Choosing CMS from SaaS providers can offer you PCI compliance along with inventory management. Although you can still have options to choose additional systems such as OMS, PIM, or ERP tools through APIs (custom or built-in)

3. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs)

Progressive web apps (PWAs) are the finest example of applications using the latest web functionalities to present a native app-like user experience.

PWAs are standard websites that appear like traditional native applications combined with web and mobile technology to create an interactive user experience to boost conversion rates and total time spent on site.

4. Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs)

The Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is a software to help improve customer experience through digitization. Incorporating DXP with headless commerce can provide a reliable foundation.

The foundation of such integration can be only possible due to adaptable content fueled by API with the functionality to integrate with other great services.

How to start using headless commerce?

Most developers aren’t designers, and vice versa when it comes to being straightforward with headless commerce. But you can still take advantage of the provided APIs and tools for developers to coordinate and maintain brand consistency across channels.

Whereas the design team can keep giving their best user experience through the interface and boost user engagement.

Such flexibility offered by these commerce platforms helps developers boost their performance by gaining control over every tool and API they’re working on.

FAQs

What is the difference between Headless Commerce & Headless CMS?

Headless is a process of dividing the presentation layers of the frontend from the backend that manages the whole of e-commerce.

Headless Content Management System (CMS) is also a process of separating frontend and the backend but has features to edit and equip APIs.

CMS provides a backend layer to create user-specific content through channels. You can transition from commerce to a content approach; however, you must create your frontend data layer.

Do I really need headless commerce?

Headless commerce may not be the right choice for every business since many companies rely on the traditional monolithic model. Although you can still consider going headless if:

✓ You’re a content-driven business.

✓ You have multiple customer pointers and want a seamless digital experience.

✓ You’re capable of implementing customizations to enhance the experience.

✓ Have a separate content website and need to merge together with the main store.

✓ You’re already using CMS and want to include commerce in business.