Why is Headless Commerce the future for Brands and Retailers

Sabah Noor

Dec 16, 2021

6 min read

With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, the eCommerce industry saw a massive rise in terms of sales. Since COVID-19 had shut down retail stores, the online eCommerce world saw a significant transformation. The global lockdown led to an increase in global retail sales. According to Statista, the expected eCommerce growth will reach an industry worth $26.7 trillion by 2022. Increase of $23.6 trillion from 2018! With more and more online shopping options, customers have found different channels to purchase products. Today, there are numerous devices they can shop from: mobile, computers, and intelligent devices.

Headless Commerce Source: Unsplash

According to a study conducted by Microsoft, around 58% of the shoppers don't prefer buying from an online shop that offers a poor customer experience. Offering seamless, fast, and intuitive user experiences throughout the shopping process are challenging for many eCommerce businesses.

Do you know that Headless commerce can create a significant impact on enhancing user experiences? Today, headless commerce is transforming the eCommerce world by offering customer-focused technology that enables online businesses to develop future-proof shopping experiences. If eCommerce brands and retailers want to scale their digital channels, they need a robust technology like headless commerce. Let's understand the concept of headless commerce and how it can offer a future-proof eCommerce solution to online businesses.

What is Headless Commerce?

Before we jump onto the concept of headless eCommerce, let's find out the features that traditional eCommerce platforms lack. Conventional eCommerce platforms like Magento are developed on a monolithic architecture. It is tightly coupled with the back-end and front-end. It allows businesses to sell their products via a web-based shopping experience. However, customer demands and behavior are changing.

Shopping behaviors have changed drastically. With the growth of smartphone users worldwide, more customers tend to purchase or surf across the web through their smart devices. The demand for smartphones is quite evident if we see the figures. According to Gartner, the worldwide growth in sales for smartphones went up by 26% in the first quarter of 2021.

Therefore, eCommerce businesses have a multi-channel approach. They need to provide personalized shopping experiences to match the prevailing level of customer satisfaction. If brands and retailers want to keep up with the evolving customer expectations, they'll need a flexible and agile eCommerce solution. The answer to that is headless eCommerce!

An eCommerce business with a headless commerce setup will fully decouple the front-end and back-end. They communicate via APIs (the acronym for Application Programming Interface). Headless eCommerce has different features too. It utilizes headless CMS and a headless eCommerce platform to run various operations.

These features enable eCommerce businesses to simplify product logistics, inventory management, marketing, etc. They can distribute content through APIs across various devices and channels with just a push button. These features allow businesses to streamline content easily. It will enable them to offer a seamless shopping experience across all devices.

Why Should You Consider Headless Commerce? How Does It Make Them Future-Ready?

Headless commerce can help eCommerce businesses meet modern market demands. They allow online companies to gain an omnichannel approach and offer personalized experiences. Many small businesses can quickly meet small customer demands through their small online shop and a website. However, the problems start rising when their business scales or expands to new platforms.

Comparing headless CMS and traditional CMS

The most significant advantage of headless commerce is that it allows businesses to create content once and utilize it across all channels. With traditional content management, eCommerce businesses were not allowed to do so. Headless eCommerce setup will enable enterprises to:

Handle storefronts across multiple channels.
Offer enticing UI and apply visual editing.
Use technology to boost performance & security.
Develop flexible, customized storefronts.
Focus on customer solutions

The Key Benefits Of headless commerce

1. Improved user experiences

As mentioned above, the headless setup allows eCommerce businesses to manage content using two critical components. These components enable your business to maximize users' experience and integrate a headless CMS with your eCommerce platform. Once you integrate your content with your headless CMS, you can quickly deliver the same content across multiple channels. Therefore, your brand will be able to provide an omnichannel experience.

Headless Commerce (1) Source: Unsplash

You also get a centralized content management system that is very helpful in creating multilingual content to internationalize your offerings. You get to modernize your CMS by adding social media services with an API. How does that benefit you? With an omnichannel approach, marketers use language as a marketing tool to engage new audiences from new markets without spending loads of money on a translation team.

2. E-commerce Personalization

E-commerce personalization can help your eCommerce business to cater to individual needs. You can offer services that align with your customer's intent. It also allows companies to provide context to different customers from various other channels.

3. Enhanced security and performance

Stores developed on the top of a headless architecture tend to load faster than traditional architectures. They also offer a greater level of security. How do these things affect customer experience? A fast-loading website that is responsive to its viewers has a more significant influence on them.

Headless Commerce (2) Source: Unsplash

When a website loads quickly, it adds up to the user experience and boosts the organic and SEO performance of the website. Today, many eCommerce storefronts are developed using statically-generated sites. These websites have increased efficiency because a headless configuration works relentlessly to reduce the website's loading time and boost performance. As loading time decreases, businesses offer a better user experience that improves quality scores and decreases ad spend.

4. Flexibility and faster deployments

The headless architecture offers high flexibility and complete control to front-end developers. Developers can curate user experiences from scratch as per their customer demands and help you meet your eCommerce store needs. Front-end developers working with headless don't have to worry about back-end limitations because they cab fetch enough data from an API call. When we talk about smaller-to-larger changes, a front-end developer can operate independently via any back-end system. How Does that help your business? It allows you to make efficient storefront updates.

5. Quick time to market

Unlike the traditional architectures, a headless commerce setup is entirely indifferent to the kind of technology you are using. The headless commerce setup shall remain independent of any future changes too. Due to this reason, developers get a lot of freedom regarding their decisions related to technology. How will that benefit your team? When developers get the space to make decisions, your marketing team has more time to take new initiatives and create new marketing campaigns. Hence, your marketing team has more time to work across multiple channels across various devices.

6. How do you decide when to go headless?

Many businesses struggle to find the best time to shift to headless. It can be difficult for your business to realize the best time. If you have a custom eCommerce platform or eCommerce solutions like Shopify, WooCommerce, or Adobe Experience Manager, having a headless architecture can make your business more manageable, efficient, and profitable. A CMS/eCommerce solution is very reliable compared to the above cases. There are a few questions that you must ask yourself before implementing your headless eCommerce architecture. What are your targeted devices? What technology do you want to use? Do you expect redesigning at some point in time? These questions are critical to ask before taking your first step towards headless commerce.

Conclusion

Do you think you want to implement headless eCommerce for accelerated growth? If you are planning to do so, wait no more! With the propelling rise of eCommerce adoption among customers, brands and retailers need to provide their shoppers with a notch higher online shopping experience. Headless commerce allows you to deliver an enhanced shopping experience and increase eCommerce efficiency at scale. At Saffron Edge, we can help your business adopt necessary technological changes. We have built over dozen custom-field types with headless eCommerce. Get in touch with our experts and initiate your practice towards a future-proof eCommerce business.