Debunking Top Headless Commerce Myths Hampering Your Digital Transformation

Headless Commerce, in other words, decoupling the frontend or the head of the brand experience from the non-customer facing backend, is the talk of the town in the digital commerce industry. The primary driver behind this is the pandemic-fuelled rapid economic and taste changes of the customer that quick-on-their-feet businesses can accommodate.

By 2040, 95% of all purchases are expected to be made online. Customers search for value-added shopping services across various touchpoints, which motivates them to make informed purchase decisions and keep them attached for future purchases. The changing market scenario has led to eCommerce players constantly striving to improve their tech stack to bring out innovative solutions to satisfy the customers.

The decoupling of the frontend, leaving the backend behind to carry out business as usual, gives the brands enough wiggle room to change their tune with no strings attached and cater to the hyper-digitally engaged customer base and render a superior and consistent CX.

Headless technology is fairly new and still unfathomable to a great extent. And as with any other new technology or trend, headless has its own share of misunderstandings, pandemonium, and myths created around it. So, before diving right into the buzz of headless myths, let us understand in brief, the basics of headless commerce.

In a typical headless architecture, the frontend is decoupled from the backend. It can be adjusted as and when required, as per the whims of the brands, or to serve particular customer demands. The frontend calls an API to pick up the content to display dynamically for your user interface, like Google search, Instagram, Facebook, Online storefront, PWA Apps, across multiple channels.

Headless commerce is based on the MACH architecture, viz, Microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. The microservices solution acts as independent components communicating via a well-defined user interface using lightweight APIs when aligned with the MACH approach. So, all the functional elements, including the product’s content, forms, blogs, banners, and everything else, can be programmatically managed, including creating and managing various content components. Headless architecture is imperative in the IoT age.

With the popularity of headless commerce on the rise, this is the right time to put certain headless myths to rest.

Most of you would think that adopting headless commerce is what brands and retailers are doing today. Even with big player platforms putting a dent in the traditional paradigm, the reality hits different. There are a lot of myths following this new technology around. The top 10 headless myths doing the rounds are:

Will implementing a headless solution be too lengthy or even risky? Making a jump to microservices tech strategy can be daunting because of various misapprehensions regarding data loss, improper transfers, miscommunication between marketing and developers, and other human errors. However, if you found the right solution for your business, implementing headless can seamlessly work with your existing systems while ingesting information and data from all probable sources, rearranging it to form a universal schema, and then delivering content and information through APIs to the storefront. So, the truth is that in a headless model, you can scale by removing and implementing various systems while keeping the abstraction layer for your eCommerce store. This eCommerce platform will enable the best of microservices while relieving the business owners of risky challenges while switching to headless without a safety net.

No sugarcoating here! The cost will go up initially. But the overall price monetary liability depends on two factors. Firstly, the more customizations, the higher the cost of developing the frontend from scratch. But in the long run, various customizations will prove to serve the customers right and ultimately result in increased ROI. Secondly, if you plan to scale your eCommerce platform, headless is the best way to future-proof your eCommerce business. Headless gives the developers enough room to accommodate dynamic scaling. That may again impact the overall costing because of big server and infrastructure expenses, but in time, it would vastly help keep a check on maintenance and scaling expenses. Another reason to adopt headless requires considering some probable results while calculating long-term gain after implementing headless: faster rollouts of updates with negligible downtime, no-restriction customizing experience, making platform changes with no complexity whatsoever, and fewer plugins and extensions required. Headless might not look like a cheaper alternative at the moment, but the argument that it is prohibitively expensive does not hold up.

One of the greatest myths surrounding headless technology is tearing everything down and starting from scratch. But no, this is not what headless does to your business. You do not have to worry about ripping everything you have worked so hard for. One of the significant advantages that headless architecture gives developers is that the implementations can be layered with minimal intervention on top of the existing tech stack. You need to take care of certain prerequisites, like checking the CMS to see what you can stack. But you will not have to redo everything.

So, one of the frequent questions business owners ask is headless architecture secure enough? Yes! The headless platforms allow easy and secure third-party integrations and protect against security risks. No one can access the backend and the content publishing platform from the frontend and the CMS database. This makes you less vulnerable to DDoS attacks that could render the store offline or unable to access network resources and systems. Headless architecture can tightly secure all the data-holding and administrative regions by completely separating them from the actual displayed website. You can even restrict IP access to the database.

eCommerce platform migrations are infamous for tedious coding and lengthy compilation times. But that is not the case with headless. If you are planning to migrate to a headless architecture for your digital commerce business, then this might be your lucky day. The prominent players in the market provide easy and numerous integrations and plugins, minus the hassles of complicated codes. They even have pre-written APIs that the business owners can consume for a seamless headless implementation.

The headless commerce solution meant for your business will be tailor-made to be flexible and fluid while supporting your changing business needs. The microservices strategy gives you the freedom to cherry-pick integrations and tools that are the right fit for your brand. It also allows you to eliminate and replace the tool when it no longer works for you as you scale. The MACH approach also reduces the risk involved while replacing or removing tools from the monolithic structure.

The digital commerce fraternity is buzzing with awe because of the lightning-fast speeds that headless commerce and PWAs bring to the table, as this directly boosts the CX and hence the conversions. But is speed gains the only benefit? The mobile-app readiness and the ability to give a native app like user experience on mobile browsers are some of the reasons why headless increases the ROI. High traffic surges, no worries, headless to the rescue. The headless architecture efficiently supports days like Black Fridays and Cyber Monday. You can seamlessly use a CDN to eliminate the issues known for crashing or slow websites. It has already been established that headless solutions are hero or frontend development, but it also aids the behind-the-scenes development team by eliminating the need to manage numerous codebases for desktop and mobile and the various APIs of your stack tools. From enhancing CX to reducing friction, headless commerce does it all. But these are just a few benefits of a headless commerce solution. You can read more about it in our ebook: Headless Commerce. (Link to ebook)

The term headless commerce has been explained in various forms and text repeatedly. The strict definition of headless commerce is a separation between the frontend and the backend. However, some myths ignore this very definition. For instance, if an eCommerce platform is integrated with a different vendor’s CMS and sends data via API, but the CMS loads the frontend experience, it cannot be called headless. Hare, the frontend might be separated from the backend in terms of vendors, but it will become irrelevant to the shoppers who still cannot have the headless PWA experience. For a correctly built headless eCommerce architecture, the separation should be clear between the frontend framework and the backend code, while the systems used do not matter.

No one in this world can guarantee definitive results. In the case of being headless, nobody knows what the experience will be like. Headless commerce architecture is customizable. What determines the outcome is your approach to its implementation including, the cost, time given during implementation, integration, and functionality. But there are certain definitive advantages your can expect. The customization is never-ending and free from restrictions. The opportunity to play around to create an exceptional experience for both customers and admins is endless. The developers are not bound by design constraints’ shackles and can use APIs to incorporate new ideas aligning with changing requirements. You can roll out updates as and when required and have greater control over what the shopper sees. So, in a way, you can sway the results in the direction of your choice.

Tech leaders and developers have always driven most eCommerce technologies. This has created misconceptions in the marketers’ minds that headless solutions will bring the developers again in the center and push the marketers to the corner. But this time, history will not repeat itself. Headless commerce is putting marketers into the driver’s seat. It gives the marketers enough power to pull the strings and redesign the frontend interface to deploy the content in any manner they want, across any channel. All this, and without diving into the deep ends of the codes. Headless commerce allows simple content deployment and other customizations to be just an API call away.

Headless Commerce is the Future of eCommerce

Headless is the way today to future-proof your eCommerce business. Do not let the myths scare you away if you consider headless implementation. With any new trend, myths are bound to accompany, but not all myths reflect reality. With headless commerce, the same is true. It might be just the solution needed for your digital transformation. Krish promises to be with you at every step of the way to plan and reshape your eCommerce strategy and bring you an antidote to boring commerce. Contact our headless experts for all your headless requirements.

As the relevance of Headless commerce continues to grow in the eCommerce landscape, we have brought our simplified version of the concept. Do read our free eBook, “HEADLESS COMMERCE: A DEFINITIVE GUIDE,” to crack the complexities of headless technology.