Headless Commerce or Traditional: Find the Right Fit for Your eCommerce Business

User experience is crucial in making or breaking a digital commerce business. According to Baymard Institutes’ analysis of forty-one different studies, 70% of the carts are abandoned due to poor user experience. With the exponential growth of customer-centric commerce, businesses are now gravitating toward headless or composable technologies to enhance their CX and increase revenue. With this, headless commerce has become the most significant technological advancement in the eCommerce industry.

Today’s consumers want a personalized experience beyond anything while shopping—that feeling of having a personal sales assistant when you first walk into the store. And while they want to interact and shop from the comfort of their own home, they demand an increasingly high level of personalization. According to a survey, more than 70% of customers expect personalized experiences across various touchpoints while shopping online.

Hence, eCommerce businesses are sparing no effort to bring ”personal” into personalization via newsletters, personalized email campaigns, product recommendations, or special discounts.

Here is where headless commerce outpaces traditional commerce practices.

The last decade saw a gradual decrease in retail digital commerce monopoly held by big players. The norm was that small and medium sellers and business owners would depend on these digital marketplaces to sell their products. They had to pay a significant cut to these markets as a commission. Building and maintaining a digital commerce website was an arduous task. And one of the primary reasons was the inherent nature of traditional commerce, where the frontend and the backend were tightly meshed together. But by the end of the decade, the wheel of fortune turned, and the process demanded fewer Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), time, and lesser technological acumen. The pandemic catalyzed the situation further, and eCommerce became a lifestyle mandate rather than a convenient choice for the consumers.

The traditional infrastructure has a frontend that is conjoined with the backend allowing a robust platform but with little room to move. Whereas, in the case of a headless infrastructure, it facilitates the separation of the frontend and the backend. The presentation layer is decoupled from the eCommerce operational platform, offering increased flexibility and delivering and managing content via simple API calls.

The headless platform allows business to remodel their frontend without deep-diving into layers and layers of coding, giving them the flexibility and ease to create a unique, hyper-personalized, and user-friendly user experience for the visitors. The frontend is seamlessly connected to backend operational layers like the ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning), OMS ( Order Management System), PIM (Product Information Management), DAM (Digital Asset Management), and others via an API layer. Business owners can leverage the headless tech stack and optimize their online stores for better performance. At the same time, the developers can break from the shackles of traditional commerce and make alterations to the frontend effortlessly.

As mentioned above, in traditional or monolithic infrastructure, the tightly coupled frontend and backend make it challenging to customize the eCommerce store or the mobile applications. Because of design constraints, any change in the frontend will affect the backend. The limitations also hamper rapid prototyping and testing.

On the other hand, headless overcomes most of these issues by separating the user-facing frontend from the operational backend. Designers, content marketers, and frontend developers do not have to go back and forth to the DevOps and engineering teams for rolling updates and design changes.

Let us see how headless commerce is a wise choice.

Headless facilitates fast integration

An eCommerce online store uses multiple operational integrations like CMS, payment gateways, shopping carts, email engines, mobile devices, online catalogs, FTP, etc. Integrating these functionalities can be a tedious job in a traditional architecture due to numerous programming alterations in the backend. In the case of headless commerce, these integrations are independent of each other and treated as individuals. Headless commerce lets the developers integrate, update and remove these modules faster to cater to the ever-evolving customer expectations.

Headless commerce renders greater flexibility for a mobile experience 

Changing the codebase to be optimized for mobile viewing is an uphill task in traditional architecture. But with the increase in the number of smartphone shoppers by the second, it has become a gradual prominence. Delivering better online shopping experiences on smartphones and mobile devices has become a competitive advantage. Headless commerce is the way to cater to this constantly growing demand for optimized and updated mobile shopping. It supports mobile shopping addons like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), native application development, Progressive Web Apps (PWA), and more to deliver a superior customer experience, including aesthetics and performance.

Headless commerce helps businesses become truly omnichannel

The last few years have seen exponential growth in consumers loving omnichannel brands. Convenience drives them towards businesses that have embraced the omnichannel model across websites, marketplaces, social media, and physical stores. Online stores built on headless platforms offer authentic omnichannel experiences facilitating frontend changes such as prices, promotions, inventory updates, BOPIS, BORIS, curbside pickup, and social media shopping, all in real-time.

Headless commerce is a practical synonym for personalization

Headless platforms allow businesses to implement personalization in terms of relevant content delivery based on geolocations, preferences and interests, and previous purchases. This is one of the various advantages for eCommerce businesses leveraging appropriate APIs. It not only attracts a suitable customer base but helps reduce churn.

Enhanced SEO and performance optimizations are two of the many side benefits of headless commerce

It goes without saying that online shopping sites need SEO and performance optimization for their competitive advantage. Frontend changes like banner images, H-Tags, meta texts, and more can be frequently updated for better-optimized webstores. Headless architecture can make these changes seamless and reflect in little to no time. Headless platforms are also known to increase page speed and enhance Google Core Web Vitals to help them rank better on SERPs.

Headless commerce platforms offer flexibility like no other

With today’s dynamic eCommerce scenario, customer behavior and preferences change overnight. As explained above, the headless architecture facilitates quick and hassle-free changes such as website tone, inventory organization, app updates, and more to cater to the consumer base.

This is just the gist of what headless commerce technology is capable of. But there might be numerous questions popping up in your mind right now. Is it the future of eCommerce? Is it the right fit for you? What are the real-time challenges while implementing headless commerce? You can find answers to these questions and more during the live webinar “Composable & Headless Commerce – A (Not So) Secret Path to Success” on 21st April 2022.

Krish is coming together with Vue Storefront and commercetools to talk about Headless and Composable commerce, focusing on the strategic implementation of these innovative models.