Headless Commerce Summit 2021 Recapped
What is the Headless Commerce Summit?
The Headless Commerce Summit is a Jamstack focused commerce event presented by Netlify. This is a must-attend event for anyone interested in headless commerce. It has been running for two years now virtually and will hopefully continue to be presented annually.
The Headless Commerce Summit site says,
“Join decision makers, technologists, and e-commerce experts for a one-day deep dive into how you can leverage the Jamstack to take advantage of this new headless approach.
Whether you’re just learning about headless e-commerce, you’ve already started to go headless, or you’re a Jamstack pro, this conference will give you insights and actionable information to make your site and your business move faster.”
It is just that: an amazing one day event that will leave you with a greater understanding of the commerce landscape and actionable tips for improving businesses.
Attending the Headless Commerce Summit
I always have a fun time at any Jamstack event that Netlify presents. They do a top-notch job of making their events, online or in person, a “comf” space for talking tech. Probably why the Jamstack Jammies are top swag items. 😉
On top of being an attendee, this is also my second year presenting. 🥳 Last year I was just a few weeks into my role as a Developer Advocate; needless to say this presentation went a lot more smoothly. You can view the presentation below, and check out our existing blog post on Inclusive And Accessible Omnichannel Strategies with JAMstack.
An aspect of the event that I really enjoyed were the polls that the Netlify team curated. One that I found particularly interesting was learning that most attendees have most often used monolithic applications for commerce development. 👇
Another of my favorite things about this conference was that we had “lounge” spaces to chat with others between session blocks. This was a great use of space and time so that attendees could network and share what they’re working on. At the end of the conference, the lounges turned to event booths where you could interact with sponsors and learn more about their products. I personally loved the photo booth feature and ended up with this gem… I blame the photographer. 😝
Session Breakdown
The Headless Commerce Summit morning sessions were longer, at around 30 minutes in length, and were case study driven. The afternoon sessions were lightning talks that were anywhere from 10–15 minutes long. You could easily watch the entire playlist in a weekend, but here are some of the highlights curated by yours truly.
1. State of Headless, Christian Bach
In this keynote address, Christian Bach (Co-founder and President of Netlify) impressively noted that we saw 10 years of ecommerce growth in just 10 months due to the pandemic. This massive swing in the ecommerce industry has led many established online brands to think about differentiation. This means thinking about everything from frontend personalization to backend speed and reliability. This is where headless commerce comes into the foreground. Headless has a need for speed and that can really drive conversions.
This slide references the stats that Christian cultivated:
All in all, this keynote hit on some great stats and concepts that set the foundation for the day.
2. Caching Strategies for Large Ecommerce, Cassidy Williams
This was a lightning talk that focused on Distributed Persistent Rendering (DPR). Cassidy used a compelling metaphor to introduce this topic that I won’t spoil for anyone, but let’s just say it was a really creative intro that involved pokemon.
“DPR is a framework agnostic, architectural approach for incrementally building web applications.”, -Cassidy Williams
This means you can go from having micro-sites to having micro-builds. Instead of having to rebuild the entire site due to a change to minor components or pages, you can just rebuild what you need to, when you need to. 🤯
Cassidy went on to explain how this works using Netlify’s Edge CDN. I highly recommend checking out this talk to get an understanding of how this approach works and how you might utilize these new principles.
3. Supercharging the Restaurant Industry, Zahid Mahmood
Zahid is the founder of Buskana. Buskana is an application for building low-code websites for restauranteurs to have their menu accessible and available for ordering online without the high commissions that are charged by food delivery services like Uber and DoorDash. Buskana allows a restaurateur to have their own site, use Stripe for payment processing, and maintain ownership of their customer data.
Zahid knew that the pandemic would hurt restaurants and wanted to help. Using Jamstack technologies he is helping restaurants go from zero SEO presence to seeing over 100% growth in SEO scores in about 8 weeks. Just look at the numbers below for some of his results.
Social Highlights
There was some great chatter happening on Twitter during the summit. Here are a few tweets, and you can search #headlesscommerce for more.
This quote by Agolia is 🔥.
TakeShape.io gave us a play-by-play, throughout the day.
We had a great time in the lounge chatting after the conference. Just see our silly faces here.
Recap Complete
That’s it y’all. Visit the Headless Commerce Summit playlist on Netlify’s channel to catch all the talks from that day.
Here’s me signing off from the conference. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
🤓See you next year! 🗓
