The Key Benefits of Headless Commerce for Your Business

In this article, we reveal the reasons why the Headless Commerce approach is a game-changer and explain how your online business can benefit from it.

What is Headless Commerce?

Headless Commerce is simply decoupling the front-end from the back-end. The front-end represents everything that users can see on the webpage — the content and design. User experience heavily depends on the front-end performance. Meanwhile, the back-end corresponds to the area where everything is managed and stored. In a conventional e-commerce product, these two platforms are linked to each other, and changes in one part will affect the other.

Why is everybody making a big fuss around Headless Commerce?

Headless Commerce is a game-changing approach, as it gives freedom to both parts — front-end and back-end platforms can operate independently. But they are connected through the use of an application programming interface (API).

How does this apply to business?

The key point is that user experience is evolving so businesses need to know how to meet new expectations of the targeted audience. Consumers interact with online stores through mobile apps, social media, chatbots, different digital channels, and a variety of devices — desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone. Therefore, the interface should work simultaneously across all devices and platforms.

In a conventional e-commerce store, if there is a need to apply some changes to the interface or design, the back-end part will have to be updated as well. This process is usually time-consuming and labor demanding. Let’s dwell on the broader differences between e-commerce and headless commerce in more detail — probably you will find your own reasons to switch from a traditional e-commerce store to a headless approach.

Headless Commerce vs Traditional Commerce

Initially, e-commerce was conceived as a ready-made platform for building online stores. Using such platforms entrepreneurs could build all necessary sales processes. Thus, e-commerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce included all the front-end features, presentation, and ready-made UI themes for your store as well as digitized back-end functionality, such as customer registration, login, order management, shipping.

Now, as e-commerce progresses, many businesses experience a lack of functionality for their online stores. The fact is that there is only a tiny room for personalization and customization using all-in-one solutions. As a result, businesses are tied to the functionality of the platform and are not able to create unique features to attract and retain their customers. Here is the milestone when the decoupling started and Headless e-commerce appeared.

Going headless, website admins can create, change content, and design without hurdles, and you will not need to add code to the back-end or hire a development team.

Thus, the business has many benefits — IT development costs are reduced, the marketing team can implement changes faster, and the business is not limited by the capabilities of the website. Here is a comparison of Traditional Commerce and Headless Commerce solution. I’ve highlighted eight main features:

Headless Commerce Benefits

Let’s focus on what exactly Headless Commerce benefits are.

Front-end Development

Website design is no longer limited by pre-defined themes provided by the platform you use. This way, designers, marketers, and front-end developers can create a unique customer experience and make your business stand out from the competition.

In traditional e-commerce platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce, developers don’t change the back-end part and, therefore, they’re limited with data. Also, Shopify uses Liquid templating, which helps to display all data. That’s why it’s needed to put additional efforts into transforming received data and displaying it.

Using the Headless approach developers aren’t tied to the front-end technologies of the platform. They can use such technologies as ReactJS, VueJS, or Angular. Moreover, you determine what data you need to receive on the front-end page through API. These technologies give engineers more flexibility in development and make front-end applications more dynamic.

Customization and Personalization

By using a conventional e-commerce approach, users, developers, and marketers may use only a limited number of themes. It makes the user experience standard and boring. With the best headless commerce approach, your website won’t be associated with the usual clichés used by the vast majority of retailers — it’s possible to create unique offers, visualization, and customer journey. It will encourage your website users to make a purchase and better fit their needs.

Omnichannel Presence

Shoppers want to purchase at any time, from any device, through any digital channel, or a chatbot. If a business doesn’t work with one of the sales channels, obviously it’s decreasing its conversions.

We provide access to the created content through the API to all consumers and across various channels: mobile apps, websites, chatbots. The headless approach offers a seamless user experience and omnichannel content publishing. Creating content in one place, CMS, we can use it everywhere.

Flexibility

Your tech team or even non-developers can apply necessary changes — new features, functionality, or integrations — to your website much faster. For example, when required, your team can create a new field for the Promo page. Any changes are easy to execute and add, no more editing of several layers of coding is needed to update e-commerce themes directly, as everything is applicable in the Headless CMS.

Scalability

The headless approach is entirely customizable, which makes it perfect for the businesses that are going to scale up. You can plan an important marketing campaign or introduction of a new product line without tech pains — putting energy and efforts into coding, optimization, and adaptation to various digital channels.

Development Speed

Using Headless CMS, we create a set of components that will be used on the front-end site and in any sales channel further. In this case, there is additional time spent on configuring the CMS. But in the long-term, you benefit from components already created, which can be easily extended when it’s needed. You don’t waste time making changes in the theme directly, as you can do it in the visual editor in the CMS. As a result, the speed of adding new content or changes to the website increases.

SEO Optimization

Site loading speed is crucial for better optimization of your website in search engines. Using the Headless Commerce Shopify approach it’s possible to fix store performance issues that cannot be solved that easily with a standard Shopify solution.

Besides, in Shopify, all URLs are in a specific format, which developers can’t moderate for better SEO optimization. Using the Headless method it’s possible to render URLs in a required format for search engines.

Cost Savings

It may seem that migrating to the headless solution can be quite expensive compared to conventional e-commerce solutions. However, you win in the long run. As soon as you switch to this solution, you can manage the changes on the site yourself, and your tech support costs will be halved since there will be no need to make changes in the back-end part. Instead, the front-end part can be easily managed by a non-developers team or partially by front-end developers.

To know more about Headless CMS — read our full article following the link https://bit.ly/3yyAKoS