Top 3 Reasons Why You Should Consider a Shopify Headless CMS

In this article, we explain what the Shopify Headless CMS is. Here you will find out if Shopify Headless approach works for you and how you can benefit from it.

E-commerce with a headless CMS approach is a “multi-channel strategy” that places goods on a customer-friendly platform. Choosing the right platform for development can increase your sales growth across all e-commerce channels. In the article, you will find a comparative description of the headless and traditional approach to content management, the technical and economic advantages of the headless Shopify approach.

What Is a Headless CMS?

In web development, a “head” means the front-end part — the interface of the system. Headless CMS is a type of content management system that was initially designed without a frontend, but only with API — programming interfaces for interacting with external applications and services.

Such a system can work simultaneously with several distribution channels and doesn’t link it to a specific output. You will be able to manage the content virtually and centrally from anywhere.

Thanks to the headless architecture, many business tasks can be delegated to independent software products. Thus, one part of the software is used to operate the front-end part, it also refers to all those functions that are not directly related to the creation of content and its management, and the back-end part is used to work with the functionality.

Let’s analyze how headless commerce works using the example of an online store made under the Shopify Headless Approach.

The Difference Between Shopify Headless CMS and Traditional CMS

Now merchants have great options to build their e-commerce business. Using all-in-one platforms like Shopify allows entrepreneurs to set all necessary sales processes — ready-made UI themes, registrations, login, checkouts, shipping. Everything is there for business needs.

Once your business has grown and you are looking for options of how to scale it — headless CMS is one of the game-changing decisions. It is the headless e-commerce Shopify approach that will give your business the flexibility and a huge amount of tools to reach as large an audience as possible and build relationships with them. Traditional e-commerce solutions cannot boast of such capabilities.

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. If you’re curious about the difference between Headless Commerce and Traditional Commerce, read our recent Shopify headless commerce guide, where we compare these two solutions.

Decoupling front-end and back-end parts allow you to implement site updates without having to dig into the back-end part of your e-commerce platform. This way you can shorten development time and focus your energies on serving customers across different sales channels. The simplest example is publishing new content to your site, but you do this through headless CMS, not the e-commerce platform back-end.

How To Decide if Shopify Headless Approach Works for You?

The decision to switch to headless CMS is a strategic business decision. For example, you develop your business on the e-commerce platform, but now you feel that the platform functionality is too limited for your needs. At the same time, you do not want to absolutely start from scratch and change the platform. In this case, the Shopify Headless CMS is the right choice.

Let’s consider a few factors that will help you to understand whether to consider a Shopify headless CMS. There could be several reasons for switching to a headless solution, they are:

• Shopify themes can’t be customized as needed or it takes many hours of development and we always need to come up with custom solutions;
• New sales channels such as social media, mobile apps, smartwatches are difficult to set up;
• Storefront takes too long to load as the e-commerce platform contains limited optimization settings. Users do not wait for the download and leave the page;
• Competitors are more active in the market and offer more personalized offers across different sales channels;
• It’s difficult to add new tools to the site architecture, it slows down the work of the team.

If you recognize yourself in at least one of these points, then you should read this article further and finally decide to implement a headless CMS in your Shopify store.

The second important factor is price. Headless architecture development is pricey at first sight. But in the long run — you win. 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-developer team or partially by front-end developers.

But before investing in an entire website, you can do a test and build a small headless website section, for example, the landing page.

More about Benefits of Shopify Headless Approach in our full article: https://bit.ly/3AbgYSA