Headless Commerce, the Future of E-Commerce: The Key Benefits.
E-Commerce platforms are supposed to be intuitive, attractive, and easy to navigate for a seamless user experience. As we got used to several industry ‘standards’ designed with a desktop computer shopper in mind, new devices started to pop-up in recent years. Technologies like Amazon Echo, Google Home, Dash buttons, and even smartwatches open new ways for buyers to make purchases online. All thanks to the emergence of headless commerce platforms.
With e-commerce going mobile, consumers are increasingly purchasing goods through their smartphones. According to Statista, approximately half of all e-commerce transactions in the US currently occur on a mobile device, and mobile is forecasted to surpass desktop in 2021. What’s even more, the recent events surrounding the global outbreak of COVID-19 have caused a massive surge in e-commerce activity and a new wave of Direct to Consumer brands.
However, these brands struggle with website performance and creating unique e-commerce experiences. This area is where headless architecture and progressive web application technology come in. This new technology offers the increased flexibility and optimized site speed that a mobile audience expects. As e-commerce becomes increasingly mobile, merchants find the crucial benefits of headless commerce to adapt to this new paradigm.
What are the benefits of Headless commerce?
Headless commerce is a new way to refocus platforms as a collection of digital services supporting business, rather than a specific solution for web e-commerce. The headless architecture approach separates the front-end layer and the back-end layer, leaving more room for flexibility. As a result, it's possible to get limitless customizations and more freedom for growth. Headless commerce allows businesses to think beyond the simple storefront, shopping cart, and checkout. It makes things a step further with highly customized and seamless purchase journeys, innovative fulfillment options, assisted sales alternatives, integrated microservices, PIM systems, individual corporate account ordering experiences, and much more.
When exploring headless commerce, businesses realize the following benefits of this type of platform:
A Highly Customized Experience
Headless commerce allows for your front end experience to be separate from your back-end architecture. This feature makes it easier, cheaper, and less risky to make changes to the front end experience without disrupting the underlying infrastructure and architecture. Amazon, the most well-known headless commerce platform, pushes updates every 11.7 seconds on average while Netflix, another headless commerce platform, deploys code thousands of times each day.
Consumers love both brands for the highly personalized experience targeted at their specific needs, purchase history, and interests.
Improving Time to Value
Custom software always requires a significant investment in time, money, and resources to develop comprehensive business logic and back end services. But a headless commerce platform like Four51 OrderCloud, lets businesses start from the point of completion, allowing them to focus on the user experience and deliver a final solution for far less cost, time, and effort.
Faster Integrations
The integration approach of headless commerce allows for the connecting and exposing of assets via API. APIs allow software platforms to communicate with each other more easily. It fosters seamless connections and transfers of data. This level of flexibility removes constraints and broadens possibilities of the data model uses. In a way, headless commerce even encourages integrations. It allows brands to assemble a customized, tightly integrated experience with the fastest time to value.
These are just a few of the many ways headless commerce truly supports omnichannel experiences that cater to every user type. A headless commerce system can support the changing technology needs of businesses as and when they arise. This feature is perfect when you design for new customer experiences; it also puts marketing teams back in the driving seat to roll out multiple sites across different brands, divisions, and portfolios.
Having the option of deploying rapid updates without impacting your back-end system gives you real flexibility. And any changes to your front-end can easily match the speed of consumer technology.
Conclusion
Headless commerce's main objective is to offer a seamless user experience across channels, making omnichannel retail possible.
A headless commerce solution solves many problems equipping businesses with the tools to keep up with IoT devices' continually evolving landscape.
By doing something as simple as separating back-end and front-end e-commerce platforms, we see an ease-of-use similar to the traditional commerce system, but with the flexibility of a headless system, making headless commerce the best of both worlds.
