Headless Commerce: Everything You Should Know About the New Way to Sell Online

As Robert C. Gallagher famously said, “Change is inevitable—except from a vending machine.” Market players who wish to expand into ecommerce must embrace change on all levels. 

Judging by Amazon, eBay, and Netflix, agility has become the Holy Grail of ecommerce. These online-selling giants update their apps up to a few thousand times a day to continuously improve the experience for consumers who use a variety of touchpoints for making purchases (e.g., a web browser, mobile apps, IoT devices). Progressive digital retailers look up to them when crafting their strategies for ecommerce development, headless ecommerce including, to respond to consumers’ demand.

Until recently, closely-coupled presentation and functional layers used to be a prevalent trend in ecommerce platforms. Dedicated all-in-one solutions were seen as more robust, delivering uniform user experience. While this remains true to this day, with time ecommerce companies began to spot an increasing number of inefficiencies of legacy monolithic platforms. Vendor lock-in aside, bulging full-stack solutions led to the accumulation of maintenance costs, update hiccups, and maintenance issues. Customization became overly complex, and response to new market demands sluggish.

Additionally, once new consumer touchpoints appeared, those cumbersome all-in-one platforms started calling for costly rearchitecting to support every customer interaction channel, which proved inadequate to ensure truly streamlined omnichannel user experience.

Instead of coupling the backend and frontend layers like legacy ecommerce platforms do, headless commerce abstracts those and makes use of APIs to enable communication. Such architectural approach leads to a series of business implications and gives headless CMSs a considerable advantage over conventional solutions. The most important of these implications are listed below.

Most ecommerce websites still use custom CMSs with predefined Picsart templates, proprietary tooling, and platform-specific coding languages and frameworks. This approach imposes considerable constraints on designers and developers who should plan and implement features with platform limitations in mind.

Legacy solutions also require maintenance of massive databases and sophisticated code, which further impacts the speed of new features delivery. Each update, regardless of how small, necessitates complex changes at multiple levels, which may further slow down the DevOps cycle. All of these factors negatively affect product innovation.

With headless ecommerce, frontend developers enjoy a greater freedom. Their code is disconnected from the backend and does not affect the database structure, allowing for unlimited modifications that can be made quickly and without the need for adjusting the whole system.

Such software development autonomy ignites creativity and allows software teams to create user experiences from scratch, with no forced restrictions. Additionally, as complex layering and code dependencies don’t hinder frontend developers, they can start working on further iterations immediately after implementing a feature, bringing advanced products and features to life on the fly.

Ecommerce sellers who come unprepared to handle peak-season traffic may have to face organizational chaos and a massive PR crisis, which is bound to affect their revenues.

Such was the case for a popular fashion retailer, J.Crew. Last year on Black Friday, the company suffered a loss of $775,000 in sales as their website failed to handle the abnormally high traffic. Another well-known retailer, John Lewis, struggled with similar issues when its website crashed overwhelmed by the traffic surge. Amazon, Walmart, and Apple were all affected by high-season outages in the past and had to cope with the customer backlash that followed. 

Ecommerce platforms should be able to scale instantaneously to prevent bursting during traffic spikes, yet the above stories show that even the greatest market players grapple with stable website performance at high season.

A modular, microservices-based headless architecture may greatly benefit digital retailers with its dynamic scaling abilities and help them ensure uninterrupted and flawless services even when traffic surges. Headless makes it easy to add more bandwidth to carts and payment systems during peaks while presenting the opportunity to reduce capacities at low season.

Without a doubt, personalization is a top priority for today’s marketers across all industries. According to the 2018 survey from Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences.

Legacy platforms usually come with a set of predefined user experience components, such as interface layouts, banner templates, subscription forms, and product selection tools. Even though some systems offer feature-rich, extensive UX design libraries, creating highly unique user experiences can be still ineffective as these platforms allow little room for customization. On top of that, by default, they usually deliver content to one or two communication channels only (typically, a web store and a mobile app), which can create an error-ridden experience for users on other platforms.

Headless systems lift these constraints for developers, allowing them to design and manage user experiences with total freedom. By creating multiple frontends attached to a single backend, they can support an unlimited number of screens and devices, building a webshop dashboard with a completely different layout from the one displayed in a mobile app or a smartwatch interface. This flexibility leads to better customer engagement and facilitates interaction with a brand.

Customer needs evolve at great speed. Companies such as Netflix and Amazon push thousands of updates daily to respond to these needs as they appear. They can only do so thanks to their flexible and dynamic technologies.

Detaching the frontend from the backend opens up new ways for experimentation. Once a headless ecommerce platform is in place, it becomes easily replicable. As changes in the backend don’t affect the presentation layer, new personalization features can be tested safely, without disrupting the experience on the user’s end on any platform.

The headless capability to run experiments without interrupting user experience allows retailers to respond to the market demand almost immediately. For example, marketing teams can set up new sites within days as opposed to months when covering new geographies. With headless ecommerce, the time needed to roll out an online store for a new location can be greatly reduced as compared to traditional monolithic systems.

Finally, one of the greatest benefits of headless ecommerce is enhanced security. There are a few inherent qualities of headless architecture that make it much more resilient to cyber threats than coupled software.

First of all, having one uniform data structure instead of a gigantic multi-headed monolithic behemoth makes headless CMSs much easier to monitor and control, which decreases the risk of a critical failure. In traditional all-in-one systems, all components and functions are packed together, leading to a situation where a small change in one component may impact the entire system’s security and performance.

Secondly, thanks to the layer abstraction, the CMS functionality can be hidden under one or more layers of code instead of being directly exposed, as it happens with conventional CMSs.

What’s more, APIs used to provide content to a headless CMS come mostly in the read-only mode, which further reduces the risk of cyber attacks.

Finally, as the system is decoupled, temporary issues with one of the components won’t compromise the continuity of the web store, and can usually be resolved in the background.