When companies think of digital transformation and migrating their commerce platform, many questions come to their mind. Which platform to choose? What do they need to achieve with their chosen platform? If their business is growing and expanding to new markets, would their chosen platform support this expansion? Would it have the capability of creating a seamless shopping experience for their customers? Does their chosen platform allow for innovation and creativity, scalability, and agility? What level of flexibility and customization does their business require? The most important question is, what is the smartest financial choice that best fits their business and technical needs. When headless commerce comes up as an option, businesses need to quantify the benefits they are looking to achieve from headless commerce to grow their business.
What is headless commerce?
Headless commerce is decoupling the front-end of a commerce platform from the back-end. The front-end is the user interface, this is what the customer interacts and engages with as text, images, and forms. It is typically referred to as the “head.” The back-end is where the logic behind this interface happens. This could be as loading product catalogs, placing orders, and storing customers’ information. It is referred to as the “body.” With headless, the key difference is that the head is separated from the body. There could be multiple heads and multiple bodies. When the head and the body are separate, they communicate to each other through application programming interfaces (APIs). So, APIs can push back-end information to any front-end device like a website, mobile app, smartphone, computer, or even digital sign, and voice assistant without updating the other.
The headless architecture is also made up of micro-services, which are individual functionalities that can be independently developed and deployed. APIs deploy these functionalities for new channels. This translates to a seamless omnichannel experience between different touchpoints, where customers can make purchases through many different touchpoints.
To simplify, the main distinguishing feature of headless is seperating the head, the front-end, from the body, and the back-end of the commerce platform, which increases flexibility and enables developers to develop new channels and additional touch-points. This provides endless opportunities to create customer experiences with the use of the right combination of micro-services.
“As a business owner, if you are thinking of digitalization and migrating your platform, then you should be looking for an agile, fast, scalable, customizable platform that allows for innovation. This is exactly what a headless commerce platform enables your business to do.”
DOMENICO D’AVIRRO
DIGICOMMERCE PRESIDENT & CEO
Here are some of the Key benefits of headless commerce to your business:
Flexibility:
The most important advantage of headless commerce is flexibility. It is characterized by a high level of flexibility which allows the front-end and the back-end to work independently. It is flexible enough to accommodate any business requirements. As explained, with headless architecture, you can seamlessly deploy fast any changes to front-end content on any touchpoint without changing the back-end. For example, if your customers are interested in a new social platform today, you can still be there too. The beauty of headless is that you can create a new experience via a mobile app or a chatbot without having to change the back-end. Micro-services provide you with the flexibility you need to pick and choose which commerce features your business requires.
Customization:
A fully integrated headless platform allows for a high degree of customization. Businesses can customize the look and feel of their customers’ experiences. Developers do not need to edit multiple layers of coding between the front and back end. It is easy to customize its architecture as per your business needs. For example, if you have a promotion to announce, you don’t have to run an update on every platform to publish this promo. Thus, developers can make rapid changes using APIs and microservices, which reduces complexity, and allows for these incremental changes to occur for different digital devices.
Scalability:
A headless platform is very scalable. A headless solution will scale your business as it grows. Whether you’re considering adding new product lines, selling via new touch-points, expanding into new markets, or even needing to scale fast for the holiday season, here is where a headless commerce platform comes into place. In a headless platform, once decoupling the front-end, your customer experience can scale independently of the back-end.
Speed – Fast time to the Market:
With headless commerce, your product information is located centrally. It can be pushed via APIs anywhere. APIs are simply how information is passed from one system to another. For example, If you have a product launch, a headless platform will reduce the time it takes to be visible in the market. With traditional architecture, it is much slower. When the front and back ends are coupled, it is not easy to move quickly. APIs help you make changes up to 4 times faster than on a monolithic platform.
“There are many benefits to implementing a headless commerce platform to your business.
Domenico D’Avirro
B2B Connect solution enables you to customize your front-end customer journey for your headless commerce easily.”
DIGICOMMERCE President & CEO
for a Headless Commerce Platform.
True Omnichannel experience:
Headless commerce can easily facilitate the multi-channel experience. Your business can easily join up mobile apps to voice-activated devices, smartphones, or in-store touchpoints. With the traditional monolithic commerce platforms, you cannot achieve this. Their architecture is not set up to take advantage of multi-channel, like encompassing social media, marketplaces, mobile apps, podcasts, chatbots, and in-store sensors. Omnichannel today is not just about delivery or buying online, or pick-up in-store. But it also includes augmented reality apps and customization engines. Retailers today have embraced an omnichannel approach to meet their consumers’ buying behavior.
Personalization:
A headless architecture allows you to meet business and future needs. You can respond to market trends and personalize your messages according to your specific customers’ search behaviors. When customers find what they need, conversion rates soar. Delivering more relevant results based on customer search behavior, along with some recommendations, directly improves conversion. One of the key advantages of adopting headless commerce is to create personalized experiences for your customers that best fit their shopping dynamics behavior. Businesses can test the market with different innovative personalized strategies for their customers without disrupting the back-end. That is the beauty of headless architecture. Simply, headless commerce provides the freedom to create a personalized shopping experience for your customers.
Allows Innovation:
With a headless structure, it is a lot easier to innovate and be creative when you have a headless commerce platform. Since the front-end is separate from the back-end, you can easily innovate, With an agile headless commerce platform, you can develop and test new customer experiences in a matter of weeks or even days. For example, adding a product catalog without bringing down the site. Simply, headless allows for these dynamic changes using API micro-services. So this enables your marketing team to innovate and create unique experiences for your customers.
Long-term cost savings:
Adopting headless commerce might be costly in the short term, but it is justifiable for the long term. It can be cost-efficient for your business growth. Going headless allows you to lower your total cost of ownership. Not only that, but a headless platform lowers operational costs, in the long run, providing a better value than traditional commerce. API’s micro-services reduce software complexity and allow for incremental changes to happen in less time.
Also, due to its highly customizable architecture capability, you have the privilege to pick and choose and prioritize the features you need most and implement them as per your business needs. So, this as well saves on budget. Most important, it allows you to focus more on your business growth.
Is it time to “future-proof” your commerce platform? Implementing headless commerce allows your business to achieve this. Curious about how and where to start? DigiCommerce can help you avoid complex implementation and can have you quickly deployed with your preferred headless solution.
