Learn how APIs and headless solutions work: sign up to our interactive webinar
Learn how to design a headless digital estate that generates ROI in months not years with the third and final webinar of our headless ecommerce professional development programme. We will be joined by our partner, Gradient Edge, to focus on headless ecommerce, enterprise architecture and the role of APIs in modern ecommerce.
Taking place on Wednesday 29 July from 11:00am to 12:00pm BST, ‘Understanding headless architecture’ will review the programme’s latest modules, talk through case studies, and give you the opportunity to engage with our panel of experts. Learn how to accelerate deployment timelines – bringing faster ROI – and create more powerful, revenue-generating digital experiences.
Learn professional skills through our expert-led webinar
Your webinar 3 team is:
- Tim McMillen, Director of Digital Delivery, Profound
- James Wiltshire, CTO, Gradient Edge
- Andy Hill, Digital Development Architect, Gradient Edge
As with our previous webinars, Tim will review the key lessons from modules 5 and 6, and you can ask questions in real-time. Using content management systems (CMSs) as a case study, module 5 introduces headless as a concept and explains how headless solutions work. Module 6 takes a more technical step, clarifying how application programming interfaces (APIs) function, the significance of their role in modern ecommerce, and how you can develop and consume APIs in your digital estate.
James will then take you through one of Gradient Edge and Profound’s most recent customer success stories, demonstrating how a headless strategy expedited the customer’s transition into continuous delivery.
Going headless gives your teams the freedom to innovate on multiple front-ends
Going headless is the implementation of a digital estate strategy that centres on decoupling your front and back-end. Watch our video here for a short introduction to this approach.
Adopting a headless approach is important because the pace and innovation of today’s markets dictate that brands become channel-agnostic. This means your digital presence must extend to every channel that customers interact with – i.e. the multichannel – meaning your teams are required to create optimised User Experiences that are moulded around your customers’ behaviours.
A monolithic approach means this standard of digital delivery is not easily achieved. However, going headless transforms this process, enhancing your brand’s ability to deliver innovation to these channels and exploit their micro-moments. By separating the codebase between your front and back-end, your teams have the freedom to optimise multichannel delivery. Then, you can test and learn on these channels and grow your revenue streams.
What role do APIs play in headless ecommerce?
APIs underpin headless ecommerce, enabling microservices to communicate with each other and deliver data and functionality to your front-ends. Crucially, the build and consumption of APIs prevents each microservice from accessing the internals of other microservices in your digital estate – they can only call on actions in other solutions through an aggregated API layer.
With APIs acting as the intermediaries between your front-ends and back-end solutions, you can make front-end changes without disrupting back-end architecture. This gives your teams the power to innovate and iterate on your front-ends much faster, providing your business with a more agile ecommerce platform that changes the way you can compete digitally.
It is worth noting that enterprise ecommerce platforms have multiple APIs for different needs and purposes. Each use case, therefore, alters how each API is modelled and developed. One of the most important questions for developers is whether they should adopt a REST or GraphQL data interchange specification. Both specifications have their pros and cons which impact different use cases, but GraphQL is the framework which is especially good at empowering front-end teams to optimise delivery to the ever-growing multichannel.
How our interactive sessions guide your headless ecommerce strategy
Our webinars provide you with the opportunity to engage with experts to discuss your digital challenges. Tim is a highly valued digital delivery and headless expert, and the team at Gradient Edge are renowned enterprise platform architects, so do not be afraid to leverage their expertise with questions that concern either business or technical users.
Remember, you can still enrol on our headless ecommerce programme. Modules 1 to 6 are available to download any time, meaning you can get up to speed before the webinar on Wednesday 29 July. And while this is the last webinar of the programme, you still have the opportunity to work through your headless ecommerce strategy at our masterclass event in London in October.