Headless Commerce: The Future of Multi-Channel E-Commerce

Migrating from one platform to another can be a challenging process, but for brands wanting to transform digitally and have any chance of remaining a serious player in their competitive space, this transition is a question of when, not if. So, what are the key factors that you should consider before going headless?

First, review your business objectives, and assess how headless technology could deliver value for your business. A workshop with an experienced external partner may help here. There are, in fact, a few digital strategies where a traditional monolithic approach remains a serious option. So, it is important not to choose headless because it is the latest shiny technology toy.

Then, undertake a digital audit and discover what your brand’s greatest digital pain points are. You will need a dedicated replatforming team to help you achieve this, who can then undertake the necessary research and gap analysis to shape your goals and milestones.

Part of this process involves analysing the marketplace. There are several cloud-native headless solutions available from vendors available on a SaaS / PaaS model for each function of your digital estate. With your replatforming committee, you need to decide which solutions best accommodate your business’ needs.

In addition, many legacy solutions now position themselves as ‘headless solutions’, making the marketplace even more difficult to navigate. Seek the support of an external partner to help you with this process, who can help steer your transition across this new terrain. Remember, solutions that are truly headless usually offer their products in the form of ‘as-a-service’, meaning you receive structured account management and access their development team’s expertise.

The need for single-channel e-commerce software suites is over, and modern, multi-channel headless technology stacks, which Forrester and Gartner highly rate, are being widely adopted across the industry by forward-thinking brands; here’s why:

1. Better shopping experiences

It’s obvious that a mobile app shopping experience needs to be different from a website’s shopping experience, but it is often impossible to achieve different experiences with traditional eCommerce platforms. With headless architectures, you can design and build tailored front-end experiences based on the needs of your shoppers in each channel.

2. Reduced administration

Merchandising teams will be more productive because they no longer need to enter the same data in multiple systems just to list the same products in every channel.

3. Consistent data

Your product data and content will always be consistent across every channel because it will be managed and distributed from one place.

4. Hyper-fast front-ends

Because headless front-ends are decoupled from the back-end, they load faster and do not require high levels of server processing power to compile the front-end for users.

5. Faster innovation

Headless technologies are easier to work with, meaning you can increase the rate of development your teams can deliver. This is vital in keeping up with your competitors, responding to customer feedback and delivering business outcomes.

6. Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Headless eCommerce platforms are cloud-native, SaaS-based technologies. This means the vendor will be responsible for maintaining and upgrading your commerce platform as part of your subscription fee. This releases budget and resources that previously would have been ringfenced for keeping your platform online and up to date to be used for more innovative activities. It also means your hosting infrastructure can scale up and down automatically according to demand so that you are only paying for the levels of cloud services that you are consuming.

7. Happier business users

Business users want to be free to trade their eCommerce channels without a dependency on development teams. But many traditional eCommerce solutions cannot support this independence or meet the expectations of the business without significant customisation. And the more you customise a platform, the harder it is to maintain or customise in the future.

In a recent market survey by commercetools, more than two-thirds of respondents (68%) said it takes their company three months or longer to take new commerce solutions to market, and half of the respondents (50%) reported that their organisation’s technologies had limited their ability to innovate as quickly as needed.

Modern, headless technologies are built to fully enable business users with their powerful back-office tooling and featured rich APIs, meaning they can manipulate front-end experiences with greater independence than ever before. And when they do need developer support, the speed of delivery is much faster because the development only happens in the front-end, without impacting any back-end system.