Introduction
A revolution is taking place in the world of e-commerce. This revolution is marked by the explosion of mobile commerce, social commerce, web 3.0, and others. The customer experience should be smooth across all these marked multiple channels and touchpoints, including smartphones, IoT, and Progressive Web Apps. In this context, e-commerce companies must give clients an integrated and personalised buying experience. To provide such a seamless experience to customers, headless commerce can be one of the potential solutions. As the e-commerce industry evolves rapidly, headless commerce is gaining popularity among startups.
Headless e-commerce represents a platform or solution that abstains from defining the perfect front-end view by simply not having one. This means that the front-end has been decoupled from the backend, and your solutions can be built without affecting your repository. Now, you are free to develop any front-end experience you want to and can add all kinds of complex e-commerce functionality via a RESTful API. This makes the front-end solution more scalable and iterable, making it easy for developers to modify their front-end platform according to the needs of their customers.
In this article, we’ll examine the significant distinctions between traditional and headless commerce, the benefits that headless solutions provide companies, and how merchants are reaping the benefits of headless commerce.
How Does Headless Commerce Operate?
A headless e-commerce system, like a headless CMS, works by transmitting requests between the presentation and application levels using web services or application programming interface (API) calls.
For example, when a consumer hits a “Buy Now” button on their smartphone, the headless e-commerce system’s display layer sends an API request to the application layer to process the order. Another API request is sent to the application layer to show the customer the status of their order.
Traditional Ecommerce vs. Headless Commerce
In the early stages of website development for e-commerce, businesses applied a monolithic approach, where every part of the solution is deeply interconnected with each other. Though it is easy to work with while making the first release, such a platform or application has significant drawbacks, i.e. inflexible model, hard to delegate to new developers, etc. Furthermore, traditional e-commerce does not provide decoupling, implying that the user interface layer, i.e. front end code, is not isolated from the logic code, i.e. backend logic engine, resulting in unexpected constraints.
Headless e-commerce is a replacement for traditional e-commerce that can address these flaws. It allows for further personalization. In terms of programmability and maintenance, it is the most adaptable.
A website designed using headless commerce has a modular design framework that allows for more flexibility in the future. Traditional eCommerce, on the other hand, is more resistant to change.
In other terms, headless e-commerce is a software architectural style that permits decoupling, which is easier to maintain, scale and even iterate, based on feedback.
Benefits of Headless Commerce
Moving to headless commerce from traditional solutions can be of huge benefit to businesses. Some of the primary merits are listed below:
- Increased employee acceptance: Due to long learning curves, some businesses may be hesitant to adopt new technology. Because everyone on your team can simply access and update the front end without sophisticated knowledge, having a platform built with headless commerce overcomes this problem.
- The proper equipment for the work: Headless commerce provides relevant tools that allows easy management of their e-commerce solutions. Brands may use headless commerce to create unique experiences for their customers that they won’t find anywhere else. APIs are essential for ensuring coordinated, brand-consistent experiences across channels, which are powered by common commerce services like promotions, inventories, product information, and more.
- Time savings in the IT department: Developers save time on user interface modifications since updates to the front end may be implemented quickly. Additionally, with headless templates and partner solutions, developers can build MVPs for commerce projects with limited technical efforts.
- Lower turnaround time: Responding to customer feedback is easier with headless commerce. Businesses can swiftly develop new front-end experiences, or revamp the existing solutions with headless commerce. This is one of the most important factors to be considered by startups when choosing a technological solution.
Impact Of Headless Commerce On Customers
Growing entails swiftly adapting to meet new customer and social demands. Quick Start Commerce Solutions is allowing branded manufacturers to go direct-to-consumer for the first time. Other businesses are revamping their business strategies, such as Michaels, which has unveiled new fulfilment alternatives in a matter of weeks. Customers gain from headless applications and websites as they adopt new methods of communicating with companies in a post-COVID world.
When a company adds new material to its front end, the changes are virtually immediately reflected. Traditional commerce architecture sites, on the other hand, might take minutes, not hours, before all consumers can see a brand’s most recent design. With headless commerce, customers can get consistent experience across all their devices, which ensures familiarity and ease of usage. This increases customer satisfaction and reduces customer attrition on the platform.
Brands may get more creative with the material they publish on their websites to give experimental design now that they can manage all of the aspects visitors engage with more readily. Traditional e-commerce website managers, on the other hand, must care for responsive design to avoid items missing or showing wrongly on different devices. This ensures that businesses can release improved versions of their platform quickly, and customers are more satisfied. This creates a win-win situation for both customers and businesses.
Conclusion
Headless commerce provides significantly greater freedom in establishing, repairing, and maintaining a website than its traditional version. Headless commerce also enables easy centralised control of a website, as content and design can now be updated from a single location across all channels or devices. However, headless commerce may not always be an ideal solution for everyone, since its implementation may take more effort and money than needed. Startups should evaluate the need of such technology for their own solutions and plan accordingly.
