Last updated - July 11, 2022
The appearance of IoT expanded the number of channels where people search for the required products, forcing many eCommerce organizations to learn how to execute new, faster, and more productive solutions. In this way, the eCommerce landscape tends to headless solutions, especially among mature brands.
Let’s find out more about headless eCommerce and its main advantages, and discuss business cases when you should consider implementing it.
Headless eCommerce defined
When defining headless eCommerce, the latter stands for a solution where the frontend (head) functionality is detached from the backend.
Everything related to the frontend – digital marketplaces, user interface, and more – can be easily amended without intervention with the backend. Such eCommerce functionality brings in more flexibility, allowing brands to improve the consumer experience, customize certain features, and change platform functionalities.
Headless commerce makes it possible for companies to separate frontend apps with the help of eCommerce APIs and work with the backend processes in the background. These systems operate by exchanging requests between two layers, utilizing API interactions.
For instance, when the consumer presses “Complete Purchase” on their mobile device, the presentation layer then sends a call to another application level for order processing. The application layer, later on, forwards a call back for the presentation level to show consumers the current status of their order. And these layers aren’t a part of a closed system but two connected subsystems.
Advantages of headless eCommerce
When eCommerce just started, all the consumer traffic came from desktop systems, which were of a traditional design (front and backend were combined). The biggest issue was to amend the presentation and ensure it worked well on different browsers.
Nowadays, there are far more devices to work with, more information transmitted, and way too many channels where the data is distributed. New challenges, as you might have guessed, have also evolved.
Headless eCommerce makes it possible for the brands to keep all their backend-related systems, like CMS, CRM, payment processes, and product inventory, separate from one another, bringing in apparent benefits for the business. Same as eCommerce KPIs help monitor and improve the business processes, headless solutions make it possible for the companies to change and adhere to the current trends in the field.
For now, there are five apparent benefits of headless eCommerce for mature brands:
It saves time
With headless eCommerce, you can easily update your website within a matter of minutes, giving no impact on the backend. Those times when companies with upcoming updates might affect the full functionality of their online store have ended.
Take Amazon as an example. The company is updating its website not every week or day but a period of seconds, making it possible to minimize outages. Another example is Sky Italia. The company uses a headless eCommerce approach and can accept 150 million visitors per month without speed and functionality issues.
With headless solutions, you can save time on maintaining your website and keep its performance at a high level. And this is what customers need: we all value time and don’t like to wait when we’re ready to spend money.
It improves customer experience
While traditional eCommerce systems define the appropriate consumer experience on the website, brands can come up with a unique experience totally from scratch with headless eCommerce platforms.
With headless architecture, developers have way more flexibility over the platform, how it looks and feels for visitors, and can customize the given experience for both consumers and platform admins. It opens you to a field for experimentation to improve customer experience. You can implement all the changes on a website like integrating a chatbot, adding new landing pages, conversion elements, or experiments with CTAs quickly and smoothly.
With consumer needs changing super fast, it is vital to adapt and deliver consistency no matter what. According to recent research, 73% of people consider consumer experience one of the most notable factors for making a purchase.
Using headless eCommerce, you can leverage the backend information about visitors and consumer purchase behavior to deliver a unique shopping experience for improved engagement and sales.
It impacts logistics
Even for a small business, delivery and supply chain management can be a challenge that significantly affects customer experience and brand reputation. Needless to say, how mature brands can suffer from gaps in logistics.
Statistically, 8 out of 10 eCommerce businesses with well-performing, flexible, and transparent supply chain management achieve more significant growth and revenue results than companies that don’t prioritize logistics.
Headless solutions allow you to improve the logistics processes of your company:
- better inventory management
- transparent relationships with suppliers
- effortless cross-border delivery
- quality warehouse picking/packing
- shipping monitoring
- dedicated support
Using a third-party logistics company, you can add stability to delivery, minimize unpleasant customer experiences, and keep your inventory clean.
It can save costs
Headless eCommerce can help to set a cost-saving approach within your business.
- You can save costs on advertising. Brands spend fortunes on consumer acquisition, the cost of which continues to rise as many companies are still relying on paid advertising. Headless eCommerce is a way to reduce advertising costs and focus on other inbound marketing strategies. For instance, having a quick website that performs well, you can leverage content marketing and consider implementing conversion experiments on the website.
- You can save costs on development. By customizing website elements and swiftly reacting to current trends, companies can also cut regular expenses apart from saving quite a lot of time. As the front end works independently from the back end, all the costs related to development will not be as high as before.
- You can save operating costs. You can also reduce operating costs and save on licensing, hosting, website maintenance, supply chain, inventory, etc. You won’t need a dedicated team of employees for some activities since many operational processes are done on the contractors’ side and your services.
It gives flexibility in tool selection
With headless eCommerce, you can choose the platform that best fits the business needs while working with the preferred frontend system, PWA, CMS, or any other one.
Besides being API-driven, headless eCommerce solutions can be integrated with either new or existing functionalities, like in-house CRM or CMS. Integration with an API enables secure and fast data transfer and does not require regular updates.
Such flexibility makes it easier for the development team to work with the preferred framework or technology and, at the same time, streamline many processes in the product development lifecycle and make them far more efficient.
The same relates to vendor selection. You have the flexibility to choose marketing consultants, analysts, supply chain management companies, delivery services, and more. You can choose the best fit following your budget, business goals, and company culture.
It impacts your marketing performance
Brands need to ensure omnichannel coverage to succeed in today’s fast-growing digital environment. There is no time (and no sense) for slow marketing.
Headless eCommerce makes it possible for companies to significantly add speed to a brand’s marketing performance when it expands to other markets or new channels. We outlined the related benefits above. Once again, headless eCommerce gives you the flexibility to experiment with digital marketing approaches and brand promotions.
With headless solutions, it’s easier and faster to enter any existing or soon-to-emerge marketing channels and marketplaces. Additionally, it’s more convenient for data analytics. Thanks to an integration-friendly environment, you can set up Salesforce integration or integration with any other marketing tool to get data for further analysis and marketing improvements.
When should I consider using headless eCommerce?
Many established businesses still go with traditional eCommerce platforms, trying to fight the existing performance gaps related to conversions, competition, customer experience, etc.
A solution to fill the gap is headless eCommerce. As a matured eCommerce brand, let’s explore three signs for you to consider headless eCommerce.
You want to improve your marketing efforts
The current marketing model is driven by attracting visitors with relevant and valuable content – be it a blog post or product review. Don’t underestimate the power of content. To thrive, you need to learn how to boost this strategy.
If you feel stuck with marketing approaches, particularly content production and distribution, headless eCommerce may be a solution.
Thanks to the system’s flexibility, you can update your website without performance issues. Marketing campaigns and testing of approaches can be launched faster, allowing you to get new consumers on board and start receiving more revenue.
Headless eCommerce’s flexibility may motivate you to experiment with a division. For example, you can easily create a set of landing pages, subdomains, or even a website for a particular product. Such segmentation may help you improve marketing efforts for a subdomain/product website, positively impacting the main website.
You go global
If you decide to go international, headless eCommerce is for you.
Brands striving to enter global markets usually struggle with delivering products and supply chains. Customers may turn to eCommerce giants or local businesses based on the quickness and convenience of their orders to be processed. This is a big challenge.
As we outlined before, the headless approach can leverage supply chain management. Choosing a logistics company with warehouses, quality support, and local shipping partners is how to enter new markets effortlessly. Moreover, inventory and delivery quality won’t suffer.
Another challenge that companies will probably face when going global is local specifics to market the company. You need to meet with patterns of local customer behavior and ways to communicate with them.
Depending on the location, consumer needs and behavior will change. Hence, the brand’s communication will need to match the targeted markets and audience.
The power of headless eCommerce allows you:
- to enter new markets effortlessly
- to implement a multi-language website
- to leverage on local-based offers
- to better understand customer behavior per location
For a perfect outcome, you need to make sure the messaging is not just translated but adapted to a specific audience in the country you are expanding to. This enhances the experience and enables better conversion.
You need stability and flexibility
Do you struggle with website maintenance, slow speed of shipping, or inventory issues? Are you trapped in one technology or have limited capacities and human resources? Headless eCommerce will help.
Being fast, flexible, and easily adaptable is vital in modern digital reality; headless eCommerce offers numerous customization functions any time they are required. Developers can either make massive changes or add one feature to the site. Brands can set up stable shipping and payment options and be sure to perform well.
This helps brands save time, resources and remain highly competitive. Since the current market is volatile, flexibility is an answer to all the market changes you experience. The transformation and reorganization can be smoother with the abilities that headless solutions have.
What are the problems with traditional eCommerce?
Shopping is no longer happening just on the brands’ websites. From communication platforms to mobile and progressive web applications, eCommerce should now adapt to many touchpoints to withstand the competition. Business owners have to face the reality of covering several channels simultaneously to address the constantly evolving consumer needs and learn how to conduct them as quickly as possible.
While being still massively used across several different industries, traditional systems have a set of limitations:
Limited technological solutions
With traditional eCommerce, a technical side is based on a built-in framework with its toolsets, which implies limitations to scaling and integrating with other technologies. The built-in framework can prevent admins/developers from changing layout, optimizing delivery, and adding new functionalities.
To interface with external solutions, developers need setups and customized solutions. Usually, APIs allow to do it, and traditional approaches may have issues.
Limited brand positioning
Traditional eCommerce systems are limited in the set of templates, layouts, visual representations of websites/brands, etc. Meanwhile, brand awareness means much now. To position your brand correctly, you need to nurture and represent your brand’s identity, except for marketing and promotion efforts. It’s not impossible to do so with traditional solutions, but headless eCommerce provides the space to build brand identities qualitatively and quickly.
Limited change-friendliness
There are low chances to make specific changes in one without altering another in traditional architecture. It relates to websites, payment and shipping flows, and technological solutions. Changing a set of tools can be time-consuming and even dangerous – the entire system may fail, and the business performance may decrease.
As you already know, headless eCommerce provides stability and flexibility. Your customers will get their orders on time, and your analytics won’t break, website performance issues can be fixed quickly, etc. And this is critical, especially for established brands that seek changes and want to grow.
Wrap up
Headless eCommerce is a lifesaver for faster adaptation, reduced costs, successful global expansion, and higher revenue.
It makes it easier to edit frontend data, improve marketing efforts, optimize operation processes, and establish quality supply chain management. All these positively impact your customers, bring new people to your brand, and give an area for growth.
