Understanding Headless eCommerce

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When eCommerce was first developed, there was no such thing as separating the customer experience from the design of that experience; they were intimately related. If there was a change to how the information was presented or how the user interacted with the site, that could not be updated without the customer noticing and often required really dramatic shifts.

But with the advance of technology, that’s changed. Now the two sides of the e-commerce coin can be updated and used without affecting each other, thanks to what’s known as headless commerce. It’s simply separating the back end—the ordering, payment, and systems—from the front end, where the consumer decides what they want and interacts with the site to get it. However, just because updates can happen without a web of changes doesn’t mean the two aren’t hooked together. What does that look like? This graphic offers some insights.

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The Benefits of Headless Commerce for Your Customers and Your Company

Via Salesforce

Headless eCommerce benefits brands and retailers

The early adopters of headless commerce are bigger enterprises with larger development and IT resources. Indeed, the custom programming required to reliably produce and build a separate front end and back end can take a major investment of development hours. However, after the coding is finished, brands reap the benefits.

Generally, headless commerce’s best candidates are enterprises or companies with a muscular IT department and a build-it-here attitude. These businesses often have months-long development queues and ambitious creative and marketing teams eager to rapidly test new designs, copy, and templates on the front end.

For brands that switch to headless commerce, the company’s four biggest benefits tend to be worth the effort.

  1. Better employee adoption. Most employees without a technical background can be reluctant to use new technologies due to steep learning curves. The simplicity of headless commerce solves this problem since all team members can easily access and update the front end without advanced technical skills. As such, many employees will take advantage of headless to ultimately improve the user experience.
  2. Consistency across channels. Traditionally, eCommerce website changes are routed through the IT team. Users of headless commerce can skip that step and deploy their own changes independently and absent developers. Since non-developers can commit changes to the front end without submitting tickets to the IT team, updates can be made simultaneously across multiple channels, reflecting one consistent voice and message.
  3. Bespoke experiences. Personalize the customer experience on a greater scale. Headless commerce gives companies the power to deliver bespoke experiences by channel tailored to use cases.
  4. Increased audience and revenue. Headless commerce can help brands increase their digital presence as they get their brand and products on as many digital properties as possible. This increases awareness and helps brands sell more.

These are reasons why teams may want to transition from traditional to headless eCommerce. Simultaneously, retailers interested in improving their user experience should also know how headless can help them deliver even better customer satisfaction rates.

Understanding Headless eCommerce

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