Headless eCommerce: fast API and scalable solutions
What is a Headless eCommerce?
A Headless eCommerce is a commerce management platform which provides a strict separation between the commerce functionalities (backend) and their presentation layer (frontend).
Headless solutions, both for eCommerce and content management systems, have gained popularity in recent years as a powerful approach to gain speed, flexibility and scalability.
Traditional eCommerce solutions usually provide a complete system capable of managing the entire commerce flow, from data management to the store presentation. This architecture, while providing some advantages, couples the presentation layer (usually a website) with the eCommerce logic and flow. The result of this coupling is a limited flexibility in providing a multi-channel experience.
In fact, modern eCommerce solutions require the capability to reach and engage customers on different channels and devices, like websites, mobile applications, voice assistants, social networks, and possibly many others in the future.
A Headless eCommerce, with its agnostic approach on how data will be used, is the perfect solution to provide a tailored multi-channel experience across different devices.
What are the main benefits of using a headless ecommerce?
Multi-channel commerce experience
Headless eCommerce solutions are designed to facilitate customer reach on multiple channels. Say you create a website which manages your commerce experience and in the future you decide to also add a native mobile application. Your backend architecture won’t need any particular change, since the commerce platform is independent from presentation, and you’ll be able to focus only on building the best experience for your user.
Speed, reliability and scalability
Headless systems, like commercetools, are generally cloud native solutions. They enable application developers to take advantage of their fast APIs to improve the speed of the commerce flow, resulting in a better and more effective experience for the end customer. Also, there’s no need to worry about maintaining a complex infrastructure, the provided system is already built to be reliable, scalable and resilient.
Better customer experience
The final user experience on the application can be tailored exactly to the company’s requirements, without constraints based on the chosen platform. Since the presentation layer is completely detached from the backend, it can be designed to achieve the best results. That’s a typical limitation of traditional eCommerce solutions.
Micro-service architecture
Headless CMSs are perfectly designed to fit in a micro-service architecture. A modular approach helps in building services tailored for customers, iterate quickly, and run new business models with a fast time to market.
Future proof
The digital market is evolving every year at a fast pace. Today you know which channels and experiences you want to tackle with your commerce system, but what about the future? For sure, new technologies, devices, channels will arise and provide new commerce opportunities. An Headless eCommerce will set you on the right spot for adapting to what the market will offer.
Headless eCommerce vs traditional eCommerce
Traditional eCommerce systems offer an all-around solution which provides the advantage to be quickly ready to be used if no particular requirements and customizations are needed in respect to the default solution. But in the majority of cases, the default eCommerce experience is not tailored to the requirements of a company, so that developers have to face all limitations of the system: design constraints, longer development cycles, coupled frontend and backend system with difficult customization.
Headless eCommerces are built from the ground up to overcome these limitations. Content and commerce actions are managed from applications via simple API calls, so that the frontend experience of your shop can be tailored exactly to your core business requirements. This provides a great flexibility in the management and evolution of your applications, whenever you’ll require the addition of a new service or the change of some flows, for example in your checkout process.
S’nce approach to Headless eCommerce
S’nce believes in the evolution of the commerce market towards API ecommerce platforms, and that’s how we are approaching new and modern projects with our clients.
We want to take full advantage of this architecture, providing our clients with the best eCommerce solutions available on the market, combining the eCommerce platform with other services capable of completing the commerce experience.
That’s why we decided to become partner with Commercetools, a cloud native ecommerce which has been recently named a Leader in 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce. Choosing Commercetools guarantees our projects with high availability, data security, fast and responsive APIs, automatic scaling and continuous updates.
Discover more about Commercetools
Why choose a Headless eCommerce?
There are many advantages to choosing a Headless eCommerce solution for your shop experience.
First, it enables creating a fully omnichannel commerce experience for your customers, with the ability to quickly iterate, change and add services thanks to its strong flexibility.
The separation between front and back end lets you quickly experiment and evolve the store experience, without interfering with backend operations. The end result is a multi-channel store that exactly reflects the core business requirements and the customer expectations, and it’s future proof for the market evolution.