The landscape of eCommerce continues to grow at an exponential rate. Merchants always have new, more advanced needs for their online stores. Luckily for them, the platforms and infrastructure are developing at an even faster pace.

The term “headless commerce” seems to be on the tips of everyone’s tongues nowadays. But what does it mean, and how can it beneficial for your business?

Consumer behaviour has now changed to a point where they demand complete control over when and how they purchase goods. People no longer want to go in-store or even on their desktops/laptops to make a purchase. People want to buy on the go using their mobile devices, voice-controlled devices, smart devices and wearables.

Along with consumer behaviour, we’ve seen the emergence of many techniques for building a digital store, with the latest being the headless approach. 

What is headless commerce?

The decoupling of the front end of your eCommerce experience from the backend, that’s what headless commerce is. – Don’t leave, we’ll explain!

That may sound like gibberish for a lot of people, so we’ll explain it in English. It separates your eCommerce platform, delivering it through an API which is fit for purpose. This gives you architectural flexibility and makes it easier for you to design the sales optimised system you want.

Separating the frontend (which you control) from the backend allows you to decouple development and solely focus on customer interaction without worrying about the impact on critical backend systems. It completely separates the presentation layer of your store from the business-critical processes like order and inventory management, payment processing, or shipping. 

A “head” serves as customer touch-points where transactions take place, or even the systems you need in place to help support employees like merchandisers, warehouse staff and customer service representatives. You can attach as many “heads” as you need.

The usefulness of headless commerce shines because you can add or swap out a “head” seamlessly without needing to change anything which would impact the backend. This is almost impossible to do with traditional platforms where the frontend and backend are heavily paired together.

Using some comprehensive APIs you’re able to take the design of your website, optimise it for mobile and sales, and then create a mobile app version with minimal effort.

Speed and Convenience

Headless commerce helps you move with speed and makes it simple and easy for you to make changes to the frontend without impacting the backend. This is because the frontend and backend are no longer so tightly connected. You’ll be able to make rapid changes. So when consumer technology and demands advance, you’ll be able to keep up without having to create an entirely new eCommerce platform.

This makes it a cost-effective solution because there’s less time spent overall migrating and upgrading the storefront architecture.

With platforms like Mobify and Appify, the learning curve is not complex. So developers will not have an issue with those APIs.

Branding

This solution makes it much easier to implement your branding onto an eCommerce store. There are minimal restrictions, so you and your designer will be able to build those creative visions and give your customers a custom experience and user journey.

Your eCommerce store will look more trustworthy and professional. You have to remember consumers probably visit 10-20 eCommerce websites per week. They’ll be able to tell if they’ve landed on a trustworthy and functional one, as soon as they come on to it. Branding a commerce platform could be the reason you finally capture all those potential leads you’ve been missing out on.

Mobify

We’ve mentioned Mobify briefly in this article, they’re a headless commerce solution who offers a lot of customisation and functionality. It’s a simple solution which allows you to implement a headless commerce structure, tweak, optimise and reduce operational risks with a proven enterprise infrastructure to host, integrate, secure and scale the storefront.

Brands such as Debenhams, Under Armour and Lancome, use Mobify as their headless commerce solution.

“With our old architecture, we were having to wait three or even six months to try something new or remove a pain point that might be stopping someone from purchasing – now we can do it in days and deploy in minutes.”

Jim Hingston
Head of Digital Product, Debenhams

Is headless commerce right for you?

If your eCommerce strategy is robust and you have a lot on your wish list, moving to a headless commerce solution is the right thing to do. You’ll be able to bring over your tailored user experience from your website and implement changes on the fly wherever and whenever you feel the need to. It allows you to scale your eCommerce storefront, in ways a traditional platform does not typically allow you to.

If you want to implement an eCommerce storefront which is easily accessible and customisable for your audience, get in touch with us and we’ll go through your options. Email us at hello@theiirthcompany.com and one of our team will get back to you shortly.