Head­less eCom­merce: sounds bad but it’s good

A great solu­tion with a weird name

Noth­ing to do with play­ing French Rev­o­lu­tion. Head­less com­merce is a new approach to eCom­merce archi­tec­ture that sep­a­rates the cus­tomer-fac­ing front-end (or ​“head”) from the back-end sys­tems that man­age prod­ucts, orders, and oth­er busi­ness process­es. A new approach com­pared to what, you may ask. Excel­lent ques­tion. Let’s go back a bit.

Tra­di­tion­al eCom­merce archi­tec­ture was con­ceived as a solu­tion to allow peo­ple to buy from their desk­tops. One sin­gle thing, one sin­gle solu­tion. One sin­gle sys­tem using one spe­cif­ic tech­nol­o­gy stack. Mono­lith, lega­cy plat­forms, tight­ly inte­grat­ed all process­es and com­po­nents; stock and order man­age­ment, prod­uct pages, blogs, carts and check­outs, all in one frame­work. Smart, right? 

But then we got smart­phones and tablets. And we want­ed to inter­act with prod­ucts, ser­vices and enter­tain­ment through phones and tablets too. With that, came apps and all sorts of things that need APIs to allow for that to hap­pen. And chan­nels, and social com­merce, and mar­ket­places. You get it. And then the once great solu­tion became a problem.

Mono­liths can­not pro­vide the agili­ty this requires. In tra­di­tion­al ecom­merce archi­tec­ture, adapt­ing to new and emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies and chan­nels can be a chal­lenge, to say the least. Who doesn’t need flex­i­bil­i­ty and agili­ty to adapt these days?

Because tra­di­tion­al con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems were not set up to take advan­tage of omnichan­nel, they have locked in devel­op­ers to using pre­ferred back and front-end sys­tems togeth­er. By sep­a­rat­ing the front-end from the back-end sys­tems, busi­ness­es can more eas­i­ly cus­tomize their cus­tomer expe­ri­ences and adapt to chang­ing mar­ket con­di­tions. Head­less allows busi­ness­es to add new touch­points and tech­nolo­gies with­out hav­ing to over­haul their entire eCom­merce sys­tem. Smarter, right? 

Quite the oppo­site of los­ing your head, head­less eCom­merce means more, inde­pen­dent ​“heads” allow­ing for more flex­i­bil­i­ty and per­son­al­iza­tion. Per­haps they should have called it Medusa eCommerce.

How does that even work?

Tra­di­tion­al sys­tems have worked well for years now, but the tech and the cus­tomer land­scape has evolved rapid­ly. Busi­ness­es need to take a new approach to con­tent man­age­ment. This is where head­less comes in.

Mark Howes, Sales Direc­tor, EMEA, BigCommerce.

OK, so the front-end, the cus­tomer-fac­ing part of the ecom­merce sys­tem, is decou­pled from the back-end sys­tems, which are respon­si­ble for man­ag­ing prod­ucts, orders, and oth­er busi­ness process­es. In oth­er words, con­tent about prod­ucts and ser­vices is stored and admin­is­tered in the back-end, and then pre­sent­ed in the front-end. How do they con­nect? Through APIs.

APIs play a cru­cial role in head­less com­merce by enabling the dis­play of con­tent using any front-end tech­nol­o­gy, whether it’s a brows­er, mobile app, or even a chat­bot. This means the con­tent in the CMS is no longer tied to a spe­cif­ic tem­plate or deliv­ery lay­er. Instead, it can be sent to any chan­nel or device.

Devel­op­ers can lever­age APIs to build cus­tom inte­gra­tions between dif­fer­ent sys­tems and tech­nolo­gies, allow­ing brands to push con­tent to dif­fer­ent plat­forms seam­less­ly. This flex­i­bil­i­ty in con­tent deliv­ery is one of the key advan­tages of head­less com­merce. And that’s where com­pos­abil­i­ty comes into play.

Com­pos­abil­i­ty: Back to The Prequel

Coined in a 2020 report by Gart­ner, com­pos­able com­merce refers to a mod­u­lar dig­i­tal com­merce approach that allows busi­ness­es to cus­tomize ‑or com­pose- their tech stacks by choos­ing best-in-breed solu­tions to suit their unique busi­ness require­ments. Like with music. Or with Legos.

Inter­est­ing­ly, how­ev­er, com­pos­abil­i­ty is not real­ly a new thing. Before mono­lith­ic sys­tems became preva­lent, it was the norm. In the ear­ly 2000s, busi­ness­es had sep­a­rate com­merce sys­tems and con­tent sys­tems, as no one had thought about com­bin­ing them into a sin­gle plat­form. After mov­ing towards mono­lith­ic sys­tems for the past 15 years, the wheel comes full cir­cle, as com­pos­abil­i­ty proves to be the best approach to achieve flex­i­bil­i­ty and agility.

To eval­u­ate whether a tech­nol­o­gy tru­ly aligns with the prin­ci­ples of com­pos­able com­merce, look to the indus­try tech stan­dard set by the MACH Alliance, (which stands for microser­vices, API-first, cloud-native SaaS, and head­less) as a guide for enter­pris­es to choose com­merce solu­tions that offer future-proof technology.

Who needs more heads and more headless?

Head­less eCom­merce solu­tions offer sev­er­al advan­tages for B2B and enter­prise busi­ness­es that strive to be agile and adapt­able in a rapid­ly evolv­ing mar­ket. Like for instance:

Increased flex­i­bil­i­ty:

The fact that the front-end and back-end sys­tems are decou­pled means that changes to one sys­tem won’t affect oth­ers. This makes it eas­i­er to add new touch­points and tech­nolo­gies with­out hav­ing to over­haul the entire eCom­merce sys­tem. It also pro­vides the flex­i­bil­i­ty to choose dif­fer­ent tech­nolo­gies and frame­works for each lay­er independently.

More Cus­tomiza­tion:

As we’ve men­tioned, lega­cy and tra­di­tion­al sys­tems can be inflex­i­ble and lim­it­ing when it comes to cre­at­ing cus­tom expe­ri­ences. Because they have pre­de­ter­mined expe­ri­ences for both con­sumers and busi­ness­es, they leave lit­tle room for cus­tomiza­tion or per­son­al­iza­tion. Head­less moves away from lega­cy sys­tems by let­ting the CMS do exclu­sive­ly what it is sup­posed to do — man­age content. 

Improved scal­a­bil­i­ty: 

If scal­a­bil­i­ty implies every aspect of your busi­ness will have to grow togeth­er, at the same time, it kind of defeats the pur­pose. Scal­a­bil­i­ty is, ulti­mate­ly, the free­dom to grow when you need to and how you want to. Head­less com­merce is also more scal­able than tra­di­tion­al ecom­merce archi­tec­tures because it allows busi­ness­es to expand their ecom­merce offer­ings as they grow with­out hav­ing to wor­ry about whether their exist­ing sys­tems will be able to han­dle the increased traf­fic. The sep­a­ra­tion between the fron­tend and back­end allows for inde­pen­dent devel­op­ment and deploy­ment, which means busi­ness­es can intro­duce changes and updates to the user inter­face with­out the need for exten­sive back­end mod­i­fi­ca­tions. That reduces devel­op­ment and deploy­ment costs and the agili­ty in deploy­ing fron­tend changes enables busi­ness­es to respond rapid­ly to mar­ket demands.

Your busi­ness may be grow­ing fast on one plat­form, you may be expand­ing to new mar­kets, or you may need to scale fast for a spe­cial event or hol­i­day. The cus­tomer expe­ri­ence can scale inde­pen­dent­ly from the backend.

Greater agili­ty, in more ways than one

Agili­ty is main­ly achieved through the head or front-end in a head­less com­merce approach. Once decou­pled, con­tent is stored in a way that is agnos­tic to how it is pre­sent­ed. This means busi­ness­es can pick and choose the heads they want to use and devel­op, which allows for more rapid changes in response to mar­ket con­di­tions and evolv­ing cus­tomer sen­ti­ment. The back end stands firm. The head (fron­tend) lets you move fast when your cus­tomers move. Where they lead, you will follow.

Also, because the front-end and back-end sys­tems exist inde­pen­dent­ly, devel­op­ers can work on them simul­ta­ne­ous­ly or in sequence, which means that changes can be made more quick­ly. And because the front-end and back-end sys­tems are con­nect­ed through APIs, the front-end’s sole focus is to deliv­er a smooth and opti­mized user expe­ri­ence, while the back-end can con­cen­trate on han­dling data and busi­ness log­ic effi­cient­ly. By opti­miz­ing each lay­er inde­pen­dent­ly, busi­ness­es can achieve bet­ter per­for­mance and faster page load times, so that’s two added advan­tages of adopt­ing a head­less approach. And that’s not all. Com­pos­able com­merce also pro­vides more finan­cial agili­ty, as mer­chants are not bound to a long term mono­lith provider. 

Not like this

How will I know?

Head­less com­merce can be a pow­er­ful, game-chang­ing approach for busi­ness­es with spe­cif­ic, com­plex require­ments for their cus­tomer-fac­ing appli­ca­tions, such as sup­port­ing mul­ti­ple chan­nels or devices, or respond­ing quick­ly to chang­ing con­di­tions. But it doesn’t mean it’s suit­able for every­one. For exam­ple, small­er busi­ness­es with sim­pler require­ments may find that a tra­di­tion­al com­merce plat­form is more suit­able for their needs. 

You can ask your­self if you need to go head­less. Or we could do it the oth­er way round.

• You don’t need head­less if your cur­rent solu­tion lets you adapt the UX to dif­fer­ent stages in the shop­per journey. 
• You don’t need head­less if your cus­tomers can make pur­chas­es from mul­ti­ple dig­i­tal touchpoints.
• You don’t need the trou­ble of going head­less if it’s easy for you to update either front or back end.

In any case, before mak­ing a deci­sion, it’s impor­tant to iden­ti­fy your busi­ness goals and deter­mine if head­less com­merce can help you achieve them. And, while head­less com­merce can offer more flex­i­bil­i­ty in the long run, it’s impor­tant to con­sid­er how this approach will inte­grate with exist­ing sys­tems and plan for any nec­es­sary changes or upgrades.

It’s not ​“small print”, it’s ​“chal­lenges”

Final­ly, it’s impor­tant to con­sid­er the chal­lenges and risks asso­ci­at­ed with adopt­ing a new approach like head­less commerce. 

Many busi­ness­es spend a sig­nif­i­cant part of their IT bud­get main­tain­ing lega­cy sys­tems that are not com­pat­i­ble with head­less com­merce, so tech­ni­cal debt is cer­tain­ly a thing. Tech­ni­cal debt refers to the cost of main­tain­ing out­dat­ed or inef­fi­cient tech­nol­o­gy over time. While adopt­ing head­less com­merce can reduce tech­ni­cal debt in the long run, it’s impor­tant to con­sid­er upfront costs and risks.

One of the ben­e­fits of head­less com­merce is that it can enable faster deliv­ery of new fea­tures and expe­ri­ences. You still need to bal­ance speed with qual­i­ty and test all fea­tures thor­ough­ly before release.

It could be argued that ear­ly adopters of head­less com­merce may face a first mover dis­ad­van­tage if they invest time and resources into devel­op­ing cus­tom APIs and oth­er infra­struc­ture to sup­port head­less com­merce before it becomes more main­stream. Or worse. If head­less does not become wide­ly adopt­ed, they may get stuck with a sys­tem that is dif­fi­cult to main­tain or inte­grate. How­ev­er, there are also poten­tial ben­e­fits to being an ear­ly adopter of head­less com­merce. For exam­ple, gain­ing a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage over busi­ness­es that are slow­er to adopt this approach. You know, catch­ing the worm.

With a lit­tle help from good friends

Ulti­mate­ly, because imple­ment­ing head­less eCom­merce requires tech­ni­cal exper­tise and resources, it’s impor­tant to assess whether your busi­ness has the nec­es­sary capa­bil­i­ties to sup­port this approach and the nec­es­sary exper­tise in-house to imple­ment it, or whether it will require work with exter­nal part­ners. In that case, it’s vital to eval­u­ate poten­tial part­ners care­ful­ly and make sure they have expe­ri­ence work­ing with head­less com­merce plat­forms and tech­nolo­gies. (If you can’t think of any­one, book a Big­Com­merce demo with us).