Headless commerce: redefining the customer retail experience

With digitalization rapidly changing the world around us, businesses are constantly on the lookout for new ways to differentiate their offerings, optimise customer experiences, and gain that all-important competitive advantage.

Use of innovative technology has quickly become a cornerstone of this, both for established brands looking to grow or maintain market share, and challenger brands trying to make a name for themselves. Now, a new technology has emerged that many businesses believe will help to usher in an entirely new era of customer retail experiences: headless commerce.

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From buzzword to business essential

Headless commerce is a platform architecture that decouples the front-end of an e-commerce website from the back-end. Doing so enables businesses to keep their back-end constant but use APIs to work with multiple different vendors and applications as required, giving them far more freedom to innovate how they reach customers.

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Simply put, it gives companies complete control over their front-end, helping them to maintain a consistent, seamless customer experience at all times. This is critical because modern shoppers are becoming more and more fickle in their buyer behaviour. According to a recent report , a quarter of online consumers are only prepared to wait up to six seconds for a web page to load before abandoning it in favour of an alternative option.

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Setting a new standard in e-commerce

The ability to separate front-end and back-end functions represents a major shift away from the established way of doing things in e-commerce, where they are traditionally tied together. This old approach restricted brands to using a limited number of online templates offered by their ecommerce platform, making it much harder for them to rapidly adapt in the face of an ever-evolving business landscape.

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Headless architecture changes all that. Below are three key reasons why it is set to revolutionise the customer brand experience in the months and years ahead:

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1.???? Optimise revenue: headless architecture lets brands optimise existing revenue streams while simultaneously tapping into new ones. A?report by? Accenture found a 30% increase in revenue amongst companies that have implemented headless architecture as a result of expanded product offerings and enhanced customer experience.

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2.???? Accelerate to omnichannel: with buyer behaviour changing at an unrivalled pace, brands that can’t or won’t adapt to the emergence of new channels will soon find themselves in a fight for their very survival. Headless architecture makes it much easier for companies of all sizes to implement an effective omnichannel commerce strategy across all customer devices and channels, which is now critical to long-term success.

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3.???? Personalise, personalise, personalise: implementing a headless architecture enables brands to deliver highly personalised content to the right people at the right time. In today's rapidly evolving retail environment, the ability to tailor customer experiences in this way is now more important than ever before. Organisations can use headless commerce to bring their products and services to market faster, giving them a much-needed edge over their competitors and helping to meet and exceed the expectations of their customers.

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The maturation of headless commerce into the MACH (Microservices, API-first, Cloud native, Headless) architecture approach has also made it more accessible than ever, due to the way it provides flexibility for businesses to build digital experiences. However, to really make the most of these benefits, IT infrastructure still needs to take on more of a progressive approach.

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To reap the many rewards that headless architecture offers, businesses must first be willing to look at themselves objectively and recognise the limitations of their existing architecture. In today’s hyper-competitive digital age, the slightest advantage can make all the difference. Brands that embrace headless commerce are setting themselves up for success, both now and in the future.

Chris Branagan is Chief Technology Officer at IBS Software . Learn more about our passenger solutions, including retailing and passenger experiences, here: IT systems to better airline passenger experience, retailing & staff travel ( ibsplc.com )

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