Why should business teams care about “Headless” commerce?

If you are like me who works with business teams that run large-scale B2B/B2C eCommerce systems you may have been part of a debate with IT teams about switching to a “Headless” commerce technology for your company’s eCommerce website.?

Before diving into the core question this blog post tries to address, let us get a baseline understanding of what the “Headless” technology actually means and how it differs from the way most eCommerce sites are run today on a “Monolithic” architecture.?

So, what the heck is "headless" commerce??Headless commerce is an architectural approach to eCommerce where the front-end (the user interface and customer-facing elements) is decoupled from the "back-end" (the database and server-side application logic). Typically, the website and shopping experiences are built using modern web development technologies using JavaScript frameworks (such as Angular, React, etc.) that use purpose-built APIs to communicate with the "back-end" of an e-commerce platform that is responsible for managing master/transactional data, product catalogs, payments, tax, UI/UX, and order management, etc.

Headless commerce is part of a broader software development approach referred to as "Composable Commerce" which anchors around “MACH” architecture (Microservices, API-First, Cloud-Native, Headless). Composable commerce builds upon the principles of headless commerce but goes further by breaking down the entire commerce experience into smaller, modular components that can be combined and modified to create custom experiences.

Just to be clear “Headless” is a concept that also applies to other areas like Content Management Systems (CMS) - not just for digital commerce.

OK, let us now get into the reason why you choose to read this blog – which is How will business teams benefit from headless commerce? While on the surface this technology doesn’t seem to offer any direct benefits like increasing average order value (AOV) or reducing shopping cart abandonments or faster time to market or ensuring high customer retention or lowering customer acquisition costs and so on... there are actually many benefits that have a direct impact.

In this blog, I’ll focus on four (4) of these benefits that should resonate with most business teams:

1. Increased Agility:?With a “Headless” setup, front/back-end development teams can work independently and in parallel, resulting in faster time-to-market for new features and capabilities so businesses teams can respond quickly to changing customer and market trends by easily making updates to customer-facing experience without affecting the functioning of the site or needing costly/time-consuming back-end development that requires build/deployments, etc.

With headless architecture, the back-end or core platform development team can continue to build capabilities independent of the front-end needs so business teams can enable new features at the time of their choosing bypassing the constraints of a traditional monolithic system. ?

2. Better Customer Experience:?A headless architecture can lead to significantly faster page load times and improved site performance, as front-end teams can optimize the site for speed and scalability – this is thanks to underlying capabilities like Progressive Web Application (PWA) and Single Page Application (SPA) that allows the pages to behave appropriately based on device and real-time user interactions on a page. With the increased flexibility business teams can actually offer customizations based on the user’s location, persona, and other specific needs to increase user engagement.

By focusing on creating a tailored and personalized customer experience, businesses can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and lifetime value leading to increased sales and revenue. The increased efficiency allows for more effective management of data, reducing the risk of errors and improving overall performance, paving the way for a more seamless customer journey.?

3. Offer Advanced Capabilities:?given the “API-first” approach your eCommerce site will be able to easily integrate with other systems in your company such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Self-service systems, and marketing automation tools resulting in a more unified customer experience that usually leads to higher customer satisfaction and retention. By connecting different systems, your company should gain better ROI as the best technologies in your toolkit are brought together to offer an advanced set of capabilities to customers without incurring a single purpose or one-off integration costs.

This is especially critical for business teams that need to offer omnichannel experiences so they can provide a consistent, seamless experience across multiple channels such as mobile, web, voice, and in-store, etc.

4. Scalability for Market Expansion:?As business teams look to expand their eCommerce offerings to other market segments and geographies, or introduce new channels they will need the underlying site to scale at the same pace. For example, if you plan to expand your channels of engagement through business models like affiliate marketing, referrals, marketplace solutions, and hosting 3rd party sellers that might attract a completely new set of users then that influx shouldn’t affect existing user experience. The business teams shouldn’t have to pause functional enhancements to their core market while the expansion is being rolled out or introduce any downtime, or site performance issues due to load.

With the separation of the two layers (i.e., front/back-end), business teams will be free to experiment in the new markets without impacting core business and scale the eCommerce site as the demand increases.?

As you can imagine, IT teams can also benefit from adopting “Headless” architecture to lower tech debt, and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of supporting legacy eCommerce sites all while being at the forefront of technology but that is a discussion for another day.

I ?do hope this post provides some context and ideas for business teams to have an informed conversation with their IT colleagues on the merits of “Headless” commerce the next time the topic comes up!

Please comment with other topics and issues that you would like me to address in future blogs.