Is Your Brand Ready to Go Headless? Ask these questions before the shift.

Prasenjit Dey

Brands & Communications

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In the early stages of eCommerce, businesses predominantly employed a full-stack approach, tightly integrating front and back-end systems to cater to desktop experiences. However, the market has evolved, demanding flexibility to adapt customer experiences across diverse channels like mobile devices, while ensuring a cohesive brand journey. Enter headless commerce architecture-an ideal solution for organizations aiming to innovate, iterate, and test e-commerce experiences.

But what exactly is headless commerce? Is your brand ready for Headless?

Come on! Let’s find out.

What is Headless Commerce?

Headless commerce enables the separation of the frontend and backend via APIs. This separation empowers businesses to customize and optimize the presentation layer (frontend) independently from backend functionalities.
By decoupling these elements, organizations can provide personalized and consistent user experiences across various channels, including websites, mobile apps, and emerging touchpoints such as smart devices or voice assistants.

Why Headless Commerce?

Headless commerce transcends the constraints of traditional systems by centralizing the API as the primary interface for interacting with distinct business systems. Administrators can enforce strict access controls on each system, authorizing only necessary personnel while limiting data accessibility through the API. With no backend database code entwined, front-end developers enjoy the freedom to customize layouts without constraints. Consequently, content and products are not confined to a single website or application; any internet-connected device can serve as a touchpoint.

As consumer expectations for brand interactions continue to rise, it is imperative for companies to embrace additional front-end flexibility if they have not already done so.

When you are Ready for Headless?

Is your brand prepared to transition to a headless approach? Does it align with your overarching business objectives?
Below are key inquiries we pose to retailers expressing interest in headless commerce. Your responses will aid in determining the readiness of your company to embrace a headless commerce solution.

1.Do your Business have multiple sales channels and touchpoints?

At the initial days of your business, you sell your product to limited channels due to less resources. But as your product catalogue and customer increase, you need to have multiple sales channels and touchpoints to sell your product. In this scenario, your business may require headless commerce.

2. Do you want to increase your site performance?

When you have a website, it becomes your responsibility to optimize it well to ensure faster page speed and provides a better user experience. This also results in increase page views, conversions and reduce bounce rates.

According to Google Research, if a website is taking more than three seconds to load, 53% of users will leave and move on to another site.

With headless commerce, you get a complete composable stack that helps you to:

Choose best-in-class breed solutions. (open ecosystem)
SEO-optimized plugins and themes.
Increase page speed and reduce bounce rate.
Provides agility and scalability.

Thus, if you want to enhance your website performance, headless commerce can be the right stack for your business.

3.You want to make a different tech stack from competitors.

In the retail sector, it is utmost important to keep your tech stack updated to stay ahead of competition. Headless commerce provides you the full flexibility and personalized experience that fits user’s interest. Brands can create personalized and dynamic page and customize them according to user persona, product recommendations, promotions, and discounts, etc. All these are based by analysing past data and insights of customers like, their browsing habit, order history, what products they like the most, how often they shop, etc.

4.You have different CMS for sales channel which lead to content duplicate content.

If you are handling different CMS for every sales channel, there may be chance of plagiarised content. This may lead to negative impact to your users. Headless content infrastructure unifies all content in a centralized content hub, making editing easier and eliminating delicacy of content. Headless CMS comes with API-driven approach, latest libraries, and frameworks that helps in boosting site speed and performance.

5.Your brand requires frequent change in content.

Is your brand frequently updating content and implementing rapid design changes on the storefront? Utilizing headless commerce enables businesses to swiftly launch new frontend experiences and promptly respond to emerging market trends, all achieved with minimal costly backend development.

6.You want to explore your products and want to sell them in different countries.

You need to consider headless architecture is when you want to sell your products across the globe. The native content management system that comes with eCommerce platform are not built to handle complex content management needs. The built-in content management systems provided by eCommerce platforms lack the capability to manage intricate content requirements effectively.

When operating in numerous countries and languages, the ability to implement changes across all storefronts from a centralized location becomes essential. This streamlines brand consistency, significantly diminishes manual workload, and minimizes potential errors.

Through headless commerce, integration with a headless CMS facilitates centralizing all content within a unified hub, simplifying content editing tasks across various storefronts.

End Note

Therefore, is your brand prepared to adopt a headless approach? Regardless of your answer, you can have a look at the list of signs provided above offers insight into your present circumstances and requirements. While these criteria are not exhaustive, they serve as a solid foundation for assessing the suitability of transitioning to a headless model.