3 Ways Headless Commerce Can Transform Your Business
3 Ways Headless Commerce Can Transform Your Business
When it comes to e-commerce, there are a number of ways to assemble all the moving parts. Every business has nuances unique to its own industry, services and customer experiences. But even when accounting for this variance, we see common themes of business challenges around e-commerce.
Common Challenges With Traditional E-commerce Platforms
Sometimes businesses have inherited monolith architecture, wherein the user interface and back-end data are combined into a single-tiered application. This is where e-commerce got its start. It presents a number of challenges for modern e-commerce, however, as newer functions are often unsupported. And when they are, they can require specialized implementation resulting in a lot of work for developers and a lot of downtime.
As these problems became increasingly ubiquitous, the industry responded with a new kind of strategy that made e-commerce the centerpiece: pure play commerce-led platforms. With this new wave of technology, the storefront is built on an e-commerce platform, and everything else is coded separately. This platform does one thing exclusively: e-commerce. That’s it. But this too presents challenges, as everything on the front-end is delivered through the e-commerce platform—meaning the company itself has little control over the user experience. So in order to activate any marketing or other business initiatives on the front-end, custom coding from developers is required, often putting undue strain on both marketing and developer teams.
Leveraging Headless Commerce for Transformation
Enter: Headless commerce. A headless strategy solves the challenges of both its predecessors by decoupling the front-end and back-end in a way that allows for complete customization and precise control over both e-commerce and the user experience. The result: An e-commerce strategy that prioritizes experience with better opportunities to engage, measure and convert—all without having to tap developers for coding.
Here’s how.
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Incremental innovation. One of the best parts of a headless option is that it offers you that chance to improve processes as you need. You can upgrade everything in one fell swoop if that’s the prerogative, but often it is less risky and faster to market to change incrementally. This gives you a chance to grow as you go, so to speak—a huge value over the prospect of “rip and replace,” which is costly, not only in terms of time and money but also as also a drain on employees. With a headless strategy, you can fix specific problems and still keep your existing systems as long as you need to.
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Flexibility and future-proofing. With both monolith architecture and commerce-led platforms, adding new features and functionality is an undertaking. With headless, each microservice component works independently, allowing you to swap, upgrade, add and remove any features as needed—without disrupting other parts of the platform or user experience. And because headless is never an all-or-nothing solution, you have complete flexibility over which integrations you choose, allowing you to make the changes that will bring your customer the most value.
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Customize for conversions. E-commerce is seeing explosive growth and UX is the centerpiece. When your user experience is shoehorned into a templated e-commerce platform, you have little to no control over that experience, which is highly problematic for conversions. With a headless system, you take back the reins, continually customizing and optimizing your experience in a way that drives conversions.
These are just some of the ways headless commerce delivers transformative business solutions.
Have specific e-commerce challenges you want to talk through?
We’d love to chat. Email us any time or schedule a free consultation.
When it comes to e-commerce, there are a number of ways to assemble all the moving parts. Every business has nuances unique to its own industry, services and customer experiences. But even when accounting for this variance, we see common themes of business challenges around e-commerce.
Common Challenges With Traditional E-commerce Platforms
Sometimes businesses have inherited monolith architecture, wherein the user interface and back-end data are combined into a single-tiered application. This is where e-commerce got its start. It presents a number of challenges for modern e-commerce, however, as newer functions are often unsupported. And when they are, they can require specialized implementation resulting in a lot of work for developers and a lot of downtime.
As these problems became increasingly ubiquitous, the industry responded with a new kind of strategy that made e-commerce the centerpiece: pure play commerce-led platforms. With this new wave of technology, the storefront is built on an e-commerce platform, and everything else is coded separately. This platform does one thing exclusively: e-commerce. That’s it. But this too presents challenges, as everything on the front-end is delivered through the e-commerce platform—meaning the company itself has little control over the user experience. So in order to activate any marketing or other business initiatives on the front-end, custom coding from developers is required, often putting undue strain on both marketing and developer teams.
Leveraging Headless Commerce for Transformation
Enter: Headless commerce. A headless strategy solves the challenges of both its predecessors by decoupling the front-end and back-end in a way that allows for complete customization and precise control over both e-commerce and the user experience. The result: An e-commerce strategy that prioritizes experience with better opportunities to engage, measure and convert—all without having to tap developers for coding.
Here’s how.
-
Incremental innovation. One of the best parts of a headless option is that it offers you that chance to improve processes as you need. You can upgrade everything in one fell swoop if that’s the prerogative, but often it is less risky and faster to market to change incrementally. This gives you a chance to grow as you go, so to speak—a huge value over the prospect of “rip and replace,” which is costly, not only in terms of time and money but also as also a drain on employees. With a headless strategy, you can fix specific problems and still keep your existing systems as long as you need to.
-
Flexibility and future-proofing. With both monolith architecture and commerce-led platforms, adding new features and functionality is an undertaking. With headless, each microservice component works independently, allowing you to swap, upgrade, add and remove any features as needed—without disrupting other parts of the platform or user experience. And because headless is never an all-or-nothing solution, you have complete flexibility over which integrations you choose, allowing you to make the changes that will bring your customer the most value.
-
Customize for conversions. E-commerce is seeing explosive growth and UX is the centerpiece. When your user experience is shoehorned into a templated e-commerce platform, you have little to no control over that experience, which is highly problematic for conversions. With a headless system, you take back the reins, continually customizing and optimizing your experience in a way that drives conversions.
These are just some of the ways headless commerce delivers transformative business solutions.
Have specific e-commerce challenges you want to talk through?
We’d love to chat. Email us any time or schedule a free consultation.
