The ubiquitous shop: headless e-commerce
Category: eCommerce, technology, consumer
Category: eCommerce, technology, consumer
In these months, many brands understand that nothing should be taken for granted and that the ability to resist change depends on technology: in order to respond to new consumption models, channels, devices... we need tools to keep up the pace.
One of them is headless e-commerce.
An e-commerce in which front and back-end development are separated, which guarantees that the "machinery" of our shop can work in our "shop window" and in many others with the same efficiency. This philosophy is perfect for brands or products that need impactful experiences, or for very specific verticals where pre-designed templates are not effective.
The headless ecommerce can have the showcase that most interests you, it does not have to be limited to have only one (the mobile application would be the first option, but think of virtual assistants, IoT...).
This approach achieves:
First, because almost all web applications are using APIs.
The technology vendor gives us the back office (necessary for the operation), a functional and complete template (that you can use), but also a layer of APIs that allows us to build any experience based on them.
The second thing is that we are already in an "API mentality". As we seek to improve conversion, we integrate growth tools into our ecommerce platform, and this is less complex if all elements are API-based.
E-commerce packages combine the ecommerce operation (databases, orders, stock, prices...) with the visualisation of the store front. And if we take the presentation logic elsewhere, the most appropriate place is... precisely the one that is closest to the visitor: the browser.
Thanks to the single page application concept, we can propose complete navigations without reloading the page, from the beginning to the end of the visit and maintain a level of experience like that of a desktop application.
The most popular frameworks in this layer (React, Angular, Vue...), are already mature solutions that improve the experience because they only need to query operational and transactional data to the backend.
In return, the ecommerce package is responsible for implementing APIs that solve the needs of the storefront (banners, front pages, modules, taxonomies, cart, availability control, prices, user identity, ...).
If your challenge is omnichannel, without a doubt yes. If you already have a good CMS that organises your decisions and you are overwhelmed by the complexity of product and content management, you should consider a change. COVID in this sense has acted as a sales accelerator towards the digital channel, which can make your scale more complex if you don't start thinking like this.
If that's not your challenge, you won't need that change, but it doesn't hurt to understand that almost all vendors are thinking about how they can help you decouple and become more agile.
First, we have the SaaS vendors who seem best placed to lead the adoption of decoupled models:
But also vendors of traditional B2C packages, for whom the need to adapt the solution to modern operating patterns leads them to the headless model: