It shouldn’t come as a surprise to retailers that storefronts have moved beyond brick and mortar. Instead, retailers are using headless commerce to create shopping opportunities wherever their customers already are or will show up.
Headless commerce decouples the front-end digital experience from back-end functionality, such as inventory allocation, content management, and fulfillment capabilities. In other words, retailers aren’t constrained by a particular platform if they want to use a different content management system (CMS) or other form of user interface (UI).
As retailers grow and look for new ways to delight their customers, they’re looking for flexibility in how they deliver their customer experience—and a headless approach is growing in popularity. Application programming interfaces (APIs) and microservices make headless commerce possible both for fast-growing retailers and for those whose growth via traditional ecommerce has reached a tipping point.
When brands first started selling online, desktops were the dominant form factor, and purchase paths were relatively simple. A “full stack” approach, where the back-end ecommerce platform and website front end were coupled, made sense. And for the majority
of retailers, it will continue to make sense.
In some cases, providing an outstanding customer experience requires more, including:
Customer personalization
Faster integrations with third-party applications and services, especially when customers are embracing new ways of engaging with brands, leading to an omni-channel approach
The ability to try new approaches to marketing, selling, and managing content, meaning they’ll be on the frontlines of these experiences as they become the standard
The most common reasons headless commerce is getting more attention is that this kind of customer experience is made possible through added customizability, speed to market, scale, and control.
Depending on where you are as a business, you might want one of these things, or all four.
But first, you need to determine whether you should move to a headless architecture at all.
