How Much Potential Does Headless Commerce Contain to Revolutionize Ecommerce?

Rajesh Bhimani
4 min readApr 28, 2022

If you ask one business that has come out as a winner in the pandemic, it’s Walmart.

Techcrunch reports of August 2020 state that Walmart’s e-commerce sales grew up by 97 percent. It proved that the pandemic was a shining moment for the e-commerce industry.

However, it wasn’t the traditional websites that experienced this growth significantly. The ones combined with new technologies were the ones whose sales soared high. It is with headless commerce that the e-commerce businesses got powered up with the profit.

What is Headless Commerce?

An e-commerce website comprises two parts — frontend and backend.

The front refers to everything visible to the user on their screen. On the contrary, the backend includes everything that keeps the things running on the front, like security features, pricing, checkout, and others.

So, when we say headless commerce, it means that the frontend is separated from the backend. Both the ends are independent of each other.

#Factcheck: $1.65 billion were raised in funding in 2020–2021 alone for headless technologies, as per Forbes.

How is headless commerce different from traditional web-shop architecture?

Traditional web-shop architecture or say monolithic commerce is way different from headless commerce. The frontend and backend are essentially fused in it. To sum up, you can’t use either one without the other.

headless commerce
Headless Commerce

With continuous use, many drawbacks were discovered along the way.

For instance:

  • The developers or IT team has to write multiple layers of code just to implement a new experience update. It further slowed down the mission-critical upgrades and new product launches on the e-commerce website.
  • Their inflexibility was another drawback that disallowed the integrations with social media channels or the internet of things.
  • It limited the options of marketing for the e-commerce industry.

With the entry of headless commerce, all these drawbacks got wiped away. With these layers separated, arrays of benefits have fallen into the way. Some of them are discussed below.

Flexible frontend

Adopt any website design and deliver it to IoT devices, browsers, or other points without being limited to the backend code limits.

Enhanced security

Lower the chances of breaching customer records and customer rights with the decoupling of strategies and execution of multiple services.

Lightning-fast deployment

Headless commerce is popular for its fast and easy connecting/disconnection and switching to new channels. It quickly pulls the data through API and pushes it to the network endpoints.

Microservices architecture

With each system responsible for a certain function, the conflict and interferences get reduced in the working of in-app processes.

Uniformity between channels

With headless commerce, you can drop the IT team required for making e-commerce website changes. You can deploy those changes independently without any help in headless commerce.

Maximized conversion and revenue

Give a spark to your digital presence as you implement your marketing strategies on various digital platforms and welcome more potential customers.

Result-oriented marketing

Headless commerce has given ample options to marketing teams to build multiple user experiences across various channels. With both the ends separated, it would cause no harm to the backend.

Go omnichannel

Going headless means you can promote your content across different channels. You can make your products available in other places apart from your online store. For instance: eBay, Amazon, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and others.

Own your site architecture

Leverage the maximized control on your website as you work separately on the content management application and content delivery applications in headless commerce. It allows businesses to keep what works for their website and upgrade what doesn’t.

Scalability

Future-proof your brand with headless technologies and add new functionalities individually and integrate with new features as per the demand of your business.

Flexibility for the developers

Brands can choose a frontend of their choice simultaneously with what works best for their brand. Developers can work at ease with their preferred technology or programming language that works best for their workflow.

All in one tool

Headless commerce is a powerful tool for every organization that wishes to deliver a personalized experience to its customers. With proper sync between all the channels, the APIs ensure a coordinated, brand-consistent experience for your customers with your services, such as product information, promotions, and others.

Examples of brands using Headless commerce

You may wonder about it as a new concept, but here are some brands that are already leveraging it to their benefit.

ILIA

A clean beauty and cosmetics company that saw immediate benefits with headless commerce like

  • Decrease in exit rate by 18%
  • Improvement in bounce rate by 10%
  • Efficiency boost for developer deployments by 20%

COMPLEX NETWORKS

Known for its multi-sensory convention, Complecon; the pandemic forced the company to go headless, which turned out to be a blessing in the end.

They got

  • A total attendee engagement of 9 million
  • Commerce and brand engagements grew to 1.3 million
  • Audience engagement was recorded at 3.2 million minutes

Headless commerce is your partner in the long run

Gone are the times when your traditional web shop used to crash when you removed just one tool that was out of your requirement. It consumed a lot of time, effort, and money in the past.

But no more!

Headless commerce has come as a blessing to the e-commerce industry that is a one-stop solution for all business requirements. You can customize everything on your website and create a super-fast website for your customers, and all you have to do is to hire Drupal developers, and they will develop a headless commerce website for you.

Take advantage of all the benefits it brings to the table and enjoy a boost in sales on your online store.

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Rajesh Bhimani

Rajesh Bhimani is the Founder at Skynet Technologies, Website Design and Development Agency. He has 21 years of experience in Technology and Marketing industry.