Businesses, whether digital-native, offline or omnichannel, have evolved like never before. The offline and online boundaries have blurred significantly. Driven by the shift in customer choices and buying preferences, new hybrid business models are disrupting the ecommerce domain every other day.
With new business models, arises the need for new, innovative tech solutions that offer agility, flexibility and creative control to build solutions without any limitations.
Headless commerce offers all of these required solutions so that the brands can efficiently meet their customers’ expectations. It also ensures seamless functioning of businesses while empowering them to have a robust digital presence.
The core concept of headless commerce revolves around helping businesses in connecting with their customers via multiple touchpoints and devices. By adopting this approach, brands are able to engage effectively with their customers and offer them personalised experiences.
It further paves the way for customer loyalty and greater conversions. Hence, it would be appropriate to say that headless commerce has emerged to be a game-changer for brands as it benefits them at significant levels.
Headless commerce: What is it?
The concept comprises decoupling the backend from the frontend and allows brands to add new touchpoints, functionalities, features, etc. while using the same backend logic.
The same backend can further be used to create any number of heads or frontends like online store, mobile apps, new age IoT devices, or just make any possible touchpoint commerce-able.
To provide a clear picture of how headless commerce works let's consider a real life scenario. A customer browsing a fashion app searches for a black dress and opens the relevant page. She now adds the desired product to her cart. At this stage, the head of the headless commerce setup sends an API call to the backend to initiate the order processing.
The backend then logs the money transfer, updates the inventory, and stores the customer details. The process is completed when the frontend sends another API call to the backend to request the order status. After all the details are fetched and cross-checked, the purchasing status is finally shown as confirmed!
Headless commerce: The beneficial strategy for brands
Headless commerce steps in as an ideal solution allowing businesses to evolve. It empowers brands to curate interactive and immersive experiences with just an API call to implement the modifications in the core. The concept provides a plethora of benefits to businesses.
Ranging from going the omnichannel route, customising as well as personalising the customers’ purchasing journeys, to building innovative solutions and ensuring brands become flexible, agile as well as resilient to keep abreast with the recent trends; headless commerce provides a plethora of benefits to businesses.
Hence, it is an effective go-to strategy for them in the truest sense!
Treading on the headless commerce path is beneficial for businesses in various ways-
Go omnichannel
Headless commerce architecture offers brands the creative control to build agile and nimble solutions. The frontend, backend, and APIs work in tandem to enable brands to build diverse and innovative e-commerce solutions.
It ensures that they are able to adopt omnichannel routes quickly and smoothly. Headless commerce also offers seamless buyer journeys across every touchpoint.
Following the omnichannel approach via the headless commerce path, brands have better visibility across channels as well as better conversions by identifying and leveraging the most profitable channels.
Extensive customisation
You have the liberty to go beyond the existing tools and create exceptional interfaces for your e-commerce platform that meet the exact requirements of your customers.
The customer journeys can be personalised easily by offering discounts, promotions, or engaging and interactive content with the decoupled headless architecture. This helps businesses to boost customer engagement and retention rates and eventually ensure greater conversions.
Innovative solutions
With headless commerce, businesses have the liberty to experiment and build out-of-the-box solutions without putting the existing ecosystem at risk. It enables them to enhance their user interface in a time efficient and cost-saving manner.
For instance, you can integrate with the best marketing software and switch to a new accounting tool without making major code changes. You can even do A/B testing to find the best solutions and software for your business.
Building flexible and resilient core
The frontend and the backend communicate using APIs and ensure that the data is available to multiple touchpoints. With API, the head and the body work independently without breaking the code at either end. The headless architecture gives brands the freedom to experiment at the frontend without any inhibitions of impacting the functionality of the backend.
Adapting to the new trends with the agile approach
Headless commerce is indeed an ideal solution for businesses that reduces their operational costs as well as boosts their performance and availability. Its microservices architecture ensures decoupling of the business modules so that the core is resilient, agile, and quick in operations.
The platform can then build new solutions or touchpoints and smoothly adapt to the industry trends. The microservices also help scale up and down the platform as per the business requirements.
Thus, it would be appropriate to say that headless commerce ensures that businesses are able to meet the customers’ expectations, demands, and requirements. It supports their customer-first approach and enables them to enjoy an edge over the other industry players due to their differentiating high-end customer experiences.
Summing up
The new-age customers prefer brands that offer seamless online shopping experiences across multiple touchpoints. This pushes brands to adopt innovative cutting-edge ecommerce solutions to deliver what the customers demand and require. The best possible way to achieve this goal is to meet your customers on the channels they prefer by adopting the headless commerce route.
The decoupled headless architecture extends power and potential to the brands to build innovative solutions. With its plethora of benefits, headless commerce steps in as an ideal approach and helps brands improve their user interface as well as offer high-end customer experiences.
This further leads to customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty and carves the path for greater conversions. Hence, it can be rightly stated that headless commerce has indeed revolutionised the working of e-commerce platforms and is playing a pivotal role in ensuring that the future of online businesses is progressive!
Edited by Affirunisa Kankudti
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)