A Guide to Headless Commerce
You’ve seen it on LinkedIn, listened to a podcast and read a blog post. Headless commerce is the future, and you want to know more.
But what is it exactly, and is it for you? This guide answers what it is, why it exists, the benefits, the pitfalls, and how to investigate it further for your store.
Common Challenges of Today's Platforms
Below are some common signs that you may need to consider a more flexible approach to your ecommerce store.
The Imperfect Nature of E-commerce Platforms
Regardless of what platform you choose to build your ecommerce store on, you might feel limited by the approach taken to a particular feature. Or perhaps that feature doesn't even exist. Whilst we have SaaS platforms at the heart of what we do, even they sometimes need bending to fit a retailer's needs.
As your business grows, costs can also escalate, especially with extensive back-end customisations that make future upgrades and changes more challenging.
Overcoming the Limitations of E-commerce CMS
E-commerce Content Management Systems (CMS) are not without their limitations, which can pose challenges to businesses. These may include templating engines or native page builders that do not offer the flexibility and customisation options needed for some content-heavy ecommerce websites.
We're fans of the out-of-the-box Shopify 2.0 CMS, but even still, where you have several authors and require greater editorial control, some areas may frustrate you.
Site Performance
Website speed is critical in determining user experience and search engine rankings. Slow loading times can frustrate visitors and lead to high bounce rates, negatively impacting your business's bottom line. Additionally, search engines like Google prioritise fast-loading websites, meaning that slow speeds can hurt your organic traffic and SEO efforts.
Delivering blisteringly quick ecommerce stores is hard. Using App Libraries and plugins add bloat meaning technical debt builds quickly.
Key Requirements of a modern Ecommerce Store
Fast & Reliable Website
As we talked about above, fast and reliable are simply now non-negotiable. Regardless of your business size, customers are spoilt by the sites and apps of the 'big players' and now expect the same from all of their online shopping experiences.
Balancing the needs of performance against the desire to add 'just one more feature' with the easy-to-use app libraries of SaaS platforms is a tricky line to walk.
Content Creation and Deployment
Native e-commerce platform functionality may not always provide the level of control that e-commerce teams need. To achieve their desired front-end design and functionality, they may require access to templates, product configurators, and product bundles tailored to their specific needs.
Unfortunately, few e-commerce platforms offer out-of-the-box enterprise-level Content Management Systems (CMS), as this is not typically their core focus. And whilst there are ways of extending the CMS that comes with your chosen platform, there is a limit to how far it can be taken.
Balancing Speed and Dependability
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, e-commerce businesses require the flexibility and agility to iterate their website's front-end design and functionality rapidly. If you're currently on an older version of something like Magento, you'll understand how the platform can hamper business agility.
Hang on, aren't these key requirements the same as the challenges identified above?
Broadly, yes. You've spotted the difficulty ecommerce teams face. The key requirements are often the source of the biggest challenges.
What is headless ecommerce and how does it help?
Headless eCommerce refers to decoupling your online store's front end (or the ‘head’) from the back-end technology. You end up with independent systems communicating with each other, and if exploited correctly, it can have a dramatic effect.
Editor: Apologies to any engineers reading this — we know we’re over-simplifying this, but you’re not the intended audience!
Software engineers have always focused on the “separation of concerns” and “Model-View-Controller” software design patterns. Engineers like having distinct parts of a software platform concentrate solely on one thing. Typically, that would be a database to store data, a decision layer, and a result presentation. And each ‘layer’ has only one job — store and retrieve data, work out what to do with the data, and present the results to the user. It’s how lots of websites work.
By default, Shopify Plus & BigCommerce present themselves as ‘coupled’ — they store data, make decisions based on requests from the user and then present a storefront to the customer all under one platform.
Think of it as three layers — data, logic and presentation — all wrapped up in one.
Headless commerce works by using your chosen ecommerce platform as only one of the three layers rather than using it for them all. And because your engineers have decoupled the ‘head’, the term for this way of developing websites is a ‘headless build’.
Here's where it can get fun. Remember Worzel Gummidge? (YouTube is your friend, people).
Spoiler: he had many interchangeable heads, and so can you (a website and a mobile app could be two different heads). But you can be better than Worzel. You can have lots of 'bodies' too.
Businesses can choose the best-in-class solutions for each area of their e-commerce stack. The best 'bodies'.
You can pick the best-in-class CMS you've always wanted. You can choose a preferred SaaS platform to process your orders and payments. It's the best-of-breed approach without compromise.
You can combine your preferred tools with a headless approach and benefit from greater flexibility in making incremental changes to different system parts without disrupting other areas. For example, if a new CMS enters the market that makes more sense for you, you can change just that part of your technology stack without disrupting the others.
And if they are combined together by good developers, the 'heads' can be blazingly quick.
Those key challenges are tackled head-on: this is fast & reliable, built with best-in-class products, flexible, and agile.
So is a headless solution 'best'?
In many ways, it is, yes. But...probably not.
We know that's a non-commital answer, but the question lacks context. The context being provided by your project, your needs today, your needs for tomorrow...
And we need to talk about what we lose when we go headless.
The Trade-offs of a Headless Strategy
There are several considerations when going headless, whether on Shopify Plus, BigCommerce or another platform. They may vary in degree depending on the platform, but the list is similar:
The need to maintain multiple technologies and platforms.
Hosting — costs, reliability, and security are all considerations that a headed build on Shopify Plus or BigCommerce does away with.
Loss of the native platform App library functionality.
An increased reliance on engineers — be those in-house or agency.
Lastly, and often the show-stopping negative, an increased development cost. The negatives above all have answers that are usually found by spending more during the initial build.
So, whilst considered by some to be best-in-class, headless is not a good solution for everyone.
In fact, arguably, it suits only certain businesses, with the majority still being best served by one of the big SaaS platforms.
A good agency (hint, hint!) can do two things. Firstly, they'll listen. Secondly, they'll walk you through the decision as to whether a headless build suits your project.
Discovery has all the answers
Refined over many projects, we have developed a way of working which delivers the benefits of fixed specifications and fixed costings yet remains agile and able to cope with change.
In our experience, we’ve found that retailers like being agile but want to know project costs, scope and delivery times before starting.
Discovery starts with getting the right people from both sides together. We’ll have gone through the spec and be armed with our first round of questions. Some will have immediate answers. Others won’t. That’s to be expected.
We’ll explore who you are as a brand, your vision for the site, your customers, their user habits, and your current design principles, plus discuss what features we need to support where we are heading now and in the future. We gather insight from existing stores to support a design and UX approach that will deliver a high-performing store with a great customer experience.
The result is a defined project timeline with breakdowns of the above key areas and a cost for the project delivery.
We’ll also have developed a good understanding of your business and working relationships, setting us up for the project ahead.
Lastly, it’s worth reminding ourselves that it is not a forever decision. You can assess headless now, build headed and move to a headless architecture later. Discovery workshops are the first step to understanding if a headless approach is for you.
Conclusion
Headless is powerful, but it's costly. For the majority, the higher costs don't equate to good value, and a headed build with one of our preferred SaaS platforms is the more cost-effective route to growth. However, for those with a project that lends itself to a headless approach, the power and freedom it delivers mean those extra costs prove to be a worthwhile investment.
Your answer lies in Discovery. Let us help.
