Six Strategies to Increase Your eCommerce Revenue With a Headless Storefront

Many brands are beginning to recognize the potential of headless commerce. Our recent poll shows that 80% of people working for eCommerce brands reported that they were considering a headless solution to increase their revenue. The possibilities unlocked by separating the frontend and backend of your eCommerce stores allows for faster webshops, more customized experiences, and content-rich storytelling - three key ingredients for higher conversion! Here are six strategies to increase your eCommerce revenue with a headless storefront.

1. Adding Integrations 

80% of recently polled eCommerce enthusiasts reported that they found it difficult to add integrations to their existing tech. Luckily, compared to a traditional monolithic Shopify setup, a headless architecture allows you to easily add integrations that can customize and optimize your shopping experience for higher conversions. 

How does this work? The main functionalities of monolithic setups stem from the backend architecture. Improving the experience by integrating with different tools is very difficult and in some cases, impossible. 

But, with headless commerce, the separation of the front and backend facilitates the ability to add integrations because of APIs. This adaptability removes the constraints experienced in a monolithic setup. This is why headless broadens the possibilities to create engaging shopping experiences. 

Going headless also means you can easily plug in different integrations to see what works, and easily remove and replace integrations that are not adding value. Through this experimentation, you can build a tech stack that is optimized for higher conversion. 

For example, if you want to improve your on-site site search, you could integrate with Agolia - an AI-based site search (which is faster and can handle typos way better than a regular site search). 

Optimizing your customer experience is sure to lead to more conversions, which is how adding the right integrations can positively increase your revenue!

2. Combining Content And Commerce 

One of the disadvantages of eCommerce is that people cannot physically experience the product first-hand before they buy it. Turning visitors into customers means building trust. They need to trust that your brand and your products will add value to their lives - even if they haven’t had a chance to try your product yet. 

Content commerce is a popular and effective method to establish this trust by using content to answer customer questions. For example - videos showing use cases, written FAQ’s, customer reviews, etc. So, to increase your revenue through higher conversions, you need to optimize the content on your store to showcase your product as best as you can in an online environment.

Headless commerce allows you to create content-driven experience such as story-telling product pages, product highlights within blog articles, or embedded customer content (like Instagram or TikTok). Therefore, utilizing a headless setup and content commerce will bring added revenue growth!

3. Organic Growth Engine

Compared to traditional setups, headless storefronts benefit from fast site speed and better SEO. Rising ad costs and the death of third-party cookies are two of the main reasons why marketers are pivoting towards strategies to convert organic traffic into paying customers. 

Google prefers fast sites over slower sites - think of it like this - the longer it takes for your site to load, the more it costs Google. This is why Google ranks faster sites higher. Combining the speed of a headless setup and the possibilities of content commerce, you can create a powerful organic growth engine that will help you rank for keywords relevant to your business. 

4. Localized Experiences

Creating localized experiences instead of just internationalized shopping experiences is a powerful tactic to increase conversions within specific markets. 

Internationalization in your stores refers to using the same content on your site translated into multiple languages. 

Localization goes a step further; instead of just translating your content, you create and use different content, products, and pricing/shipping methods. This creates a local feel that is tailored per market. 

Building and launching these localized experiences is much easier in a headless storefront than a monolithic storefront on Shopify. Monolithic setups require multiple Shopify instances. This means each store has it’s own code base to manage. The result is a lot of duplicate work when working on global campaigns and increased possibilities for errors. 

However, with a headless storefront, there is a single backend from which you can manage all your localized stores. This makes it easy to scale your brand while also leveraging the power of localized experiences!

5. Omnichannel

Omnichannel eCommerce refers to an approach where brands provide a seamless experience across the whole customer journey (from touchpoint to touchpoint). So no matter where you shop, you get the same feel (from mobile to in-store). 

With headless commerce, you can easily build experiences on any sales channel you’d like to add to your shopping experience. As technology advances, focusing on omnichannel will become even more important. For example, nowadays, people are purchasing items from their smart fridges to their smart speakers. A traditional setup is not always equipped to convert on these channels! This is why creating a strong omnichannel strategy and using a headless setup can increase customer conversion. 

6. A/B Testing

Headless storefronts are very customizable - and the benefit of that is that you can test and experiment with elements of your store to create an experience optimized for conversion. You can A/B test just about everything with a headless Shopify setup. 

For example, if you have two different products, one at a higher price point and one at a lower price point, you could run A/B tests on their product detail pages. Products that are more expensive usually require more consideration from consumers and may need more enablement information. So, you could test to see if adding more content to the higher-priced product impacts the conversion rate. A/B testing is a surefire strategy to test your way to a store that converts for more revenue!

Using a headless storefront builder to increase your revenue 

Building your own headless storefront is one way that you can implement all six of these strategies at once! For eCommerce brands that are already on Shopify, Instant Commerce is a powerful storefront builder that allows you to build headless stores in a matter of days. 

Here’s what some of Shopify’s fastest-growing brands have achieved with Instant Commerce:

• Curafyt increased their revenue by 38% one-month after building their storefront

• Brightly’s headless content commerce strategy has lead to 11% higher conversion

• Functional Nutrition will have 10 localized storefronts soon! 

Calculate how using a headless storefront builder can impact your eCommerce revenue growth with this revenue increase assessment calculator.