Why headless commerce is gaining popularity?

Sam Van Hees • 22 February 2023

Contents

Why are we moving towards a future where headless commerce is the new standard? Perhaps the biggest reason is that headless commerce gives brands the ability to quickly roll out changes, with little or no work required on the backend and no interruption to the customer experience.

In addition, there are 3 big trends shaping the world of commerce that are giving headless commerce an even greater boost.

1. Omnichannel commerce

Since the start of online shopping in the 1990s, technology has evolved rapidly. In the early days, the desktop was the only device brands had to take into account.

Today, brands must have the ability to tailor experiences to different devices such as mobile devices. The customer journey is becoming increasingly more complex: 74% of customers have used multiple channels to start and complete a transaction.

Headless commerce is built for the omnichannel world. Since the backend and frontend are decoupled, you can turn any possible customer touchpoint (mobile, app, desktop, voice shopping, social commerce) into a sales opportunity while the commerce side is managed from a single back end.

Go-to-market timelines are faster and development costs are lower since the changes to the frontend can be made without touching the backend.

2. Impact on SEO (core-web vitals)

Search engines like Google are one of the main drivers behind people’s buying behavior. It’s also no coincidence that search engine optimization (SEO) is a key part of many eCommerce marketing strategies.

In June 2020 Google announced a big change to its algorithm. Page speed was going to become more important than ever. Now Google looks at the largest contentful paint, cumulative layout shift, and first input delay. In simpler terms, this is what Google’s algorithm uses to assess page loading speeds.

Headless commerce sets your eCommerce SEO efforts up for success on the search engine results page. Since the frontend and backend are separated, it’s only the frontend that needs to load for site visitors and search engine crawlers to access it.

3. Headless CMS

When opting for a monolithic solution you need to use the CMS of your eCommerce back end. While these content management systems function on a basic level, they are not optimal for fast-growing and larger eCommerce businesses.

Multi-language is for example known to be nearly impossible with the average native eCommerce CMS. With headless commerce, you, fortunately, don’t need to use the same CMS as your eCommerce back end. Instead, you can couple a headless CMS to manage your content.

A headless CMS is a back-end-only content management system. With it you can deliver personalized experiences anywhere you want simultaneously - web, mobile, social, IoT, and even VR. Besides that, chopping off the presentation layer of your content means you never have to worry about content migration when you migrate to another eCommerce platform.

“With a headless CMS you can publish content updates to any of your storefronts —without settling for the less-than-ideal native eCommerce platform solution” -Shopify

If you want to dive deeper into headless commerce, check out the following articles:

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