What are the benefits of headless commerce?

eCommerce brands currently relying on traditional commerce may be wondering why they should adopt headless architecture instead of their monolithic platforms. Well, in this chapter we will cover the benefits.

Speed to market

Headless commerce speeds up time to market in a couple of ways. 

First, it removes one of the most frustrating sources of delays, waiting on other teams to get something done. The separation of the frontend and backend enables each section to operate independently.

This becomes incredibly useful when developers need to work on a frontend interface, marketing needs to launch a new campaign, and procurement needs to handle inventory issues. Each group can operate independently yet without being siloed, thus increasing a business’ speed to market. 

Secondly, speed to market is especially useful for marketing teams as they can quickly launch new promotional sites, roll out multiple campaigns to different audiences and operate more efficiently than with monolithic platforms. 

Improved website performance

Headless commerce helps to improve website performance as websites can load faster, which is becoming a key factor in SEO performance.

Since the release of Core Web Vitals, Google assesses page speed as part of its ranking factors. With headless commerce, frontend experiences can load much faster since they are decoupled from the backend. On the other hand, traditional commerce platforms can slow down site speed and negatively impact SEO. 

Headless commerce also makes it possible to optimize mobile performance and improve security. These things can also improve the overall website performance, positively impact SEO rankings and help to deliver a better customer experience. 

Omnichannel commerce

One of the key benefits of headless commerce is that it enables your brand to deliver an omnichannel shopping experience. You can create shopping interfaces and deliver content to any channel imaginable using headless commerce, allowing you to meet your customers wherever they are in their journey. 

Customization and personalization

If you rely on traditional commerce, you risk delivering a bland shopping experience to your customers. Headless commerce lets you customize the experience for different channels and user groups. Since headless commerce also enables you to pull data from the CRM in the backend, you can use that data to personalize the buyer’s journey for each customer. 

Developer flexibility

Traditional commerce approaches can place shackles on developers, restricting them to a particular set of templates and channels for creating experiences. It can also limit the tools they use to build digital experiences. Headless commerce gives developers more flexibility and freedom, allowing them to choose the frontend frameworks and tools that fit their needs.

Ease of integration

Headless commerce relies on APIs to make connections between the frontend and backend. These APIs also streamline the integration process.

For example, eCommerce stores that already leverage Shopify to manage the backend functionality but feel restricted by Shopify templates can use APIs to integrate Shopify with a headless CMS like Storyblok and a headless storefront solution like Instant Commerce. These APIs can also be used to integrate with other tools in the eCommerce tech stack like PIM and ERP systems. 

Read More: Top 5 benefits of headless commerce