Headless Commerce: How to Streamline Your Omnichannel Experience?

Now online buyers are able to receive personalized product recommendations, drawn on artificial intelligence, and order goods whenever they are just by clicking several times on their mobile device screens. Entrepreneurs, in turn, have numerous options to choose from to make their websites faster, more profitable and achieve high-degree customizations to instantly react to upcoming market trends.

One of these options is headless website architecture. In simple words, headless architecture implies decoupling the frontend (presentation layer) and backend (application layer) of an e-commerce system. The independence of these two environments gives freedom to developers and business owners to make the data more portable and repurpose content in accordance with a particular customer segment or sales channel. Thus, a developer can make changes to frontend without affecting the back-end operations and vice versa.

Headless architecture is similar in logic to microservices, isn’t it? Indeed, headless commerce can be called a subtype of microservices, however, they are slightly different. In headless architecture, only some parts of it can be separated, while microservices allow the solution to be fully decoupled on small independent services.

How Does Headless Support Omnichannel?

In times when omnichannel retail takes over, designs for web-first monolith will most likely lean back. When a company is able to offer its consumers multiple sales channels, it makes the interaction with a brand more accessible and increases the chances of conversion.

The API-first approach, common to headless e-commerce and microservices, allows developers to connect a single backend with multiple ecosystems (frontends), such as CMS, PWA, mobile apps, and IoT. In such a way, one e-commerce solution can include unlimited touchpoints, distribute content across them, still maintain the brand identity, and seamlessly go omnichannel.

Headless architecture also simplifies inner business operations. In the same way, entrepreneurs can integrate their solution with an ERP or CRM system and enjoy centralized and, thus, hassle-free data management.

The monolith has very little to boast about. New touchpoints extensions can be quite challenging and unjustified, yet again, because of a large piece of solid code with frontend and backend tightly coupled. Even the slightest changes can compromise the entire system, so developers have to choose what works best for the solution’s predefined toolset rather than for a holistic omnichannel strategy.

How Can Retailers Benefit from Headless E-commerce?

The tendencies we notice in our e-commerce development practice indicate that modularity is the future of e-commerce. According to Forbes, headless e-commerce is getting $1.6 billion in funding. Investors are starting to consider the potential of this technology, which can be reflected in the following aspects.

Technological diversity

As soon as another market trend is getting in the way, it will be definitely adopted by one of your competitors. Your reaction speed, in this case, is essential if you want to get ahead of this competition or at least stay afloat.

A headless environment enables the testing of new technologies. Apart from the monolith with its rigid tech stack, headless architecture behaves like plasticine in the arms of professional developers. You can try on different innovations and remove them with similar success without having them fully affect the underlying systems.

Fast time to market

Time to market defines how long it takes for a solution to be developed and become available to consumers. As an experienced entrepreneur, you may already realize its importance — fast time to market makes it possible to gain customer loyalty and a competitive advantage afterward.

As a rule, the development of back-end business logic requires most of the effort. With headless architecture, there is no need to construct everything from scratch. Therefore, you can quickly deploy new products just by sticking another touchpoint to the basis.

High-converting customer experience

Online entrepreneurs are often puzzled by how to please the client, spoiled by numerous and quite persuasive offers on the market. Personalization is always a key to solving almost any problem, related to conversions. Any target audience highly appreciates the fact its buying preferences are taken into consideration.

Due to the headless nature of an application, you can differentiate your customer experience and tailor a specific message (personal recommendations, promotions, etc.) to a certain segment across a certain channel. Moreover, you can customize the content you deliver on the fly.

How exactly can you personalize your retail with headless technologies? It’s simple. For example, when you expand your business and enter new markets, you are able to integrate a desirable payment method by region, not having to interrupt the existing payment options and replatform the entire app.

Long-term cost savings

No less pleasant plus of going headless is long-term cost savings. Obviously, when you consider implementing a headless platform, this idea seems to be more expensive in comparison with a traditional monolith, since headless architecture demands much investment in front-end developers’ work.

But let’s examine the roots of the beneficial impact of headless e-commerce on your capital. You will be able to easily multiply frontends and reach a wider audience — either web or mobile admirers. Once you notice positive customer acquisition and customer retention metrics, you’ll understand that your investments are starting to be paid off.

Conclusion

The current market establishes new rules, and going headless under the present conditions offers countless prospects for online entrepreneurs. Firstly, it is the possibility to construct your shopping experiences on the go. Secondly, headless e-commerce CMS’s extremely facilitate omnichannel retail and personalization strategy fulfillment — you are able to dynamically display content to target audiences based on their location, order history, etc.

At Dinarys, we create e-commerce solutions that are ready to scale with you anytime. We offer diligent assistance throughout the entire development lifecycle and bring to life ideas with the use of reliable e-commerce technologies, among which are Magento, Shopware, Salesforce, and CommerceTools.

Contact us today to choose the best headless CMS for e-commerce, plan your software architecture, and unlock the full potential of your enterprise. Let’s go headless together