Headless Commerce

What is headless commerce?

Headless commerce is a very hot topic of discussion among merchants and developers today especially due to the growing number of shoppers using mobile devices to transact. According to Webscale’s Global Headless Report, 52% of developers and 46% of merchants surveyed agreed that headless is the number one tech trend in the world of ecommerce.

Headless commerce is a separation of the front end presentation layer and back end commerce functionality of an ecommerce web application. This decoupled architecture offers merchants the freedom to build new functionalities and engaging content and/or customer experiences, however they envision it.

In a traditional “monolithic” commerce model, new functionalities and experiences may require updates to both the front end and back end systems, where even minor updates can become long drawn projects with many challenges.

Often, an ecommerce business is very happy with their front end presentation layer and needs more from their back end infrastructure. The real value of headless commerce is that it allows merchants to retain what works best for them and add or upgrade what doesn’t.

What are the different ecommerce architectures? 

Monolithic: In this model, the front end and back end components of the web application are joined to create one entity. A majority of ecommerce applications today are monolithic.  

Commerce-led: In this, there is a commerce platform front end for user experience and checkout, and APIs for data orchestration across the infrastructure. In a commerce-led model, merchants typically use SaaS or open-source technologies and often implement a PIM, CRM, ERP, and OMS for managing the various functions.

Experience-led: Here, the ecommerce platform is separated from the front end presentation layer, so merchants can use their preferred CMS like WordPress, DXP like Crownpeak, PWA, or custom front end solutions for offering bespoke customer experiences. The ecommerce platform provides PCI DSS compliance and can be integrated with additional systems like PIM, CRM, ERP, and OMS via APIs.

The front end or the ‘head’ is the theme that controls what shoppers see when they visit an ecommerce website. Headless allows greater flexibility in content delivery or customer experience as merchants can connect a CMS, DXP, or Internet of Things (IoT) device that is custom designed for delivering content- or experience-led commerce. Here, both the front and back ends co-exist but any one can be altered without impacting the other. 

What is an API?

API or Application Programming Interface, enables applications to exchange data and functionality easily and securely. Leveraging APIs, companies can open up their applications’ data and functionality to their internal departments or external third-party developers and business partners. Each API is a set of predefined rules that explain how services and products shall communicate with each other and leverage each other’s data and functionality. An API sits between an application and the web server, acting as an intermediary and processing data transfer between the systems. Without APIs, many of the most popular web applications of today would not be possible.

APIs offer multiple layers of security: by design, because the API endpoint decouples the requestor application from the service provider application. An API call includes authorization credentials and an API gateway can restrict access, both of which minimize security threats. Also, during the exchange, additional security layers to the data are offered by HTTP headers, cookies, or query string parameters.

What is a headless architecture?

In a headless architecture, the business logic and functionalities are encapsulated in a set of APIs that reside in the back end and the front end can connect to these APIs to offer the desired customer experiences.

This decoupled architecture offers greater flexibility and speed to create the front ends that an ecommerce business needs and the freedom to use best of breed solutions for each business function like an ecommerce platform, CMS, CRM, PIM, ERP, Payment and OMS.

What do MACH and Jamstack denote in headless commerce?

MACH stands for Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. Javascript, APIs and Markup make up JAM in a Jamstack. MACH is a modern architectural approach to deliver the backend, while Jamstack is adopted for building the front end.

Both MACH and Jamstack practices enable the decoupling of static and dynamic content, allow the reuse of APIs instead of developing and maintaining app-specific databases, and host files on the cloud through a CDN.

If done right, both MACH and Jamstack approaches can offer never before flexibility, scalability, speed, openness and modularity.

In June 2022, Webscale joined the MACH Alliance as an Enabler to advocate for MACH as an ecommerce industry standard, and to deliver the best digital experiences for merchants and their customers

Headless commerce vs Traditional ecommerce?

As ecommerce merchants chase omnichannel ambitions, technology models offering utmost flexibility are chosen over rigid traditional structures.

In a headless approach, the customer side of the ecommerce application is decoupled from the technical side, offering never before flexibility that merchants and developers are increasingly looking for to create unique brand experience on the front end.

Traditional ecommerce: The most traditional ecommerce model is the monolithic. Many brands continue to follow a monolithic approach, and many developers even recommend it. The greatest disadvantages of a monolithic approach are slow time-to-market and high development cost. The biggest advantage of a monolithic application is complete control over the platform to offer a bespoke customer experience.

Headless commerce: Modern commerce increasingly relies on a headless approach where APIs come together to deliver unique brand experiences for customers across platforms, devices, browsers and regions.

What is a Headless CMS?

A headless CMS is any back end content management system where the content “body” is decoupled from the presentation layer, the “head.” Content residing in a headless CMS is delivered via APIs for display across devices. A headless CMS enables merchants to choose the most appropriate “ heads,” the presentation layers, and structures the same “body” of content reusing it across platforms and devices.

Here’s a detailed comparison of some of the leading headless CMS solutions.

What are the business benefits of headless commerce?

Speed to market: With headless commerce, ecommerce businesses can launch new front end experiences rapidly with minimum back end development effort for global and omnichannel go-to-markets.

Enhance Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores: With Google emphasizing CWV as a critical search signal, ecommerce websites have to ensure superior performance and user experience in order to maintain their search ranking. Headless solutions can play a major role in reducing delivery time and improving CWV scores, using tactics like static page generation, cache delivery and more. In turn, faster page speeds and a flawless user experience mean customers get to see more of the catalog and are likely to buy more.

Customize and personalize the experience: With the front end and back end decoupled, marketing and design teams can focus on sales promotions, conversions and overall user experience, while engineering teams can move at their own speed to maintain stability, security and consistency on the back end.

Better employee productivity and satisfaction: Headless commerce provides developers with absolute flexibility and control, and easy to use templates to create compelling user experiences leveraging APIs and third-party commerce services like CRM, ERP, PIM, OMS, and others. The simplicity of the approach ensures everyone can contribute even without advanced technical skills.  

Zero friction between teams: Developers and designers do not make a tribe! Developers use APIs, coding and tools offered by ecommerce platforms to build compelling yet consistent user experiences across omnichannels leveraging the same set of data. Designers focus on optimizing the customer experiences across omnichannels to maximize user engagement and conversions. With a headless approach, each team works at its own pace and without stepping on each other’s toes, achieving deeper collaboration and synergy.

Improved functionality and flexibility: Headless technologies are API-first, enhancing functionality and flexibility as changes can be made on the fly without impacting the back end, or origin, since they are decoupled, improving integration possibilities and eliminating downtime.

Foster innovation: A headless environment allows developers to test new technology without the fear of breaking anything as the front end is decoupled from the back end.

Accelerate conversions and lower customer acquisition costs: The customer acquisition cost in ecommerce is relatively high as businesses invest heavily in digital advertising to drive traffic to their sites. Yet only a percentage of that traffic will convert to customers and revenue. Headless offers the promise of optimizing customer acquisition cost as the content or experience-led strategy it champions helps drive organic traffic and the unique customer experiences it brings alive enhances conversions.

Scale as you grow: With a decoupled front end and back end, embracing new technology advancements is simplified. Headless infrastructure paired with PWAs, make great sense for businesses wanting to accelerate their path to mobile, while controlling their total cost of operations (development plus maintenance costs) and ensuring enhanced search visibility and performance. 

Can going headless enhance your site’s Core Web Vitals?

The short answer is yes.

For far too long, the monolithic approach delivered by traditional ecommerce platforms has prevented merchants from offering the ultimate user experience, especially when it comes to site performance. It is a cruel joke that in an increasingly mobile first world, popular ecommerce platforms and their monolithic approach, have remained firmly mobile second. 

Google’s Core Web Vitals is challenging the ecommerce industry to up their game, to get mobile-ready and put customer experience at the top of the priority list. Failure to do so will impact search rankings, sending visibility, traffic, and revenue into a downward spiral. A static generated front end, coupled with any commodity back end that is able to serve capacity requirements, is a reliable path to achieving good Core Web Vitals scores, if executed well by experienced partners.

How does headless commerce impact ecommerce customers?

Personalized and engaging omnichannel user experience: The decoupled structure of headless commerce allows merchants to distribute content more effectively across devices and browsers, whether online or offline, ensuring a seamless brand experience for customers, regardless of the touchpoint. 

Blazing fast websites: In a headless deployment, any new experience or functionality introduced are reflected instantaneously across all the front ends as they rely on API calls. Traditional ecommerce websites can take minutes or longer for all users to see the new updates.

What are the disadvantages of headless commerce?

Slower time-to-market: An average headless build can take 4-6 months, so merchants need to make a significant time commitment. As more agencies develop accelerator programs and more out-of-the-box solutions become available, we expect to see this timeframe reduced.

High cost of development and maintenance: There is a high price tag associated with headless today. It requires a complete overhaul of the front end experience, and third party integrations are still an evolving landscape, potentially causing some maintenance headaches down the road. As always, working with great partners is critical and Webscale is happy to recommend one that best fits your needs from its global ecosystem of digital agencies. 

Is headless commerce the right path for your business?

Certainly, headless is not the right path for any and every ecommerce business. The biggest reason being it involves significant effort and cost, and requires a long term commitment to realize a return on investment. To start with, decide to go the headless route, if the business goals demand it and not because one is compelled to follow the herd. If the business has to offer advanced personalization and highly customized omnichannel experiences, then headless is the best bet.  

What are the major hosting challenges for a headless store?

Multiple platforms: Since a headless approach will involve different platforms for the front end and back end, the hosting provider will need to support both. A hosting provider with a platform agnostic approach is best.

Availability: Like any ecommerce site, a headless storefront will also see huge spikes in traffic during the holiday season and sales promotions. All components of the headless storefront should be able to deliver under peak load. A hosting provider with auto-scaling capability is highly recommended to avoid unplanned downtime or sluggish page performance when traffic hits.

Performance: In ecommerce, time is money. If the site is not fast, bounce rate will increase and conversions will drop. And with Core Web Vitals becoming a search signal for Google, poor site performance will impact search visibility and thereby organic traffic. Engage a hosting provider that relies on end-end performance optimization and deep observability that helps to address issues quickly to deliver lightning fast pages. A static generated front end, coupled with any commodity back end that is able to serve capacity requirements, is a reliable path to achieving good Core Web Vitals scores, if well executed by an experienced digital agency.

Security: In a headless storefront, since more than one platform needs to be hosted, it’s likely that they are using their respective hosting accounts, maybe even a different cloud service provider. The merchant may manage those hosting accounts directly or engage a managed hosting provider. Whatever the approach, use a security technology that offers end-to-end protection from the origin to the edge.

Analytics and Control: Every headless ecommerce storefront needs a deep analytics and control tool for proactively monitoring and managing the health of the hosted applications. While there are many tools available in the market, they are either limited in scope or difficult to integrate. Engage a hosting provider that offers deep observability into every aspect of your online business: user experience, CDN, security, application performance, and code deployments and their overall impact on conversions and revenue. With monitoring and detection automated (less or no people power), management and remedial action can be proactive instead of reactive.

Support: When a sale is going on, the last thing merchants want is to wait for a ticket to be responded to by the hosting provider. Rapid, SLA-bound 24x7x365 DevSecOps support and SRE (site reliability engineering) by certified ecommerce and cloud experts should be provided by the hosting provider.

Digital agency/Developer: Headless commerce by its very nature offers creative freedom and flexibility to develop applications to suit a merchant’s unique business case. Engage a hosting provider that works in close collaboration with digital agencies and the developer community, and better still, can recommend a best fit digital agency from their ecosystem of partners that best suits your needs.

What are Front-end as a Service (FEaaS) solutions for headless?

For an ecommerce store, the content and customer experiences can come from different sources – CMS, ERP, PIM, OMS, CRM, and others – and get delivered to any target device – mobile, desktop, point of sale display, wearables, smart mirrors and other IoT devices.

In a Frontend-as-a-Service (FEaaS) platform, these pieces are fused into building blocks which are combined to deliver device specific layouts. The biggest advantage being since developers are not required to create the layouts, they can focus on integrations, new functionalities and expansion of the modular system.

Headless commerce use cases for you to consider

Custom-build: If you are certain the customer experience cannot be delivered out of the box by any one system, then there is a business case to custom build it. In a headless approach, the APIs enable the flexibility required to transcend the limitations of any one platform or technology.

 Headless + CMS build: Here, the headless approach is combined with a CMS. As the ecommerce platform is decoupled from the front end, a merchant can deploy any popular CMS solution like WordPress, DXPs like Crownpeak, or custom front end solutions for superior customer experiences that enhance engagement and conversion.

 In this model, the ecommerce platform can be connected to the CRM, ERP, PIM, or OMS via APIs, and takes care of PCI compliance and inventory management. 

PWA: Progressive web apps (PWA) are web applications that deliver a native app-like experience to users. PWAs are regular web pages or websites but appear to the user like traditional applications or native mobile applications. PWAs bring together the best of websites and mobile applications to create an immersive user experience that can lead to more time being spent on the site and higher conversion rates.

For a full technical download on everything PWA, here’s a session anchored by Webscale and our digital agency partner, Corra.

What are the advantages of a PWA?

Offline availability: PWAs, like mobile apps, and unlike websites, allow users to access them while not online. This means greater availability which drives deeper engagement. 

Mobile-like experiences: PWAs bring together the best of websites and mobile applications. Like websites they are indexable by search engines which enhances their visibility and organic traffic, while offering core website functionalities like dynamic data and database access. Like mobile applications, PWAs offer faster page loads and far better UX compared to websites. 

Robust security: PWAs use HTTPS to secure their data thereby mitigating risks associated with malicious activities.

Single-click installation: A PWA can be downloaded onto any device from a website and gets its own icon on phones and tablets. A PWA can also be listed in the Google Play Store (not yet allowed on the Apple App Store).

Skip the app stores: It is absolutely discretionary to publish a PWA on any app store. Which means merchants can not only entirely skip the tedious submission process but also push new updates on the fly without having to wait for app store approvals. New updates are auto-downloaded on a PWA when users relaunch it. 

Push notifications: Like native mobile applications, PWAs allow push notifications to user devices making it a powerful marketing and sales enabler. 

Hardware features: PWAs can use typical hardware features of mobile devices such as geolocation and camera.

Developer time and cost optimization: Websites have to be responsive and mobile applications have to be individually developed for different devices. But a PWA is platform, screen and device agnostic

significantly reducing developer time and thereby associated cost.

What are the disadvantages of a PWA?

Lack of presence on Apple App Store: The biggest disadvantage often cited about a PWA is its inability to make it to one of the world’s largest app aggregators – Apple App Store, severely impacting their visibility. iPhone and iPad users have to visit the brand’s website to download the PWA. 

Limitations on using hardware features: While geolocation and camera features of user devices can be used by a PWA, many other critical hardware features like accessing contacts and calendar, or Bluetooth and NFC are not yet possible, impacting the user experience.

Drain on device battery: Since a PWA requires intense CPU usage, it leads to fast battery drainage which can be a hassle especially for mobile users.
If you need help to decide whether you require a PWA for your business, here’s an insightful blog authored by Atwix, one of our digital agency partners.

Which are the most preferred front end applications for building a headless storefront?

Here’s a detailed comparison of some of the leading front end applications.

Which are the most preferred backend applications for building a headless storefront?

What is a headless PWA?

When a merchant chooses the PWA route to go headless, it’s called a headless PWA. As a matter of fact, merchants do not have to compulsorily pursue headless commerce with a PWA because it is just one of the approaches available. A traditional, dynamic website or native app can also be used to decouple the back end of your ecommerce platform. A headless PWA makes great sense for businesses wanting to accelerate their path to mobile, while controlling their total cost of operations (development plus maintenance costs). 

ScandiPWA, Vue Storefront and PWA Studio (Adobe) are three popular headless PWA solutions available in the market. 

Webscale for Headless Commerce Infrastructure and PWA Delivery

Webscale has the technology and expertise to ensure merchants don’t have to lose their head while going headless. 

Webscale is learning daily from managing hundreds of merchants, thousands of storefronts, millions of users worldwide and billions of dollars in revenue every year.

We have been delivering, managing and securing headless storefronts on the public cloud for years. Our Intelligent CloudOps platform, Webscale One, enables merchants to

quickly launch PWAs that combine traditional website functionalities with the best mobile app features. 

Webscale offers tailor-made infrastructure, software and services with complete observability into how the performance, security and availability are impacting the user experience across multiple devices. Combined with the Webscale VelocityEDGE, and advanced Webscale features like automatic image optimization, Site Splice and Dynamic Site Cache, the benefits to merchants include incredible performance and scalability at every layer of the application. 

Leveraging Webscale’s end-to-end PWA delivery, that integrates with any market-proven open source or licensed PWA framework, or Jamstack, Webscale accelerates a merchant’s ability to deliver new microservices quickly, securely, and without downtime.

Download the Solution Brief.

Headless Commerce starter checklist

Here’s a simple checklist which we have created based on our experience to help you kickstart your headless project and see it through to go live. 

Step 1: Choose an {ecommerce platform} for product management and shopping cart

Step 2: Identify a {headless CMS} for content management

Step 3: Select a {front end application} for customizing UX

Step 4: Engage a {digital agency} partnered with Webscale for front end or full stack development

Step 5: Trust Webscale for infrastructure, software and services with laser focus on performance, security, availability, and ongoing success