You may have heard about “headless commerce” but maybe you’re not quite sure how it works and how it can help your ecommerce brand. Headless commerce is one of the most important emerging trends for ecommerce companies, and impacts how you enable transactions with your consumers. 

What Is Headless Commerce?

Headless commerce is a separation of the front end of an ecommerce experience (for example, the customer touchpoint, like a website or an app) and the back end (like the functionality such as a shopping cart or payments). 

There are a lot of benefits to this separation, not the least of which is being able to provide an omnichannel experience to shoppers. More and more, consumers expect a seamless e-commerce shopping experience from wherever they are. 

Today, 87% say they want a personalized and consistent experience across all shopping channels. And 56% say they're likely to shop at a retailer that provides a shared cart across all digital channels. Headless commerce offers multiple ways that your consumers can buy from you online. 

The traditional model of ecommerce is all about sending shoppers to a website to purchase their items. The modern shopping experience fueled by headless commerce is to allow consumers to buy from anywhere they want like a mobile app, a wearable device or an SMS text message to name a few.

Is Headless Commerce Right for My Ecommerce Brand?

If your ecommerce brand wants to create an omnichannel shopping experience, then headless commerce is for you.

Traditional ecommerce platforms like Shopify or Magento have allowed ecommerce brands a way to get up and running very quickly using an all-in-one solution. But these solutions were built on the notion that people are buying only from their computer via a web browser. 

This is great for brands that want to rely on their websites for transactions and don’t need a ton of flexibility when designing the ecommerce experience. But the shopping experience is evolving. 

Younger generations especially are expecting the shopping experience to be seamless. One study showed that one-fifth of U.S. consumers have shopped by using the “buy” button on social media. 

And when the data is broken down by age group, “the share of 15-22-year-olds who engage in either of these shopping behaviors is about double that of the general population, with 37% using the ‘buy’ button and 30% clicking on a shoppable post.”

Other research indicates that already, 22% of shoppers are interested in making touchless or one-click payments from a wearable device. We can imagine how this number will increase in the next five to 10 years.

For those who want to offer a richer ecommerce experience that is available through many touchpoints and devices, headless commerce is the way to go. 

Remember, having an all-in-one ecommerce platform means that the front end and the back end are inexplicably tied together. This means a lack of flexibility where you are limited to what the platform can do. 

While many existing ecommerce platforms like Shopify, Salesforce, BigCommerce, Magento and WooCommerce are increasing their support for this headless commerce, it’s only to a certain degree. To answer the demand, entirely new headless platforms are emerging, such as Fabric and Nacelle.

So, if offering your consumer a way to check out seamlessly via an SMS text message or a wearable device, for example, will impact your bottom line and increase customer satisfaction, headless commerce can help.

How Does Headless Commerce Work?

Without getting too technical, here’s how headless commerce works: 

The back end of the ecommerce experience, which houses all the logistics of shopping like a cart, payment system, shipping and so on, is separated from the front end. The front end represents all the customer touchpoints, be it an IoT device, a computer, an application or more. 

With headless commerce, the back end is now connected to the front end via APIs (application programming interfaces). These APIs allow you to attach any front end customer touchpoint to the back end ecommerce experience.

What this means is that you can use any screen, device or application you want for ecommerce on the front end without disturbing the critical functions of the back end and vice versa. 

With the front end and the back end working independently, it gives you major flexibility to innovate on either without impacting one another.

3 Benefits of Headless Commerce

Here are 3 benefits of headless commerce:

1. New ways to reach shoppers and create better brand experiences. People want an uncomplicated shopping experience. That means being able to let them buy from wherever they are in the moment -- whether it’s a wearable device, an SMS text message or social media channel. Headless commerce allows you to design an ecommerce experience that caters to what your customers want with the goal of increasing sales. With headless commerce, you can create seamless brand experiences across multiple channels. 
2. More flexibility and more innovation. With the front end and back end separated, you are able to choose the front end you want and couple it with the back end of your choice (and the development team can work in their programming language of choice). Plus, your teams can work on either one without the worry of impacting the other. With headless commerce, your teams are able to innovate freely. 
3. Speed of execution. On traditional ecommerce platforms, making desired changes can take months or longer (if you can do them at all). With headless commerce, if you want to change something, you can. If you need to ramp up for a new launch, for example, everything is already there in a central location, and can be delivered anywhere via an API. 

Headless Commerce Example

What if you could enable a frictionless checkout experience via SMS text messaging versus sending people away from their app and into an online store? This could more than double your conversion rate, given that the average cart abandonment rate by mobile device is about 81%.

Here’s an example: Headless commerce could allow your repeat customers who already have their payment information saved to place an order by simply replying to your marketing text message.

But there are many other use cases for headless commerce. This article outlines 15 examples of brands using headless commerce. 

Final Thoughts

Modern commerce is now increasingly happening through multiple different front ends, such as a brand’s website, a mobile app, marketplaces like Amazon and Ebay, social media sites like Instagram and Pinterest, and inside marketing channels like SMS and Facebook Messenger. 

It is very important for brands to start preparing for headless commerce to future-proof their e-commerce implementation. This means adopting more headless features of existing e-commerce platforms and also exploring new platforms to enable headless architecture.