Customer expectations and the need to give customers the best online experience have both led to brands and companies building monolithic businesses that do what they need to, but that cannot be decoupled easily. These systems are difficult to improve, they slow business down, and block innovations. A better approach is headless ecommerce.
What is Headless Ecommerce?
A website consists of the frontend, backend and an API or service that connects them both. Headless ecommerce decouples the frontend and backend, allowing developers to use whatever technologies they want for both. Developers then write APIs that allow them to pass information and data between the frontend and backend to ensure the website works correctly.
Headless Ecommerce Provides Better User Experience
Because the frontend is decoupled from the backend, developers can create custom user interfaces for the different devices that customers use to access the business’s ecommerce platform. For example, they may have a custom frontend for laptops, tablets, and apps. The website and app could use the same data from the backend but provide vastly different user experiences.
This means the marketing team and developers can work together to create custom frontends for different customers depending on what they use. A bank, for example, could have a website where a person can check their balance and an app that gives customers access to various other services. The needs of people who use either platform are different, but they are getting the best user experience on either platform.
Faster Feature Addition
Headless ecommerce also allows businesses to add new features to their platforms quickly. Since front-end developers do not have to deal with the backend and vice versa, they can implement features faster. They can also make wholesale design changes to the website without affecting the backend.
This speed of feature addition, changes and improvements can be important for businesses that are experimenting with different user interfaces to see which one works best. Since the data is already available, it is just a matter of switching out the front end or making changes as needed.
Better Omnichannel Experiences
It is not unusual for people to see your product on social media, search for it and visit your website on mobile, add it to their cart on their mobile devices, and complete the payment on their computers.
Since the website and app that they use to check the product and complete the purchase use the same backend, a business can ensure seamless omnichannel experiences.
The ability to provide these omnichannel experiences is increasing as the use of commerce centric IOT devices like interactive digital signage and smart kiosks increases.
Easier Multi Store Commerce Setups
In the past, businesses that wanted to open a store in a different language for a different region had to build a new website. With the backend holding the data and an API supplying it, businesses can build as many websites as they wish much faster. All they would need to work on is the frontend user interfaces.
Headless ecommerce has become very popular for various reasons. With these benefits, it is impossible to see developers going back to building the monolithic websites of the past.
