Aaron Conant  0:18  

Happy Tuesday everybody, my name is Aaron Conant, I'm the co founder and managing director at BWG Connect. We're a networking and knowledge sharing group with 1000s of brands. And we do exactly that we network in knowledge share together to stay on top of newest trends, strategies, pain points, whatever it is that shaping digital, I chat with 20 to 30 brands a week to stay on top of those trends, just little mini digital strategy sessions. But so I throw that out there. Because I'd love to have a conversation with anybody on the line today, just ping me afterwards, we'll put some time in the calendar. And we'll walk through it. And I'll pick your brain on what your biggest pain points are. And that's how we'll get some of these topics in the future ones as well. housekeeping items we get started, we're kicking this off a couple minutes after the half hour here, and we're gonna try and end up end about one minute early. The other thing is, if you have any questions along the way, don't hesitate to drop them into the q&a section or into the chat section, we'll get them answered. As soon as we can. If it's easier, you can always email me Aaron Aaron@BWGconnect.com. So I don't think anybody is surprised that headless is a topic that's been coming up over and over again, is conversations we've been having. We got some great friends partners, the network over at Swell people on their team we've known for a long time, they agreed to jump on and tell us a little bit about being going headless and the headless strategy and what it means. But, Kelsey, I'm gonna kick it over to you first, if you want to do a brief intro on yourself and Swell, then we can take it to Greg, and we'll jump into some of the content. Sounds good?

Kelsey Kinney  1:43  

Sounds great. Yeah. So I'm Kelsey Mark center, I work in Product Marketing here at Swell and at Swell were our sort of guiding light here is so that people will never have to hear that phrase, your platform can support that. So we're really all about headless eCommerce. We are an eCommerce platform, but really focused on that API first and headless space. And of course, we'll dive into that today a little bit more and kind of explain those concepts. So you have a better idea of what that means. Exactly. But yeah, we're really excited to be here today.

Greg Hoskin  2:19  

Greg, Greg Hoskin, I lead the solutions engineering team at Swell. So my team works with merchants every day who are making the journey into headless and adopting Swell's platform. And I based out of Austin, Texas, back to you, Kelsey. 

Kelsey Kinney  2:36  

Awesome, yeah. And I should have said, I'm in Massachusetts. 

Aaron Conant  2:39  

Cool. So just a reminder, if anybody you have any questions or anything you want us to tackle as we're going through here, just you know, submit them real time, we'll get them answered the chat the q&a or you can email me. Okay, Kelsey. Let's jump in. 

Kelsey Kinney  2:51  

Let's do it. So, today's webinar, we're going to be talking about headless Of course, and really why why eCommerce brands and particularly high growth, eCommerce brands are going headless, and utilizing this kind of newer technology. So we'll go over, you know, really how eCommerce has changed, and particularly in the last few years, how it's changed because of the pandemic. And of course, I will explain exactly what headless eCommerce is what that means, answer some of those questions around like, how does this affect our brand? Should we be thinking about this? What are the kinds of questions that we should be asking ourselves as a business to determine if this is the right fit for us? And then how you can utilize the flexibility given by a headless platform to power your brand growth? And we will happily answer any and all questions as we go through that. So we already enjoyed ourselves. So I'll skip this here. But I mentioned that eCommerce has changed, right. And I think one of the biggest changes is that really, it's just skyrocketed. There's, in 2021, there were $4.9 trillion in worldwide eCommerce sales, and that is predicted to grow to $7.39 trillion by 2025. So if you take a look at this graph, I mean, again, skyrocketing. And, you know, it's really just worth kind of digging in deep and seeing how you can capitalize on this growth of eCommerce. And 58% of Internet users, myself included, and probably many of you on this call today, buy something online every week, every week. So just think about that. I mean, it has changed our routines in many ways, things that you may have gone to a store for previously. You're now buying that online and have that, you know, I think it was four $4 trillion that were spent in 2021. On eCommerce sales. 3.5 6 trillion of those dollars were spent on mobile eCommerce. So the way that we are purchasing has also changed in addition to the frequency, and kind of just how much we're spending overall in eCommerce as well. Oops. And so just thinking about how you shop online and how I shop online, really, it's no longer enough to just go to a website, see an item, any purchase a right, we want to kind of have an experience, we want the website that we're going to tell us a story to make an impact on us and create an emotional connection with a brand. And that experience should be a good experience, it's got to be fast, I mean, literally every millisecond counts, when it comes to conversion rates. Nobody wants to go to a website where it takes five full seconds to load and you know, you're gonna give up, you're gonna go buy that that item from another website or similar item from another website. And it needs to be intuitive to it's got to make sense, the UI has to be very, very easy. And you know, your, your your fingers, particularly on mobile just has to go in the right place get you to where you need to go easily. And of course, it has to be innovative. Again, we want that kind of unique experience and to create that emotional bond with a brand. So eCommerce has changed pretty significantly. And really, when you start to think about all of these changes, as a business, you kind of start to ask this question of, do we have to build a custom back end? And you know, maybe even a custom front end as well, to achieve all of this? Can we offer this really innovative experience and offer this to our customers and create that bond and create a really unique shopping experience online? Do we need to build something custom to do that? And it's a really good question, right? Because custom, there are a lot of benefits to going custom. For example, you can build a store using your team's preferred technologies, you can craft a custom purchase and checkout and order fulfillment flow to make sure that that that that checkout experience is streamline the buying experience is really streamlined for your customers. And then you can also do that on your team's end as well to create custom workflows on the back end, to make your team more efficient. So you can really build exactly what you need and want, both for your customers and your team internally, when you build something custom. But there are also things to keep in mind with that, too, it takes a lot of time, typically requires a really significant upfront cost to build that out, because you're essentially building your own platform when you're doing this. And it requires ongoing maintenance. So that means a lot of time, a lot of money. And you have to have developers on staff to keep those things secure for both your customers and your business internally. And then ultimately, really, it stifles creativity within your marketing and sales teams. So think about like, you know, your marketing team has this really unique idea, they want to try a new business model, they can't do that, because they have to go through all this process of having a developer developer build it out takes months, eventually, they're just gonna stop having these are really not having them. But stop bringing these creative ideas to the table because it's just too much effort and too much time to really bring it to market. And so this is why a lot of us have gone with software as a service, eCommerce platforms, because you know, we get those benefits of like reduced maintenance, keeping, that keeps your site up to date and secure. You don't have to worry about that as a business. You don't need as much development work to get these experiences into market, you can put ideas into action quicker. And there's of course, a lot of cost savings around this because you don't have to have all of that ongoing maintenance. And I need all these developers on staff to do that. But, of course, we want that flexibility that comes with headless and I'll define that in a second here. But really, we want that flexibility to create these really innovative new ideas really interesting and exciting website experiences. So we need that flexibility that comes with custom. But we want that security we want that ease of use that goes along with typical kind of software as a service platforms. And so when you think about something like you know, Shopify, the biggest, the biggest name when it comes to eCommerce platforms out there, they've really focused on just getting brands up and running. And that's that's amazing. Right? That is a huge, that was a huge thing almost two decades ago when they first came out. And it was amazing to be able to get online and get your brand going and be able to put your products there for customers to buy. But in this day and age of eCommerce without Things have changed, we kind of require more flexibility and more creativity that typically goes along with a custom custom build. And we're we're wanting the software as a service component of that. But we want to kind of blend the two, right to get the best of both worlds. So, let's talk headless. But before I talk headless, I want to just define the opposite of headless here. Because I think it's important to understand, you know, both ends of that spectrum to really fully get the picture. So a monolith is the opposite of a headless application. So mono is Monolith is an application that has all data storage, business logic, and user interfaces, tightly coupled in one system. So when we're thinking eCommerce, that means an interconnected front end or your storefront, and your back end or your admin dashboard. So the to communicate with each other, they pass information, you know, with each other, but they're really they're tightly tightly connected, and so you can't really break them apart. The information is really wound together. And so that's good for a lot

Aaron Conant  11:09  

of people. Today, right? It's the the Shopify is the

Kelsey Kinney  11:13  

yes, this is the Shopify. Exactly, yep. And so and we'll talk a little bit in a second to around like, this idea of adding headless like functionality to a monolith, which is different than what we consider kind of like, true, headless. And so of course, there's great things like I was mentioning, before, you know, Shopify has built this really incredible business around being a monolithic eCommerce platform, where they make it just incredibly easy to get up and running online. And so this is a great, honestly, it's a great fit for tons of businesses out there, because a lot of businesses are just, you know, they're very simple, there's just a couple of skews that you need to worry about, it's a very typical kind of, you know, somebody places an order, it gets sent out, they make, maybe they have their own warehouse, like, it's just very simple. They're not doing anything sort of, you know, complex. And so, it is a really good fit for a lot of businesses. But the bad piece of this is that, because it's so tightly connected as an application, and architecture, it lacks flexibility, you will, and this happens, this is, of course, what we hear at Swell a lot is brands will run into this, you know, they want to try something new, and they hear platform can't do that sorry, like, you know, we just don't offer that. So they'll have to add on some kind of app, there's an extra cost there, or it's just not possible at all, and they can't do it, you know, in any in any sense. And so it will tend to struggle with those more complex use cases, which is too bad for a lot of brands that are really these high growth, innovative kind of brands that want to do different unexciting things. And the other issue with monolithic architecture here, too, is that, you know, these, these kind of platforms, like Shopify was founded almost two decades ago at this point. And so when they start adding new features onto this architecture, it leads to this kind of messy code kind of different behavior than we would expect, can just kind of lead to some issues, when you're expecting certain behavior on the back end, and it doesn't do what it's supposed to. So just a lot of kind of complexity happens there that you know, you're really not looking for. So, opposite of monolith, is is something that is headless. And so a headless application has an architecture that separates that back end content, the data storage and functionality from the customer facing rendering of that information. So that is typically done via API's. And we'll define that in a second here. But in eCommerce, when we say headless we are we're kind of talking about the front end, the storefront is separate from the back end are kind of like your dashboard. And so these two things will pass information via API's to each other, but they're not so tightly connected, like in a monolith, where, you know, adding anything on top of that gets really kind of messy. And so the good thing about this is you get that infinite flexibility, you know, that you would get with custom. And so it's, you know, you really can kind of do whatever you want, right for complex use cases or unique business models. Like I said before, you know, if you're trying to add some kind of different business model, and you're on Shopify, you might hear we just can't do that. Like it's just not something we offer. Sorry. And that's unfortunate when you've got these really creative ideas that you want to put into market. And the other thing you can do to again, same similar kind of thing with custom is that you can increase the operational efficiency of your team when you build your back end to kind of suit your business needs in particular. So really thinking through like your, you know, fulfillment flows for your team, you can, you can set things up to make that really easy for your team and very efficient. Now on the the other side, of course, is the bad here, this is typically still a somewhat developer heavy model, there are open source, headless platforms that, you know, you're still essentially building quite a bit of it yourself. So it takes a lot of developer work, you kind of lose the benefits of software as a service like that maintenance piece to kind of keep things up to date and secure. So it gets rid of some of the kind of complexities or hardships of going custom, but not enough for a lot of businesses to really make that leap. Because it will still just be very expensive, typically. And it's it's also often overkill for simple businesses. So like I was saying before, you know, a perfect fit for a Shopify store, just a few skews, you know, very kind of simple workflows, there's really often not much of a need for them to go headless. And that's totally fine. You know, we all have different businesses and different brands. And it's really worth asking your yourself the question, what is our brand trying to accomplish? What are we what do we envision doing in the future? How fast are we growing? Do we want to try you know, different kinds of business models? Or are we doing something that's a little bit more complex than kind of a typical, just put a couple skews online? For our customers to buy? Because if the answer is yes, then headless can be a really good option. Now, I promised I would touch on this idea of, of true headless versus just headless functionality. And I think this is important to mention, because, you know, like we were discussing at the beginning of this call, like headless is just this huge topic right now it's it's becoming more popular, particularly in eCommerce, and monolithic, you know, platforms, they want a piece of that. And so the way that they kind of build on headless functionality is by building their API's after the fact. And what that means is that it essentially still will limit the flexibility that is given to a business and can result in that kind of inconsistent behavior. And you'll still eventually maybe not right, right away, but you'll still eventually end up hearing platform can't do that. Sorry. And so really, it's just extending that road a little bit further before, you might hear that, but you're still eventually going to hear it. So API, let's talk about that. Because I think this too, is when we say truly headless or true, headless. What we mean by that is API first. So to take a step back, an API, you know, is an application programming interface. It's a set of programming calls that expose the functionality of an application to developers or other applications. So really, that just makes it simple to develop integrated applications. By offering that way, like I was saying, with a front end and a back end to kind of pass information and credentials between those two sides of your eCommerce store. And so when we say API first or truly headless, what that means is designing a product or a platform around the API from the ground up, rather than building a product and then adding an API later. So this is where like something like Shopify Plus, and you know, if you if you Google Shopify, headless, they've got a whole page about it. They'll tell you how they do headless, you know, they have headless functionality. And they do, but it's not what we would consider true headless. And that's simply because they're, they're building these API's after the fact. And they're only exposing a small fraction of the, the overall kind of platform via API's. So really, you have just a limited range to work with. And so you'll still, like I said before, you'll run into certain things that are inaccessible via API's, so you won't be able to edit them. Or you'll have to just use apps for for other things that you want to edit. So again, it's kind of like extending that road of that runway of hearing that phrase, the platform can't do that can't support that a little bit longer than you would just with like typical Shopify but it's, it's still going to happen at a certain point. So a truly headless software as a service platform, right? Like that's what we're all sort of looking for. And really it comes down to being the recipe for creativity without that headache of going custom. And with that, you know, your brand can offer what it takes to succeed today, we talked about how eCommerce has really changed particularly over the last few years, and you need to be be able to, to kind of be creative and be innovative and create these really cool brand experiences using unique and complex business models. So think about things like, try before you buy social selling subscriptions, literally any kind of use case or business model, you can imagine, you could build it on a platform like this. You could also build a really media rich storefront, for that immersive brand experience, while having a blazingly fast web experience, like we talked about before, you know, time is money here, every millisecond counts. When we're thinking about conversions, someone's going to bounce from your page, if it's taking too long to load, that's just the reality of it, unfortunately. And so a truly headless platform can support you know, the most up to date, innovative kind of technologies that keep your website, your storefront really, really fast. And then you can also customize the checkout to remove hurdles from the purchase experience. And that's something we hear a lot about here as Swell, where people are just kind of sick of like the stock checkout experience, right, they want to create something that's a little bit more accustomed to their business, and you can apps, you can absolutely do something like that on a truly headless platform. So with all of those things, you can increase your average order value and lifetime value, and get higher conversion rates all which of course, equals more revenue for your brand. So we're a little biased here, of course, we work for Swell. And like I said earlier, you know, I think really our guiding light, and what we aim to do here at Swell is make it so the people and brands never have to hear this phrase, your platform can't do that. And our founder, Eric Ingram, you know, he, he is a eCommerce entrepreneur and a developer himself and he created Swell to, you know, prevent these kinds of limiting problems that a lot of brands were running into when they're on something like Shopify, and they just, they keep hearing that over and over, it kind of starts a small things that, you know, a platform can't support, but it leads to bigger and bigger issues, the bigger your brand gets. And the more creative as a brand you get as well. And so these legacy platforms, they just really struggle to kind of give businesses what they need to, you know, be creative and be innovative in this modern era of commerce. And so of course, that's that's our goal here as well is to create a platform where you have that flexibility, that freedom to be creative, try new things with your marketing, and, you know, not feel limited by your platform or not have to essentially like make your platform work for your business, like you're working around it, your your platform should be working for you and your business, not the other way around. So on Swell, really, the only limit to what is possible is your imagination. And that, of course, is very different from a lot of other platforms out there where you know, you are limited by the platform and not your imagination. So I want to bring Greg on here for a second because I think it's useful to think about some of the brands that we have on Swell, and just what they've accomplished and what they've built on Swell to kind of wrap your head around like, truly anything is possible. So Greg, you want to hop on here?

Greg Hoskin  23:34  

Yeah, sure. Thanks, Kelsey. So so far, we've discussed some of the key differences between monolithic versus headless and true API first versus some headless functionality. So in order to help kind of tie these concepts together, I'd like to highlight one of our merchants Spin Coffee, they were able to launch and grow into one of the largest online coffee shops, and they continue to innovate using this headless approach. So Spin originally began with a Wi Fi connected coffee machine, allowing their coffee enthusiast to fine tune the machine roasting settings using a mobile app. But Spin didn't stop innovating. Once they fulfilled their first pre orders. They soon launched a roaster marketplace, which features hundreds of individual roasters and 700 types of coffee. So new roasters can then like onboard easily onto this platform, setting up new products and promotions tracking fulfillment. It's all done through a custom vendor dashboard that they set up on their site. The Spin customers can even gain access to a coffee quiz, which lets them define which flavors and brewing methods that they prefer, which you can see here on the left. The customer is then presented with suggestions that they're able to discover new types of coffee, and they can buy those types. They can even sign up for a premium subscription which like aside from the free shipping out and also allows them to auto order beans on the machine when it detects that the coffee levels are getting low. So with a traditional monolithic application, much of this functionality would just need to be built custom, like the quiz. And various paid apps would need to be added, like handling subscriptions. Their site speed also will be limited to whatever storefront was offered by the monolithic monolithic eCommerce platform. But by going headless Spin was able to tie everything together from the coffee machine to the mobile app to the roaster, marketplace and dashboard, all under a single eCommerce umbrella. So they're now able to fine tune their website performance to the latest specs, increasing their conversions, and their internal resources are more focused on continuing to innovate in the coffee industry, rather than maintaining an array of custom apps and infrastructure. So the end of the day, that's a lot for the perfect cup of Joe, but it's really allowed Spin to grow quickly. And it's all been made possible by the power of a truly headless API first eCommerce platform. I'll turn it over for for Kelsey, any questions?

Kelsey Kinney  26:16  

Awesome. Thanks, Greg.

Aaron Conant  26:17  

near perfect timing here, by the way, as well. And we can open it up for questions for sure. If people have that I think you like literally answered probably almost all the questions that would have popped up things that come to mind for me. So number one, anybody on the line today, you know, we can probably go over a few minutes. But if you have questions, the team is Swell. Just, they're just leaders in this space, but they're also incredibly nice people that will just jump on the phone with you and kind of walk through what it means. I think this is a fantastic presentation, we're going to make it available to everybody. But if you want to follow up connection, you know, 100% worth having a connection with conversation with somebody on the Swell team, they're all around fantastic. What is the replatforming? I'll use that term. What does that look like? What does that timeframe look like? how impactful is it? And you know, I don't know, how is their typical conversion costs. And then with that, we'll kind of gauge if others have questions, feel free to drop them in the chat and the q&a, but also knowing we'll probably wrap up here in the next like three minutes or so.

Greg Hoskin  27:21  

Yeah, and I mean, to kind of inject my personal opinion, I think, you know, the RE platforming into headless is inevitable. So, you know, it's something that that will need to be done if you want to continue to innovate, but to more directly answer your question, you know, there's a wide range of strategies, we certainly recommend replatform replatforming all at once, if that's possible, but we also understand that, you know, a phased approach might be necessary. So, you know, say you just want to take advantage of the the products kind of PIM in order functionality, but you're not quite ready for subscriptions, and you want to maintain your own customer records, that's entirely possible, because of this API, first approach, where all of our API's, all of your data is accessible on the platform, and you can communicate with existing systems if you need to. So, you know, replatforming can be done in different ways. Of course, all at once is recommended. But a phased approach is also possible. A phased

Aaron Conant  28:23  

approach. Awesome. It's not normal, right? Anyway, the awesome. Are there other as we wrap up, what are they? What are you guys most excited about in this

Kelsey Kinney  28:33  

space? It's a good question. I mean, I think that it just offers like, it makes the the impossible possible, I think, which is a huge, a huge thing, like, you know, you can have any kind of crazy idea and really get that get that online and going and sell in whatever way you want, in ways that just were not possible or and are not possible on a monolithic platform. So to me, that's like the biggest sort of, you know, area that I see a lot of brands being able to jump into, and just do really creative stuff. And, you know, get their, their brand, either off the ground or grow it exponentially because they're doing something totally different that no one else is doing.

Greg Hoskin  29:21  

I completely agree. And I'm so excited to see just how folks are innovating every day, you know, with our customers able to say, you know, buy a product on their cell phone with try before you buy and then return it in a store. And you know, see all this omni channel kind of approach evolve. It's really exciting.

Aaron Conant  29:39  

Yeah. So last question that comes in here is what is the onboarding? Thanks, Dina. What is the onboarding process and requirements gathering and typical timeframe typical of a pure headless platform versus a bolt on headless? Is there an off the shelf functionality and a pure headless platform?

Greg Hoskin  29:57  

Yeah, absolutely. And I think Kelsey, you were You know, addressing part of that with the kind of combination of a headless platform, but also the SAS component to it, where you're getting all of those things out of the box like subscriptions and, and your products, but you're also able to continue to grow. And in my opinion with a bolt on, you're gonna quickly start running into issues when you start to innovate and

Kelsey Kinney  30:21  

experiment. Yeah, and I think there's, you know, like, if you think about like Shopify, for example, where they've made it very easy to, you know, add your products, get your customers on there, and, you know, all just sort of the basics, like on Swell, all that stuff is, like Greg mentioned out of the box, like you have all that capability, it's just that you get that additional flexibility on top of just, you know, being able to jump in and build right away and kind of get up and running. So it really just takes things a little bit further and gives you more of that flexibility and creativity, but it's still like, just as easy.

Aaron Conant  31:00  

Awesome. Love it. Well, with that. I think we're going to wrap it up here. I actually think maybe next time we do a full hour, I think there's going to be enough here to unpack and so, you know, Kelsey, Greg, thanks so much for your time today. Thanks for being such great friends, partners and supporters of the network as a whole. Again, anybody have follow up questions on this space whatsoever? These guys are the leaders in the space on a percent. We're setting up a follow up conversation with them to learn more. And with that, we're gonna wrap it up. Thanks again, Kelsey. Thanks, Greg. Hope everybody has a fantastic Tuesday. Have a great rest of your week. Everybody, take care, stay safe and look forward to having you at a future event. Thanks again, team. That was awesome. Thank you.