As eCommerce becomes increasingly centralized to meet evolving consumer demands, many businesses are reconsidering the functionality of their monolithic or single-use customer experience platforms. To create a more seamless customer journey, headless and composable commerce options are more flexible integrated concepts that separate the front-end presentation platform from the back-end software to develop a customer-focused, best-in-class tech stack.
Yet some companies are influenced by this solution’s growing popularity and lack consideration for its features, which can give the customer an inconsistent and confusing experience. So what should you know when contemplating headless or composable commerce for your business, and how can you implement one of those approaches seamlessly into your eCommerce system?
To stay in step with competing modern brands, businesses utilize headless and composable commerce to enhance the customer experience. For instance, when employing a subscription program, you can delegate portions of your checkout model to third parties to provide the customer with personalized shopping options. These approaches enable them to improve content management and marketing strategies and boost website speeds.
However, adopting a headless or composable commerce approach is a significant investment that requires careful assessment. You’ll want to consider the alternatives.
Headless and composable commerce approaches may appear attractive initially, but it’s critical to evaluate your current monolithic architecture before moving forward and fully implementing them into your business model. Sometimes, your current system can be optimized to perform functions similar to a headless solution, thereby increasing your conversion rates and average order value in the same manner. In this case, your monolithic program holds greater value and ROI since you wouldn’t have to pivot your entire organization to accommodate a new system.
In a trend-driven digital landscape, headless and composable commerce are marketed as all-or-nothing, comprehensive solutions. Yet, a complete system leads to additional complications as businesses try to address knowledge gaps, liabilities, and risks. Executing a complete transition from a monolithic to a headless architecture requires onboarding, staffing, and training, leading to increased maintenance and costs.
How can you develop an approach that’s right for your company?
Jordan Brannon, President of Coalition Technologies, says that you can take a fragmented approach to composable and headless commerce: “the big key thing is to be thinking about what aspects of a composable or headless solution are going to benefit you; which ones are going to provide value and which ones won’t?” Decoupling your front end from your back end and going headless with your current system will increase flexibility, speed, and control. Composable commerce goes further and is most valuable when implemented with high-volume data hubs, such as warehousing, fulfillment, shopping carts, and CRM software. Adopting a composable architecture enhances responsiveness to market changes by leveraging many powerful technologies.
When you analyze each option, determine which one benefits you most — headless or composable — and create a solid plan for effective implementation. Before selecting an appropriate solution, Jordan recommends simulating the onboarding process to prepare for and mitigate possible complications.
If you’ve decided that composable and headless commerce is an appropriate fit for your business, it’s essential to become familiar with each component. Software platforms integrated with a composable system offer multiple PBCs (packaged business capabilities) that you can extract and curate for a particular business function. For example, they can be employed to personalize content for target audiences without detaching your eCommerce back-end system.
If you’re looking to maximize customer lifetime value, PBCs can also optimize the shopping, post-purchase order, and post-purchase checkout experiences through a CRM solution. These capabilities can also accommodate your monolithic platform.
Whether choosing to maintain your current architecture or adopting a headless or composable approach, it’s essential to modify new systems to support your business endeavors rather than transitioning to a more complex environment.
The term “headless commerce” is gaining traction as people begin to see value in its maturity. The overriding advantages of headless commerce are apparent in a multi-storefront experience where you can blend a group of best-in-breed eCommerce, content management, and marketing technologies in a powerful way.
But there’s a big question many companies are asking: “Is headless commerce right for me?”
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Let’s start with the basics. As an eCommerce brand, most of your consumers interact with a presentation layer, while the administration and what happens from a business perspective occur primarily in somewhat of a back-end management tool.
So, you have two things happening. On the one hand, customer service teams, fulfillment teams, warehouses, accounting, finance, and IT are all working with the back end. On the other hand, the customer is engaging with that front end presentation layer.
With headless commerce, you can separate the front end from the back end of your application. The idea is that you can remove the head from the rest of the body, and the body continues to operate.
There are three significant limiting factors that headless commerce can address. One factor is on the presentation layer and customer experience side. Another is in that back end and management layer. And the third factor is that it helps address limitations inside the organization itself. Essentially, you can use headless commerce as a way to patch over problems you have inside the company.
Traditionally, eCommerce teams carry the primary responsibility for eCommerce growth. However, they often don’t have the authority to manage the eCommerce toolset. They're beholden to an IT team, AI engineering group, customer service teams, operations teams, and maybe even legal and finance teams, limiting their ability to move and pivot quickly.
Headless commerce allows the eCommerce team to work more independently and quickly to achieve its goals without being concerned with all those traditional organizational workflows and approvals that can be restrictive.
Jordan Brannon, President of Coalition Technologies, says, “Headless increases your marketing outcomes. It can be organizational, and it can help free you from some of the bureaucracy traps that maybe you're stuck in with a larger organization… it can be more flexible and dynamic, it can be faster to stand up, [and] it can be more responsive [to] customer needs.”
Headless commerce can help eCommerce teams address changes in the market — such as iOS updates, TikTok, and short-form video content — and take advantage of emerging opportunities as they arise.
To illustrate, a small pest control equipment company saw a significant increase in demand for online purchases during the pandemic, specifically around beekeeping equipment. They stood up a headless commerce experience specific to these products and saw a 3X increase in ROI. Because they were able to set up subsites and optimize for the consumer, their product sales increased. As an added benefit, the headless approach is also less expensive since their main B2B site is already connected to their accounting software, warehouse, ERP, and CRM.
There’s a wide range of headless commerce implementations. Brands are employing headless for apps, emails, games, and more. Rising projects also include headless commerce as it relates to the metaverse, augmented reality experiences, and 3D rendered products. Beyond content management, headless is also being used in multi-storefront initiatives to differentiate the customer experience and optimize the customer journey.
Coalition Technologies’ clients are using headless to generate content marketing, new experiences, and new interactivity. Comparing two clients based on Shopify and big commerce, Jordan says, “Both are leveraging headless as a way of… selling experiences that are different [from the] typical ‘buy a single product.’ Both use recipe-type content for top-of-funnel traffic generation… they wanted their content marketing teams to have more freedom to be able to publish that and do that easily.” Whatever the use case, headless commerce unlocks greater flexibility and unique content for your industry.
