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.
