Insights
Demystifying Headless Commerce
If you’re not sure what headless commerce is, or how it can work for your business, you’re not alone.
- Article
- 3 MIN READ
- May 21, 2020
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Neil TrickettManaging Director, EMEA
Summary
If you’re not sure what ‘headless commerce’ means or how it can work for your business, you’re not alone. There is a lot of misleading information circling around the tech industry about the term.
In this article, we’ll attempt to clarify the meaning and benefits of headless commerce, and what you should watch out for when implementing it. While we won’t dive into the full technical details here, we’ll aim to cover a few key elements that drive overall business value.
What’s in the name 'headless commerce'?
Let’s take a look at how ‘headless’ came about.
Looking closely at the name itself, headless commerce can do much more than what it describes. Below is an overview of how the industry arrived at the term, revisiting how tech architectures have evolved from as early as the 2000s to the present day.
From the advent of monoliths and their transition to headless 2.0, here’s a timeline of the headless commerce history and trajectory:
2000 to 2012: Monoliths
During this period, big companies bought other platforms like IBM Websphere, Oracle Commerce (previously ATG), and SAP Commerce (previously Hybris). Each offered a rich suite of features and began to power some of the biggest commerce companies during this period. As eCommerce grew, the high licensing and support costs, as well as slower innovation on the part of these giants led to new entrants and more competition in the space.
2010 to 2018: Headless 1.0 (decoupling the monolith)
During this period, vendors started to offer the ability to decouple the front-end and back-end of websites. This helped teams free up their front-end workflow and get changes live quicker than before.
Many people’s understanding of headless stops here, thinking that it simply means decoupling the front-end from the back-end. But there’s more to it than that, as we’ll see in headless 2.0.
2016 to Present: Headless 2.0 (rise of the microservices)
While the headless 1.0 era moved technology leaps and bounds ahead of monolithic structures, headless 2.0 built on this progress to offer even more ease of use. Speed and flexibility became a focus here, as technology developed.
This looks like purpose-built, API-first services that drive experiences across modern communication channels and devices, putting customer preferences and expectations first. This is achieved through more sophisticated and faster web apps, mobile apps, chatbots, and voice tech, among other tools.
Headless 2.0 looks like a flexible, well-architected, scalable, and easily deployable set of back-ends that combines your own microservice architecture with best-of-breed vendor systems. This enables you to respond quickly, releasing content rapidly and seamlessly.
What makes headless so great?
As mentioned above, headless commerce offers a ton of benefits. Here’s a breakdown of some advantages of headless:
Business benefits: Headless makes it quicker and cheaper to deliver value to market, due to the flexible and composable nature of the tools. You can easily make changes, and integrate with many other systems, which helps get to ROI quickly.
Speed and scale: When executed well, you can achieve a very robust, cost-effective, and scalable architecture. If you’re like many teams coming from a monolith environment, it’s likely that you’ve been craving this for some time.
Agile platform upgrades: Old monolith technologies and vendors often require painful upgrade paths that slow down the rollout of new business features. Thanks to headless, you can remove these delays and roadblocks in your release schedule.
Flexible vendors: With headless, you are not beholden to any particular vendors that require high licensing and support fees, and include cumbersome technology.
Happier teams: Headless tech is simply great to work with. Teams often share that working in headless environments is faster and more fun than monolithic environments. By providing full ownership of tools and content, you’re empowering your team to innovate and optimize your site.
Beware these pitfalls
While going headless provides a major upside, starting down the path should come with careful consideration around the technology you choose to make sure it’s right for your business. Here are a few things to watch out for.
Faux headless: Not every tech vendor is as headless as they claim to be. Do your due diligence to make sure it’s going to set you up for success long term.
Rogue integrators: While headless architecture offers many advantages, it’s not a silver bullet. You need a robust plan for implementation to avoid ending up with a dog’s breakfast of a platform. Having a plan will ensure you don’t end up signing up for tools you don’t need. Make sure your partners they’re the right fit and play well with your entire suite.
Shiny object syndrome: Your own tech team may encourage you to build everything yourself. While you might have the resources to do so, beware. Make shrewd build versus buy decisions and don’t get caught up in overbuilding the greatest architecture if you don’t need it. Direct the best brains on your team to architecting a great system, and be strategic in how you improve things over time.
Time to market: Without boundaries in place, you can burn a lot of time working out what to do and how to do it. Take some time to experiment, but if you’re not sure of your next step, talk to someone who knows their way around headless technology to make sure you don't spin your wheels.
New paradigm: You need to be ready for the shifts that moving to a headless architecture will require. This includes an updated operational workflow, a new way of structuring your team, and even leadership styles. Embrace these change, and don’t overlook them.
If you’re looking for help to make a move towards headless technology, reach out to our team — we’d be happy to chat.
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