Embark on digital transformation with headless commerce

by Jack Ryan Web Designer

Embark on digital transformation with headless commerce

In this present era, it is becoming excruciatingly difficult for ecommerce businesses to stay at par with the dynamically shifting trends and consumer demands. Businesses that fail to meet their consumer expectations or provide a unique shopping experience are pushed to the back, out of sight, out of mind. Even though these businesses implement a series of technological concepts, there is a huge gap between implementation, deliverability, and productivity. Besides, the journey to adopt digital transformation is never a walk in the park for an ecommerce business.

With numerous challenges and higher failure risks, most businesses look for a radical approach. This is where the concept of headless commerce comes into the play. It not only provides businesses with a fast, lightweight, and agile ecommerce platform but also reduces the complexity of monolith architecture. Having said that, the following discussion will focus on headless commerce and its contribution towards a successful digital transformation.

What is headless commerce?

From the name itself, it is evident that in headless commerce, the ecommerce platform will be void of its head. Every website or web app comprises two major layers. These are:

Frontend: This layer handles the UI of the website and is responsible for collecting user actions and providing the responses accordingly.
Backend: It is the business logic layer comprising the entire codebase, third-party integrations, plugins, database, and many more.

In a traditional monolithic architecture, the frontend and backend layers are integrated to an extent where interdependency is at its peak. This type of architecture orchestration poses numerous challenges and restricts developers to innovate or scale the ecommerce platform. To tackle this issue, headless ecommerce concept is implemented. Here, the frontend and backend layers are decoupled and made independent of one another. Several service APIs are integrated to act as the communication channel between the two layers controlling the ecommerce platform.

In what ways headless commerce paves the way for digitalization?

With headless architecture, it is much easier for businesses to launch digital commerce and meet the consumer expectations head-on. In this following section, we will shed light on the ways in which this new development architecture can be a real game changer for the ecommerce industry.

Omnichannel presence

A typical ecommerce business cannot restrict its communication with the consumers to a single channel. Instead, it needs to utilize as many channels as possible for a successful business expansion and acquiring maximum incoming traffic. Headless commerce allows developers to work on the omnichannel presence of the ecommerce platform. In other words, the decoupled architecture ensures uniform behavior of the ecommerce platform across all channels, whether it is the search engine or social media.

Highly scalable

Thanks to the headless architecture, it becomes easier for developers to scale the frontend or backend layers on the go. Since these layers are no longer dependent on one another, scaling either the frontend or backend won’t have any negative impact on the other. Furthermore, deploying the changes or any new feature or component addition to the concerned layer becomes easier with headless commerce.

Enhanced performance

In headless architecture, the frontend and backend behave independently of one another. As a result, developers won’t have to worry about taking down the entire website or web app from its hosting server to deploy any code change. Furthermore, headless commerce allows implementation of microservices where each functional workflow has an individual service handler. Due to this, the ecommerce platform becomes more agile and lighter, thereby enhancing the overall performance across all channels.

Better security

With this new architecture, the ecommerce platform can become more secure and future-proof against cybercrimes of numerous sorts. From infrastructure upgrade to phishing activity blockage, most of the functions can be automated through headless. As a result, integrating military-grade encryption algorithms also becomes easier. This is why businesses can become more resilient and less susceptible to cyberattacks, data theft, and corruption.

Personalized user experience

One of the major benefits of headless commerce is that it allows developers to offer personalized experience to the consumers. Whether it is the UI component or any business logic executed at the backend, the workflows can be personalized to meet the recent trends and shifts in the ecommerce industry. This enables businesses to enhance the user experience and retain maximum customers with time.

Increased customization

As the backend and frontend layers are decoupled from one another in headless architecture, developers can easily customize the functional workflows and UI components without slowing down the performance or compromising user experience. For instance, customizing the shopping cart can be easily done with no impact on any other process of the ecommerce platform. Due to such a high level of customization, the success rate of the digital commerce platform is pretty high.

Conclusion

In this article, we have talked about what headless architecture is and the ways it propel digital commerce towards success. However, it is noted here that migrating from the conventional monolith architecture to headless is not an easy task. Planning and strategy orchestration should be done extensively to ensure the results are completely synchronized with the expectations.