In 2020 Headless Commerce Is All About Improving Customer Experience

As Shep Hyken states, “Technology, personalization, and innovation are hot topics in customer service and CX.” Your development strategies also need the freedom to work in parallel to platforms of tomorrow’s technology. And it all has to be relevant for not only the business but also for the customer.

Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer, BigCommerce, said that “Headless e-commerce is where merchants blend their front-end and back-end for maximizing their potential and creating truly personalized online shopping experience for customers.”

What is Headless E-commerce?

On your web store, a customer generally interacts through a user interface that typically consists of elements such as cart item list, search field, product listings, product visuals, etc. All these elements are part of the presentation layer of your e-commerce platform, designed on the front-end or head of the entire platform.

The back-end part of the store is closely tied with the front-end to coordinate several tasks based on real-time store usage and users data. Such functionality involves updating product catalog, maintaining inventory data, processing payments, handling user credentials, orders, and a lot more.

Typically all this requires coding efforts to enforce functionality for both front-end developers and users. As opposed to traditional e-commerce development models, the headless e-commerce separates your front-end design from the back-end design infrastructure and makes it easy to deliver any content quicker to any platform or device.

Headless E-commerce Solution works as a content repository that makes content accessible using a RESTful API for display on any device. It gives companies the full potential of best online retail without any restrictions to certain touch-points and ensures a great customer experience.

Such e-commerce development autonomy ignites innovation and allows software teams to create world-class customer experiences with no restrictions. Additionally, as complex code dependencies don’t hinder front-end developers, they can start working on creating advanced web products and features to bring your retail store on the fly.

As we know Headless e-commerce is becoming a trend, so this is also important for you to know if it’s right for you?

The points below can also help:

• Do you lag behind your competitors and need to simultaneously make adjustments to front-end and back-end systems?
• Isn't it easy for you to re-architect with another platform using existing technology?
• Does your web store takes too long to load?
• Isn't your web store theme customizable as you think?

E-commerce brands are looking to re-architect with headless e-commerce for a more flexible user experience. For example:

T-mobile one of the top mobile carrier companies in the US adopted flexible headless strategies to take full advantage of today’s best CX solutions.

Koala, an Australian mattress brand is doing incredibly well in its business by using Shopify in a headless architecture and crafting a highly engaging customer experience.

Organizations didn't want to be bound by the capabilities of channels, they wanted to make channels that their customers demand. From here the interest in headless e-commerce solutions has increased thanks to the proliferation of channels and the need to smooth out customer experience and delivery processes.

So, What is driving uptake of Headless E-commerce?

Dietmar Rietsch, CEO at Pimcore, said “headless e-commerce is a concept embraced by Pimcore an open-source customer experience management company in 2013.” By the desire for more flexibility and agility, PimCore suggested the concept of APIs, service-oriented architectures, and to separate front-end and back-end technologies.

The idea behind the Headless E-commerce is that you can innovate quickly, make changes without impacting the store logic. This means you can keep up with the demand of customers and release new transactional touchpoints without having to restructure your entire e-commerce platform.

Make your customer experience more personal and consistent

Even though customer demands change every day, they still need a consistent customer experience across all devices and digital channels.

People look for e-commerce brands that understand and prioritize their needs across all channels. For example, on a web store “buyers who bought A also purchased B.” The data stored in the back-end system already knows what a consumer has bought. The system then uses this data for the personalization of CMS, mobile apps, and social channels.

It allows for greater integration across all sides and allows for more flexibility for the customers, ease of use and maximizing the functionality of an e-commerce website. This is something every e-commerce business can use.

Headless e-commerce platforms lift major constraints for developers by giving them total freedom to design and manage user experiences on a single back-end. They can build a web store with an unlimited number of screens and devices, with a completely different layout from the one displayed in a mobile app or a smartwatch interface.

This flexibility leads to better customer engagement and facilitates interaction with a brand.

Enhance security for better customer experience

One of the greatest benefits of headless e-commerce is enhanced security. There are a few inherent qualities of headless architecture that might be unavailable with a conventional system. Often the API used to provide content via headless that makes your platform much more resilient to online threats than other software solutions.

What’s more, that API works as an application layer and a security layer making headless CMSs much easier to monitor and control. It also decreases the risk of critical failure.

In traditional systems, all components and functions are placed together, which may lead to a situation where a small change in a single component may impact the entire system’s security.

Secondly, the administration portion of a headless system placed on a different server and different domain. Also thanks to the headless CMS functionality that can be hidden under layers of code instead of being directly exposed that usually happens with conventional CMSs.

Thus, a headless e-commerce platform is a relatively more secure option than a conventional one. This enables brands to deliver best-in-class customer experiences on touch-points including security, performance, and personalization.

Allow For Seamless Integrations

How do you implement Headless E-commerce? By definition, a headless e-commerce platform must have RESTful API, which allows for easier integration with other platforms.

It is also easy to add your website to any new device, which opens room for new opportunities and outreach to more customers at the same time.

Also, integration on headless e-commerce won’t take months, it’s just few hours to integrate with Oracle and Slack. Without delving deep into the integration process, you can have an integration that can also streamline your customer service workflows.

With headless e-commerce it’s easy to collect customer support requests, and other questions while simultaneously executing a lookup to check it isn’t a duplicate request. If it is duplicate data, the system modifies the request and creates a new customer record.

If you are a business with established infrastructure or still working on your enterprise architecture, headless commerce might be right for you.

Likewise, if your business operations become more complex and you want to differentiate by competing on performance rather than price, you may indeed have a headless future.

Final Words

Progressive e-commerce brands look up to agile metrics for crafting their development strategies. Either way, they want to craft their store in a “Headless Environment” because that fits well into their new business model. Indeed, many business brands and development firms are focused on building headless e-commerce. Because “Headless E-commerce” is a catch-all solution for e-commerce platforms.

So, take your eCommerce business to a new level by hiring dedicated resources. SyncrasyTech (IT solutions company) help you invest your efforts in something beneficial for your business.