Forward-thinking businesses were a step ahead of the competition once they recognized e-commerce was growing at unprecedented ratesOpens a new window at the onset of COVID-19. Organizations that transitioned slowly or failed to adopt a robust digital commerce strategy during the pandemic are still desperately scrambling to catch up.Â
But whether leading or lagging in their digital transformation, companies of all stripes currently face adapting to technological improvements that are bringing headless commerce to the leading edge of their respective digital marketplaces.
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Evolving Online Commerce
According to U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates, ecommerce sales surpassed $850 billionOpens a new window in 2021. That is an increase of 14% over 2020, and annual ecommerce worldwide is predicted to keep growing by double-digit marginsOpens a new window for the foreseeable future, according to Statista.
Pandemic shutdowns expectedly accelerated this trend. The general public turned to online purchasing en masse during COVID-19 to seek and buy all the items that would carry them through the tumultuous time. B2C businesses discovered the more intuitive they made buying — a combination of immersive, engaging yet straightforward transactions — the greater their sales and customer satisfaction grew.Â
Headless commerce proves its worth in this space by accelerating ease-of-use on both the buy and sell sides. And B2B businesses are taking note, recognizing headless ecommerce as the solution for making their more diverse and complex product specialties available to buyers, easily surpassing outdated sales methods and outpacing even current online sales tools.
Traditional Ecommerce Shortcomings: Experience Starts With Your Architecture
Now that businesses in nearly every industry have turned to ecommerce in one way or another, the question is: “how will the customer experience that we offer stand out and differentiate us?â€Â
What holds most companies back from offering these differentiated online experiences actually starts with what is behind the curtain in their traditional ecommerce architecture.Â
Traditional ecommerce presents a connected infrastructure of linked servers, web architecture, and databases that offer products via its customer-facing frontend. The items offered and their availability are uploaded and maintained in the backend. This traditional online commerce system can be viable under the simplest circumstances but is inadequate in modern omnichannel commerce, especially when featuring wildly varying products buyers want or need to select for their specific use-cases. In B2B sales, traditional ecommerce tech falls short.
The user interface in traditional backend ecommerce is limited and unable to present products in all their varieties or combinations. It cannot withstand product updates or supply chain adjustments without significant user input or experiencing unacceptable lag times. Backend users are also typically limited by what devices or platforms they must use to interface.
These shortcomings directly impact the user experience for customers on the front end. Features of diverse product ranges are nearly impossible to represent; their availability is not always accurately presented or, worse, as the products are updated on the backend, their selection and purchase may be entirely inaccessible on the front end.Â
Customers’ preference to shop using omnichannel methods is also burdensome for companies to provide. Product selections are still negatively impacted even if omnichannel options are maintained. This is the troublesome fate of managing commerce to identically function, whether viewed on a desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone, built by different manufacturers and outfitted with separate operating systems and browsers.
Headless Alternative
Headless commerce allows businesses more flexibility and helps to future-proof their online experience. Headless commerce allows backend UI product maintenance to communicate through multiple app and platform options by utilizing APIs. Adjustments to product lines, supplies, features or other specifications can be made in real-time and immediately reflect on the frontend, assisted by the speed and reliability of intelligent automation, code-splitting, and other modern tech.
For example, headless commerce employs a content delivery network to pass information from the nearest available server to the front end rather than sending it through a single dedicated source, significantly reducing load times on both ends and immediately improving the user experience for buyers. This translates to increased UI versatility for businesses to incorporate or expand product lines with ever-increasing complexity. Headless commerce gives companies confidence that they can present diverse and complex product lines in an engaging environment that is not limited by outdated systems but intuitively evolves as products are designed to do.
Specializing and Personalizing
Headless commerce is especially beneficial in B2B environments where personalization and specialization set competitor products apart. In headless commerce, the product buying experience can be configurable and customizable to the customer’s demands and at their fingertips. This creates personalized experiences available to all users that are otherwise replicated only by teams of sales professionals who can never be available to meet limitless customers 24/7 worldwide.
It also opens up opportunities for businesses that strive to serve specialty markets with niche products that surpass typical items generally available online. Engaging, hands-on buying experiences usually available only in boutique settings are replicated online through headless commerce, delivering versatility and simplicity to sell-side and buy-side users.Â
The attractiveness of headless commerce can be summarized into a few simple categories.
- User-friendliness: Backend management of products, services and features can be more easily maintained or adjusted by traditional supply-side staff without IT specialization.
- Intuitive tooling: Like the simplified backend user interface, headless commerce tools are API-based and allow consistent, customized experiences across channels. Brands are better able to ensure consistency in all customer-facing venues.
- Resource allocation: With the adaptive use of APIs and simplified procedures that product staff can handle, professional IT resources can remain focused on the company’s technology sphere. This saves considerable time and developer resources from being dedicated to buy-side or sell-side operations.
- Market differentiation: Time-to-market in headless commerce is on-time, virtually real-time, and surpasses traditional commerce lag and downtimes that regularly arise when performing product line management and maintenance that relies on siloed data. Beneficially, headless can accommodate product and sales complexities such as dynamic pricing or other variables that traditional tools struggle to achieve.
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Complexity simplified
The more complex solution that the shopper seeks, the more beneficial headless becomes for them and their provider. With their wallets, consumers of every cloth, whether the general public or specialized businesses, are demanding companies make their products readily available online.Â
The better companies provide virtually the use-cases, functionality, availability, pricing, and other variables that differentiate their products from static competitors, the more attractive they will be. Headless commerce makes this customer-centric transition possible.Â
Have you implemented headless commerce? What benefits have you seen? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window .Â
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