Ichabod Crane may have fled in terror from the decapitated horseman in Washington Irving’s famous tale. But headless commerce these days is the solution to the most pressing challenges facing small and medium-sized businesses. That’s especially the case for manufacturers in both the business-to-business and consumer spaces.
In separating the front and back ends of online sales applications, headless business platforms can unlock ecommerce and become dedicated marketing and growth machines to make it through today’s chaotic economic conditions.
This year, supply chain and market landscapes full of jump scares and surprise plot twists have understandably spooked companies. More than half of U.S. manufacturers are concernedOpens a new window about ongoing shipping disruptions from COVID-19 impacts, according to the Institute of Supply Chain Management.
Companies without the processes in place to navigate today’s fast-changing conditions have found themselves at a serious disadvantage. Some holdouts are planning to stay the course until things go back to normal. They should think again.
McKinsey’s recent analysis on changing commercial behaviors in the wake of COVID-19 found only 20Opens a new window % of B2B buyers, for example, ever hoped to return to in-person sales. Businesses that can’t provide a fast and seamless digital buying experience to meet their expectations could, well… lose their heads.
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Doubling down on online sales, for instance, can be scary. But businesses that shift to headless, API-first commerce platforms benefit from unprecedented power and flexibility in building leads, keeping customers, and staying out of the sales dead spots. These platforms unite commerce and sales order management on a single platform without sacrificing the unique features businesses require for their industry, brand, and customers.
What scares B2B buyers, in turn, are overly complex ecommerce experiences that take too many steps to get from Point A to Point Buy, opening more chances for customers to turn away rather than stay engaged. This is an urgent wound to close.
In a recent Gartner survey, more than 75Opens a new window % of B2B buyers reported that their last purchase was inordinately complex. Compared to the retail experience, they already tolerate complex orders and pricing structures, hyper-detailed specifications and product needs, multiple stakeholders and decision-makers, and an overwhelming array of sales channels. Modernizing to digital should reduce, not add to that. Though after a lengthy implementation period and considerable expense, that’s not necessarily the way it goes.
A manufacturer’s digital channel needs to be self-explanatory, effective and streamlined, with automation, mobile capabilities, remote capabilities and self-service. That goes for implementation too. If the B2B customer of headless commerce doesn’t have a great customer experience getting a digital solution, how is the solution itself going to deliver where its own developer can’t?
As many as 80Opens a new window % of B2B customers prefer digital or self-service remote sales over in-person. But what they prefer are self-service solutions that work all the way through. Not the equivalent of that self-service checkout station at the hardware store that leaves you waiting for a non-existent associate when the scan doesn’t go through.
Most B2B customers are digital natives and regard all buying experiences from a consumer standpoint. Those who have an outstanding digital experience are twice as likelyOpens a new window to reorder from the supplier who delivered it and three times as likelyOpens a new window to place a bigger purchase order.
Headless commerce fosters those positive experiences by equipping ecommerce and sales with the right features, power, speed and, most importantly, usability and interface, to keep and attract partners.
Flexible and Extensible
Another trap to avoid is a solution that works now but will not evolve to your needs next year. By design, any solution should be highly flexible and extensible and doesn’t require layers of coding and hours of developers.
Ask vendors if they’re bringing you a platform built on an open REST-API approach instead of rigid architecture. The objective is to have tools that can be leveraged as a standalone commerce platform or seamlessly integrated with existing systems, from critical ERP and CRM to marketplaces and ecommerce platforms.
Flexible integrations and customizations via pre-built APIs mean orchestrating data from multiple sources and enabling businesses to maintain a single source of truth for data through one unified platform. Relying on less code gives you the ability to stretch and expand, resulting in much faster and flexible software applications.
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Hitting the B2B Sweet Spot
Low-code flexibility and extensibility across a singular platform is the ecommerce sweet spot for B2B. You get much faster time-to-revenue and spend far less time on nonessential, manual and repeated tasks. Gone is the need to manually tend to files or migrate data from one place to another. That gives teams more space to spend on the work that matters, attending to leads and customers instead of fixing loose ends at the end of the day and responding to complaints.
Aligning sales channels and improving the speed of data exchange can make manufacturers more competitive and responsive in real-time while providing superior customer service, inspiring customer loyalty, and ramping up those purchase orders.
Manufacturers face a barrage of X-factors right now — a turbulent labor market, a hyper-competitive business environment, increasingly unreliable supply chains. Headless commerce should provide a reliable engine that can shift and pivot quickly, enabling a business to navigate snags and go omnichannel when specific avenues to business shutdown.
It takes care of the technical backend, giving manufacturers the freedom to create a superior and tailored front-end experience for B2B customers, including customized points from social commerce to checkout and every facet stamped with a clear sense of brand.
As we’ve all learned from the pandemic, flexibility is the key to business survival. But the key to success is harnessing the innovations that put you ahead of the curve and your competition. Given the worrying shifts, transformations and challenges facing manufacturing today, there’s likely a bit of Ichabod Crane in all of us trying to get home. But with headless commerce, there’s nothing to be afraid of, and there’s a whole lot to like.