Why is a headless commerce solution a great fit for online brands?
For a start, it helps brands stand out with their storytelling and content experiences. It’s a perfect fit for brands that want to use a robust content management system (CMS) and make their content accessible across customer touchpoints and devices including mobile phones, laptops, smart speakers, smartwatches, kiosks, digital signages, and more.
The increasing popularity of headless commerce has led to accelerated investor funding with over $1.65 billion raised over the last two years.
The Top 5 Capabilities to look for in a Headless Commerce Platform
But why should any content-driven online brand care about headless commerce?
Importance Of Headless Commerce For Content-Driven Brands
How do most content-driven brands drive revenue? By telling interesting and engaging stories about products. They aim to evoke interest and build more trust around the product or the brand. All of this is done through content.
Over the last decade, eCommerce websites have evolved from using ‘monolithic’ eCommerce platforms to a complete eCommerce shopping experience.
Why is this commerce-led approach no longer sufficient for eCommerce companies? Primarily, they have a few drawbacks like:
- Frontend design constraints
- Limited marketing and content creation tools
- Limited customization options for the storefront
- Little (or no) flexibility in customer experiences
With headless solutions, brands could overcome these shortcomings and focus on a content-led approach for added business value and better customer relationships.
For instance, Redbox opted for a SPA (Single Page Application) with headless architecture. It relaunched its storefront only to offer more immersive experiences to its customers, along with responsive content and higher performance. For a website that is driven by visual content, the adoption of headless architecture proved successful.
Another example is that of consumer apparel brand, Nike, which has understood the power of great storytelling longer than most people have been online. The company went headless as it was looking for a mobile-first approach. The result: a headless campaign that helped Nike capture more market share from its closest competitor, Adidas.
Need more convincing to adopt headless solutions for an eCommerce business? Here are some more benefits of headless commerce that can set retail brands on the path to digital transformation.
1. Scale to multichannel selling without worrying about frontend restrictions.
An Aberdeen Group study found that companies with a strong omnichannel presence retain 89% of their customers as compared to just 33% for companies with weak (or lack of) omnichannel strategies. For eCommerce brands, an omnichannel presence can help in reaching out to online shoppers on their preferred channels, and in increasing brand engagement.
However, implementing a multi-channel eCommerce workflow isn’t exactly a “cakewalk” from a technical perspective. Online businesses need to design an architecture that can handle rapid changes without limiting growth. The ‘decoupled’ headless architecture is the right solution that delivers seamless omnichannel functionality across both online and physical touchpoints.
2. Faster page loading time
47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less and 40% tend to abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load. This means website loading speed is crucial to a brand’s online presence and credibility.
Wondering how headless commerce makes faster page loading possible? Essentially, the headless or decoupled approach separates the “backend” functions from the “frontend” system. As a result, the frontend tool can retrieve backend data on demand without causing any performance lag. This fundamental shift in architecture can speed up web pages in a big way.
New eCommerce functions and features can be added without disrupting the content. Further, a headless architecture is more suited for traffic spikes or increases in concurrent users as compared to traditional JavaScript or CSS-based systems.
3. Better customer experience
Adopting headless commerce allows eCommerce companies to deliver a high-end customer experience.
Despite their changing buying behaviors, shoppers still expect a consistent brand experience across all touchpoints and devices. Through the headless architecture, retailers can decouple the “eCommerce” part from their “customer experience.” This enables them to manage their content and present new “frontend experiences” without altering the existing backend eCommerce system.
Headless commerce platforms allow eCommerce brands to serve personalized and optimized messages to customers. The customer experience is personalized to the user’s needs and preferences. The frontend presentation interface can be modified for different customer touchpoints.
4. No limit to customizations
One of the most exciting benefits that headless commerce offers is that it allows “virtually endless” customization options without any technical design constraints. This helps brands reduce the amount of time and effort required to code and align the CMS backend and frontend components.
With the decoupled headless architecture, web designers and front-end developers have full control over the aesthetics of eCommerce websites. They can create unique and customized product detail, category, and checkout pages with a simple API call.
5. Smooth and seamless integrations
Ecommerce businesses need to offer integrated and personalized shopping experiences to their customers. How can they ensure this?
The API-driven headless commerce platform allows seamless integration with other systems and platforms like marketing automation tools, ERP, or CRM. Such integrations eliminate the need for partial integrations and their associated complexities including plugins, which require timely and regular updates.
For instance, subscription-based sales can be directly integrated into the headless platform architecture. Subscription-based business models need payment gateways and billing systems to integrate smoothly with the eCommerce platform.
Conclusion
Looking at the trends and benefits, it is certain that content-driven brands will mostly embrace headless technologies in the future. But early adopters can benefit from the headless architecture by integrating these technologies in a phased manner depending on their organizational maturity and how future-ready they want their business to be.
As a technology solution provider, Ignitiv is enabling digital transformation with its unified commerce platform. Here is a whitepaper that talks about how unified commerce can accelerate business growth.
Thinking of whether Headless Commerce will be a great fit for your business? Talk to our experts today.