Headless Commerce- A Strategic Business Decision

In today’s evolving digital marketing, finding the right technology to serve your business is an orchestration in itself. How can you ensure the various technology services you decide upon will guide you to out-innovate and outpace your competitors now and in the future? That is where headless commerce has proved itself to be a major milestone in this journey. Headless commerce comes in providing a way for digital experiences to provide a quick, consistent, personalized, and innovative customer experience. For those brands with complex and ever-changing customer requirements, headless commerce provides the opportunity to quickly deliver which means improving loyalty and retention with customers. What is headless commerce exactly and how will it improve your ability to innovate?

What does Headless Commerce mean to IT and the business?

Headless commerce is known as an architecture that decouples the front-end user experience (UX) from backend functions such as business logic, payment processing, content management, pricing and more. This type of architecture enables users to quickly adopt new touch points and create a unified brand experience across the entire purchase journey. By choosing a headless commerce architecture based on APIs, you are able to adopt a whole bunch of touch points faster —  perhaps most importantly, touch points not based on the web. This includes things like voice, chat, augmented reality, and even B2B channels like Amazon Marketplace. 

This post might sound like it’s starting to get technical. However, headless commerce is one of the most strategic business decisions you can make in today’s digital economy. Full-stack solutions force companies to adopt capabilities across the board. Decoupling allows business users to design innovative customer experiences without disrupting the backend — and without requiring an army of software developers and months of time and expense. By creating this system of independent API-base micro services you are empowering users to rapidly provide innovative customer experiences by removing the single, monolithic application for all functions that was required in the past. For example, you have your marketing team trying to push commerce, content and functionality into many touch points- wherever the buyer is and wants to be. Headless commerce empowers the marketing team to do their job not only better, but faster, now allowing them to spend more time innovating and without the need to redeploy backend systems to alter their customer experiences. Therefore, the business’ involvement with this IT decision is a leading influencer on deciding to move forward.

We all know that no single technology platform will ever be the entire solution to digital commerce greatness. However, when reviewing how many technology platforms you choose to support your business and to what degree they are able to meet your strategic needs, it always returns to business fundamentals. How much must I invest to achieve some viable progress along my journey toward the ideal state of my digital commerce business?  Crawl, walk, run, sprint, pivot, sprint! If you are interested in learning more about Headless Commerce and discussing your path to Headless, contact our experts at Echidna today.

Contact Echidna Today.