When You Should Consider Headless Commerce

To start let’s clarify what Headless Commerce is? Headless Commerce can simply be described as a frontend infrastructure that is independent of the backend infrastructure and vice versa. Therefore, with a headless infrastructure, you could simply replace the frontend “head” without replacing the backend systems or replace the backend systems and tie it back to the frontend user experience without having to completely rebuild the user experience.

Old Architecture

New Architecture:

Here are some of the many advantages of going headless:

Site Speed:

One of the obvious reasons to go headless is that it can be way faster than traditional monolithic site builds. The architecture behind headless allows for the website to load only what it needs and not reload the entire page upon each click to a new part of the website.

Scalability:

With speed comes scale. Headless commerce can allow you to scale to many devices and mobile devices more easily, as well as scale to more traffic capabilities and orders per second. Headless can also help you achieve best-of-breed backends with one unified user experience, scaling the user experience. Rather than having a confusing workflow of multiple sites, you can have one user experience powered by many backend systems.

Flexibility

Flexibility is arguably the main driver of why you should go headless. You can use many different backend systems, build any frontend experience, and completely control your destiny. No longer are you locked into the features and limitations of one platform. You have the flexibility to do almost anything that is possible on the Internet via modern web technologies.

Best Of Breed Backend Flexibility

I believe this is the main reason to go headless. What ends up happening when companies scale is they try and cram everything into one software. No software is great at everything which is why most companies use many to run their business.

With headless, you can have one frontend tied to many best-of-breed backend systems. This means you have multiple backends with one user experience, allowing the customer to feel they are getting a good experience and not disjointed systems.

Future-Proofing Your Technology

Headless is where all web technology is going. This is going to future-proof your tech stack so that you don’t have to constantly rebuild and deal with legacy technologies like an old monolithic all-in-one platform.

Internationalization

Headless gives you tons of flexibility around personalizing per country. This is great for internationalization where you may need different backend systems per country or specific frontend needs per country.

SaaS / Custom Functionality

If you are building a high performant SaaS application or eCommerce with a lot of custom functionality headless gives you the flexibility to do so. Most modern SaaS companies have a headless architecture already.

If enough of these factors are valuable to you, it’s worth spending the extra money to go headless. Headless is still new and likely going to be a bit more expensive than building a traditional site within one platform.