What you should know about headless commerce and composable commerce

You know it: the e-commerce market has grown along with consumer expectations. Business models have been slow to evolve, and digital commerce has begun to lag. Why? Because it was difficult for brands to anticipate the trends coming. And even if they could, their technology was not flexible enough to capture the trends in time.

To become more flexible, businesses who are looking to expand their ecommerce have started to separate their backend processes from their frontend platform. The idea behind this change was that if the technology stack was too rigid to serve changing market needs, then separating parts of it—making them more flexible and accessing their back-end through APIs would fix that.

Here comes the headless commerce.

Headless commerce is the action whereby developers decouple the backend of an ecommerce site from its frontend. This means that all the backend functions — order processing, customer records, etc. — are separate from the user-facing elements, such as cms, product images and descriptions, product configurators, and so on. What’s left is an ecommerce platform not tied to the “head” to function.

APIs connect all the user-facing frontend elements (aka the “presentation layer”/”head”) with all the backend processes required to display product information, receive and process orders, and send order confirmations.

Ecommerce applications using headless commerce is the first small step towards a flexible architecture. Decoupling the frontend from the backend frees the composable enterprise from the constraints of an eCommerce platform’s limited frontend capabilities. It also ensures that frontend developers can work independently of backend teams, with no cross-functional coordination and compromising an already fragile and enlarged monolith.

What are the benefits of headless commerce?

There are many significant benefits to headless commerce. To begin, it allows for “commerce anywhere.” Let’s say your brand has a strong following on Instagram. With headless commerce your followers can buy products directly from your Instagram posts, bypassing the need to navigate to your ecommerce store. Headless commerce plays a vital role in the expanding social commerce market and the additional revenue stream it brings.

And because of the separation between the backend and frontend, brands have a lot more flexibility in terms of creating unique and highly personalized experiences for customers.

Ok, but what does this have to do with composable commerce?

Composable commerce takes the flexibility offered by headless solutions to the next level. Within headless architecture, functionalities can be limited by business logic trapped in the monolith if the main platform is still a full-stack engine.

Composable commerce architecture is API-first, as the software communicates through APIs to create complex business solutions. However, these pieces can also work independently – meaning that one piece of the puzzle can be replaced without impacting other parts of the system.

With composable/microservices architecture, the elements are independent of each other and are brought together in a tailored system, meaning that brands can choose each element of their digital services to best meet the specific needs of their business model.

How does composable commerce work?

Composable Commerce operates under three guiding principles:

• Business-centric solutions, which empower you with tools to address your specific business needs
• Modular architecture, which creates flexibility through the use of microservices.
• Open ecosystem, which provides you with useful support, guidance, and integrations for crafting your solution.

On the road to modern commerce

Composable commerce is a game changer for brands, that’s why we can call it “modern commerce”. It can help you take your business into new markets, provide an easier customer experience across channels and improve performance in the process! This architecture leveraging MACH (microservices, API-first, cloud native, and headless) technologies will deliver optimal results no matter what challenge needs addressing today – from becoming more responsive to market changes or improving how we work as organizations overall (and not just individuals).

Mentioning other key benefits too like reduced complexity & cost efficiency really drives home why this approach should be considered by all businesses looking at their long term success.

Headless commerce is the perfect way to stretch your current limitations and kickstart change. Composable commerce will unlock brands potential for years ahead!

Where you are on the composable commerce maturity scale? Let’s discuss with our experts!