Businesses are revolutionizing – with the constant change in consumer expectations, business needs, and industry trends, you must scale your brand quickly to meet new requirements.
India’s ecommerce market is expected to rise to $111 billion by 2024 and $200 billion by 2026, so it's high time to step into the league, innovate, and flourish like the big names.
Ever heard of headless commerce?
The world of ecommerce has changed significantly in the last decade with an expansion of digital marketing, mobile commerce, social media commerce, and the dominance of ecommerce giants.
You need to keep up with this change and meet the demands of the modern consumer. This is where headless commerce comes in.
A headless commerce architecture separates the website's front-end presentation from the back-end ecommerce functionality. You need to leverage the front-end technology to deliver a high-quality content experience while integrating your ecommerce solution into the back-end that manages all trading functionality.
Headless commerce is simply a demarcation, bifurcation, and separation of the front end and back end of an ecommerce application. This system and technology have several benefits as it gives you, as a business, the freedom to decide what and how your developers need to build.
The result is being able to delight your audience and keep up with innovative touchpoints and business experiences. The hallmarks of headless commerce are the use of IT partners, experienced managers, and APIs.
Headless commerce works primarily in the Application Program Interface, popularly known as the API. APIs are connections that transmit real-time information between front-ends and back-ends.
Customer-related content is managed in a back-end platform such as a CMS. A headless storefront can use multiple back-end systems, depending on your needs.
These systems can include:
Software as a Service (SaaS) tools create customer touchpoints such as mobile apps and vending machines.
Every time a customer interacts with your ecommerce platform, an API call sends that information to your back-end, which the consumer isn’t aware of because of the headless back-end. It's just the front UI used to deliver the shopping experience.
The main motive to move from traditional ecommerce to headless ecommerce is to be flexible and offer your consumers unprecedented customer experience at the front end.
Let us look at the key differences between headless commerce vs traditional commerce:
A headless commerce system is for modern businesses that need commerce capabilities through API-driven experiences via CMS, DXP, applications, devices, or custom front-ends.
Headless commerce enables brands to create ecommerce experiences using powerful APIs. The SaaS platform is extensible and connectable to other environments to enhance efficiency and remove issues.
You can now integrate your most complex ecommerce needs into beautiful creations using customized React.js, angular websites, and CMS. It is about giving IT teams relative control over infrastructure connectivity.
In a SaaS platform, the number of available API calls is critical to ensure proper operation that includes:
The most traditional ecommerce model is one where online businesses use a monolithic strategy that includes complete platform control by IT.
This is useful when the front-end experience requires extreme customization. Also, traditional ecommerce platforms package everything, making it easier to set up the system and use pre-installed tools.
Monolithic strategies, however, result in longer time-to-market and higher development costs, which can slow down innovation.
It also reduces expansion in merchandising, customization, and design options. With traditional ecommerce, integration with current systems can be difficult. This led to the switch to headless ecommerce
Headless ecommerce requires custom coding to separate the front end of your ecommerce from the back end, which also requires a significant investment in development time.
After the augmenting of digital experience, brands must embrace innovation that can result in an increased cash flow. Let us look at some of the key benefits of headless ecommerce:
Amalgamating headless commerce with a modern commerce platform helps your teams update the front end without advanced knowledge.
You can introduce tools to create customized and personalized experiences that shoppers can't get anywhere else. This requires you to coordinate for a brand-consistent experience across all channels.
Front-end changes are agile, saving the developer time on UI changes. Developers can now launch ecommerce apps that increase conversions with just a few clicks or a little coding.
Headless commerce enables businesses to quickly launch new front-end experiences and respond effectively to innovative market trends with minimal costly back-end development.
This also means eliminating associated costs, reducing high licensing and hosting costs, and less infrastructure spending.
Headless ecommerce gives brands full ownership of site architecture, integrating innovation without impacting back-end processes.
It has been observed that 57% of existing platforms won’t be able to survive for more than 12 months without bringing about a change in their technology.
These are some of the key reasons why businesses want to move from traditional ecommerce to headless ecommerce, which can also help improve customer satisfaction.
Whether you are an experienced company with an established infrastructure or in the process of building your enterprise architecture, a headless commerce approach is a great fit.
As business processes become more complicated, it is time you step up, adopt modern technologies and differentiate by experience rather than price, to stand out among competitors.
Adopting such technological advancements in business might seem difficult, but it can be easily integrated by launching your online business using aasaan. Plus, it is effortless, convenient, and cost-effective. Build and scale your business the aasaan way.
