Why to go with Headless Commerce

Headless commerce is a pretty straight forward concept. Separate your front-end experience from your back-end commerce engine, and now you have the ability to implement changes on either more easily.

Simple enough right? That’s why so many technologies exist as stand alone CMS platforms or payment gateways. This empowers companies to choose the right technology for their business, but also supports change in a more efficient way.

Another way to think of it is like photography. Your camera is a system, and editing photos is another. You can choose the right camera that fits your goals, then use a photo software to edit and touch up your pictures, with the ability to change either at any time and not necessarily impact the other. 

Why are businesses going to headless commerce?

According to Salesforce, 26% of companies surveyed are currently headless with 59% planning to be in the next 2 years. There has been so much advancement in technology that has specialized in excellence in one area or another, that being able to choose the right approach has become critical to a company's online success.

The report from Salesforce provides some stats on reasons why companies do this. From my point of view, having spent many years in eCommerce, there are some tangible advantages as to why companies should consider going headless.

Agility

The primary reason I have seen companies go this way is to become nimble on the front-end. A light team of front-end designers and web designers can quickly add new experiences with little consequence to the root systems. 

Have a promotion coming up? Whip together a landing page, banners and new home hero with ease. Even implementing a discount online becomes a quick task of pulling a promotion from a bag of templates. 

I managed a team that could completely change a site's look and feel on a weekly basis with no requirement of an expert coder. This is powerful. Costs of operations go down, and the ability to react and capitalize on opportunities goes up.

Cost control

Speaking of operational costs going down, not having to retain a complex staff is incredibly freeing, particularly as a smaller organization. With the use of minimal internal resources, agency partners or contractors, you can achieve much of your complicated code-side work without having to retain a high payroll of technical talent.

Efficiency is also cost control, though it is sometimes more difficult to quantify. These disconnected front-end experiences can now be manipulated in moments. Now your designers/writers can implement work directly without having to go through complex push sequences through an IT group.

Early in my career, there was a lot of push back against this, as it opens up room for mistakes by removing structured deployment schedules. It’s true that a risk comes from decoupling the front-end, but the alternative is often handcuffing your team to a deployment routine that can completely undermine agility. 

Technology Agnosticism

There’s a great fear in changing technology frameworks. Though change is difficult, going headless can release a great deal of anxiety. With a separate front-end, you can swap a checkout engine as a standalone project. This frees you to be platform agnostic. You become less dependent on one platform or another, and ideally you can choose whatever framework best supports your customers and business needs.

Conversely, you can shift to a new CMS front-end without the migraines of pivoting your payment gateways. This enables a team to create an entirely new front-end experience in parallel to continuous operations, and deploying when all elements are ready. 

I have always tried to approach eCommerce without any favouritism towards one technology or another. Systems change, costs change, markets change, leadership changes; your best bet in technology is to remain neutral, flexible and able to adapt. Headless commerce will support this stance.

Time to Market

You shouldn’t think of time to market as just the overall eCommerce deployment. Every change you want to make has an inherent time cost and opportunity cost. The biggest struggle I believe companies have is not that they don’t know how to be better, but that they do but aren’t able to act on it.

Headless commerce is agile to ensure changes occur quickly, and also enable you to work with a suite of external resources to support your goals with speed. Having an online store is not a differentiator, but there are experiences you can create that will set you apart. These are often limited by capacity. Speed is a competitive advantage.

In some of my eCommerce positions in the past I have babysat incredible lists of opportunities that sat waiting for production capacity. When working in headless commerce situations, I have been able to find contract resources to accelerate our production.

Improved Experiences

Being agile and fast with lower costs should enable you to build better things. There isn’t an excuse for sloppy online experiences, you should be at a minimum standard on a competitive plateau. Beyond that, you should be looking to implement wow experiences into your customers journey.

With speed, you should be able to take new ideas to market and benefit or fail fast. Not everything is going to work, and that used to be a bigger deal when change cost a lot and took considerable time. When you can go fast you can make an impact, evaluate and evolve.

Having a headless approach enabled me to create an operations team and an innovation team. Those people may between both depending on the project, we were able to quantify and budget for ongoing operations. With the everyday essentials of running a website accounted for, we could invest in the resourcing and support that would produce meaningful improvements to our online experience.

How to go Headless?

Ok, now what? First things first is deciding what kind of organization you want to become, and if it is about being an agile leader in your competitive space, you need to commit to that. You may have to reevaluate your technology and your approach to online business. Some simple things I can point to in getting started:

Get a network

Beyond your team, you need another team. An external team of trusted companies or individuals that can accelerate your business. The reason this is high on my list is because it’s hard to get started, but once you have a network, you can call upon it when needed. Start vetting qualified people who can jump in and add horsepower to your team.

Vet programs by flexibility

Whenever exploring technologies I always want to know how well they work with other tools out of the box with minimal customization. I also want to know how hard it is to abandon them. Great design is simple, and great systems should work together simply. The more unique, custom or complicated a tool is, the less value it has to going headless.

Act Agile

The behaviour that creates momentum in a headless environment starts with leadership committing to living in an agile way. That means the phrase ‘we can’t do it’ or ‘we don’t have time’ starts becoming taboo. If it needs to get done, how could we do it? Are there external resources? Are our tools and technology in the way? Is our team lacking depth? Stop accepting shortcomings.

Get Leadership Help

Where I come in is providing some top down leadership on becoming nimble in eCommerce. You might just need some advice, an audit of your current technology landscape, some training; these are all things I would encourage you to reach out and discuss!