Headless commerce: The key benefits

Amazon is at the forefront in showing us the true value of incorporating a headless commerce platform and how it can help retailers avoid experiencing the hair-pulling frustration associated with a traditional commerce platform. A study by Salmon reported that 60 percent of consumers want an Amazon Prime-like service — but you can’t achieve that with a traditional eCommerce solution.

It is imperative for brands to make the switch to headless commerce and here are 6 reasons why:

1. To go truly omnichannel (without the pain)

First things first, a headless content management system will help propel your content anywhere and everywhere. For an eCommerce brand, that means delivering your products, product videos or blog posts to any channel that has emerged — or will emerge.

So, get ready to sell through Alexa Skills, digital signage, progressive web apps, and even through refrigerators with screens (yes, they exist).

The best news is that with a natively headless commerce platform — like Core dna — you don’t have to re-architect your platform to publish across channels. It’s all just part of the same, future-proof package.

2. To remain competitive

A headless commerce platform enables you to deploy rapid updates without impacting your back-end system. And you can easily make any changes to your front-end to coincide with the speed of consumer technology.

Major commerce brands using a traditional platform usually roll out an update every few weeks. In comparison to the likes of Amazon; they deploy updates on average of every 11.7 seconds — reducing both the number and duration length of outages.

When a front-end system is not tightly coupled to the back-end, you don’t have to roll out an update to the entire system, only part of the system. So you can deliver what your consumers want more quickly and still remain competitive.

3. For agile marketing

A headless commerce system can support new technology as and when they arise. This is perfect for when designing new customer experiences. This puts marketing teams back into the driving seat where they can roll out multiple sites across different brands, divisions and portfolios.

Finally, thanks to the flexibility provided by a headless commerce system, marketing teams can set up a new site in days instead of months — much like our client Tivoli Audio, a global brand that reduced the time it takes to launch a campaign from a few weeks to a few days.

4. To make the customer experience more personal and consistent

Even though customer needs change over time, they should still receive a consistent customer experience across all devices and channels.

In addition, people want to buy from eCommerce brands that understand their needs across all channels. This goes beyond the usual “people who bought X also purchased Y”. The back-end already knows what a consumer has bought. It uses this data to power the personalization engines on CMS, mobile apps and social channels.

5. For seamless integrations

By definition, a headless commerce solution must have an API (such as GraphQL), which makes it easier to integrate and communicate with other platforms. You can add your brand to any new device, expanding your opportunities and outreach to more customers at the same time. Also, it won’t take you months to integrate your commerce platform to a new device, just hours.

Core dna customer Stanley PMI experienced this first hand, using our headless commerce platform to integrate with Oracle and Slack, an integration which helped streamline their customer service workflows. Without delving too deep into this particular integration, Stanley leveraged Core dna to we integrate with OSCV. Here, they collect customer support requests, warranty claims and other questions while simultaneously executing a customer lookup to ensure it isn’t a duplicate request. It if is, the system appends the request, otherwise, it creates a new customer record. This is all done with the Hooks Engine.

For Slack, the Stanley support team uses the Core dna hooks engine once again to monitor all new transactions. They’re on the lookout for orders that are over a certain limit, or from a certain location, or order which contain certain products. The Core dna hooks engine automatically checks the contents of each purchase and if it meets a certain criterion, it’s shared on the relevant Slack channel.

6. For even better conversion optimization

With a headless commerce in place, you can try and test different templates and approaches. For example, you could experiment with a different back-end search solution whilst running the same front-end search.

As a result, a headless commerce allows you to run continuous tests and optimization cycles which will help you get a better understanding of your customer, whilst improving your rate of learning faster than most retailers.

7. Faster time to market

If you do manage to build a multi-channel or omnichannel retail experience with a traditional eCommerce platform, your time to market will be painfully slow, and scaling will be arduous. 

A headless commerce platform, on the other hand, enables brands to focus on building front-end experiences on different devices and touchpoints, as the content and products are housed centrally and delivered via API to anywhere. This facilitates faster time to market when adopting new channels, entering new regions, and so forth.