What is headless commerce?
In a nutshell, headless commerce is an eCommerce solution that stores, manages, and delivers content without a front-end delivery layer. With a headless commerce platform, the front end (or the “head”) — which in most cases is a template or theme — has been decoupled and removed, leaving only the backend.
Developers can then use APIs to deliver things like products, blog posts or customer reviews to any screen or device, while front-end developers can get to work on how to present that content using any framework they desire.
Basically, all functional elements (such as forms, blog, banners, products, etc.) of the system can be programmatically managed. This includes the creation and management of the content components.
In other words, headless commerce architecture is built for the IoT age.
In contrast, traditional commerce platforms have their head screwed on tight. That means they have a predefined front-end that is tightly coupled with the back-end, so even if there are plenty of customization features and unrestricted access to code, the platform is only designed to deliver content in the form of websites and maybe native mobile apps.
A headless commerce architecture delivers a platform via a RESTful API that comprises of a back-end data model and a cloud-based infrastructure. Since the platform is not tightly coupled with the back-end, eCommerce brands can deliver things like content, products and payment gateways to smartwatches, kiosk screens, Alexa Skills, and everything in between.