Why Your Business Needs to Go Headless?

Because of the rapid advancement in consumer technology and touchpoints, monolithic e-commerce platforms find it difficult to keep up. Perhaps you’ve noticed how big brands are coming up with new ways to sell and ship their products. For instance, you can now buy things through Amazon Alexa or Google Home or directly through Instagram.

As these giant companies keep moving forward, it's now more important than ever for smaller businesses to keep up with the latest solutions to stay competitive.

This is why evolving businesses are shifting to 'headless commerce'. It gives them complete control over providing their consumers with a more immersive commerce experience across multiple touchpoints.

The ever-changing customer behavior

Before, most businesses did just fine with conventional, monolithic ecommerce platforms. That was true until people started shopping on their smartphones and stopped using desktops and web browsers as their main digital touchpoint.

Customers today are always on the go, even switching from one screen to another just to shop. They are no longer limited to the desktop. Retailers may have noticed that customers are increasingly making purchases via mobile devices and voice technology and wearables.

Because customer purchasing patterns and brand engagement habits have evolved, businesses must also adapt.

The speed with which purchasing habits are changing makes it hard for brands to keep up and respond. This problem stems from a lack of flexibility in businesses' ability to adapt to their customers' evolving needs. So, how should a business progress? Going headless is one option.

Why Your Business Needs to Go Headless

The world is headed toward headless eCommerce. It's a reasonable idea that any organization can accept regardless of size, sector, or platform requirements. But to properly grasp the usefulness of a headless commerce solution, you first need to know what's in it for you.

Improves website performance

Headless commerce delivers a fast and seamless experience for all users across any channel or device. With headless, your content management system (CMS) is decoupled from the backend (the commerce engine). This architecture enables faster connectivity between services and APIs, thereby reducing website loading times and improving the user experience.

Many studies have shown that a website's speed impacts how customers feel about their shopping experience. Up to 47 percent of customers expect a website to load in two seconds or less, and 40 percent would leave a website if it takes more than three seconds, greatly affecting your bottom line.

If customers experience slow pages while looking for products or checking out, it can be very bad for your brand. Headless keeps your site architecture lean and mean, delivering a simple form of web architecture that's fast, efficient, and well-suited to your business objectives.

Gives full website control

Do the design and functionality of your website depend on the commerce platform you use? That might mean you aren’t getting the most out of your eCommerce experience.

Most platforms have strict guidelines and templates that can influence your layout, design, and other website aspects.

While it might seem like a good way to get started, it means it would take a lot more work and more specialized development to make basic changes. Changes that would allow you to tailor the user experience. Having to shoot for specialized developers ultimately proves to be rather expensive.

If you don't have access to these specialist resources, you may find yourself beyond the "upgrade-safe" territory. In other words, large or minor changes will either not be possible or would cost a considerable expenditure.

Long-term success means identifying a platform that foresees an organization's requirement to establish a distinctive brand and experience for its consumers while reducing long-term commitment.

Support scalable growth

Ecommerce demands arise in tandem with a company's growth. As the business grows, so will its needs for web hosting, web traffic, data management, and customer engagement approaches.

A headless software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based ecommerce platform is the way to go.

With it, you can scale your company's eCommerce functions as necessary. Furthermore, you'll be able to respond to rising business opportunities, and have built-in flexibility to meet various commerce goals.

In contrast, on-premise design forces businesses to rely on tightly-coupled systems that are difficult to scale. When everything is coupled together, even little modifications to the system could cause downstream interruptions in performance.

SaaS headless gives you a new method to manage your eCommerce experience without necessitating large resources such as increased time and labor.

Provides omnichannel marketing opportunities

Engaging customers where they are is crucial to personalization in any industry. Customers today shop across a multitude of channels, often combining websites, smartphones, social media, and even on-site apps like live chat to meet their needs.

Your business can benefit from reaching customers on their preferred channels. Companies that employ an omnichannel customer engagement strategy can retain 89% of their customers on average, compared to those that do not.

Unfortunately, it's costly to run. To remain profitable, businesses must find better ways to engage potential customers through all these channels without having to make large expenditures on IT systems.

This is where headless comes in. The decoupled headless architecture gives functionality to each of your sales environments, whether they're on-site, on mobile, or offline. All data produced from these channels is handled and kept on a single platform that links with your information management systems.

Another way of putting it is that headless enables you to create any kind of ecommerce experience across all online sales channels without being constrained by frontend platform limitations. It's the most economical and flexible approach to provide easy, tailored experiences to all customers, on any channel they prefer.

Allows you to respond to opportunities at speed

Headless allows you to quickly add new features and solutions in response to marketing opportunities, even with little technical resources. You'll be able to explore new integration solutions without having to make big investments.

In terms of flexibility, this makes it easy to change your strategy and take advantage of "micro-moments" in ecommerce shopping. Anytime you find a new opportunity to engage customers with a personalized offer, promotion, or reward, it is simple to set up and launch using your headless commerce platform. With the full-coverage API, the front-end can request and use the whole ecommerce data structure to develop customer experiences when it's needed.

Specified consumer data points, purchase history, and recently ordered products, for example, are all accessible via API requests at specific touchpoints. Front-end developers no longer have to build without knowing anything about customer data.

Personalization is key to marketing success. 90% of customers find tailored marketing content appealing, and 80% say they're more inclined to buy from businesses that offer it.

Going headless makes it easy to take advantage of new opportunities as soon as they come up, especially compared to monolithic ecommerce platforms, which move more slowly.

Key takeaways

• Headless commerce delivers a more flexible and efficient ecommerce experience
• Headless solutions simplify the architecture of eCommerce websites so that pages load faster and the site performs better overall.
• The flexibility of headless systems enables businesses to respond to new marketing or sales opportunities across any customer-friendly channel.
• Agile systems like headless scales with the business, ensuring your system can adapt as your business demands change.
• Headless allows brands to create more streamlined, tailored experiences.

CONCLUSION

Is your e-commerce business in need of a complete overhaul? Maybe.

The most important thing is not to think about headless as a fresh and exciting all-in-one solution. Instead, focus on the issues you're struggling with. Is there a way to solve these using your current system? And, if not, will diversifying your tech stack help?

Headless commerce is a fast-growing concept in eCommerce because it enables retailers to deliver outstanding, tailored experiences to all customers regardless of the channel they prefer.

With any luck, this has given you a clear idea of what headless commerce is all about, how it varies from the traditional method, and the benefits it brings. While it'll take some thought and preparation, putting in the time and effort today can pay dividends in the long run for your company.

WRAPPING UP

Choosing to switch to headless eCommerce is a big decision as you will essentially be building your website back from scratch. However, there are benefits to it, especially if your business is steady and making big profits.

If you choose to go for a headless Shopify store, choosing a team to work with can help ease the time and cost spent because you’ll be working with experts.

Who is Webinopoly and what can we do for you?

Webinopoly is an Award-Winning Digital Agency and are experts in Design, Setup, Development, and Marketing. At Webinopoly, we strive to create solutions that help your business grow and give you more out of Shopify.

If you’re ready to get started, contact your Shopify experts at Webinopoly here or view our recent work here.