Frustrated, annoyed, and abandoning their purchase.

This is how users respond to slowness and lack of considered experience design in today's digital retail climate of abundance.

It's more crucial than ever to ensure consistent, positive user journeys that enrich the online shopping experience for busy consumers.

Consumers are increasingly time-poor and deficient in attention spans, meaning that any hiccups in experience are going to eat into your wallet.

As an ecommerce business, if you're not moving, you're losing the race.

Say hello to Headless Commerce, quickly becoming the de-facto approach to implementing fast, personalized, and meaningful user journeys that enrich the user experience and incite users to action.

I won't get too tech-y here, but read all about how Headless Commerce works here.

Headless Commerce?

When you’re managing and maintaining a store on Shopify, Magento, or another all-in-one platform, you're most typically operating the monolithic model.

With the promise to "take care of everything" and empower you to "do it yourself", these platforms provide a wealth of tooling that enables you to go from zero to hero in no time.

Then, you start adding apps, plugins, modifying the theme, and 4 years later you're in a little too deep.

Google Page Speed Insights is starting to report failures on key metrics, and you're noticing on session replay that users are waiting more than 3 seconds for pages to load.

Sometimes, your website assets don't load fully and you can't see fonts or icons for another 10 seconds after the content loads. 

"Deliver better experiences with...", they said. 

"Take over the world with...", they said. 

Mmm, OK.

So, let's take a deep dive. 

With a traditional, or monolithic ecommerce model, you'll populate & manage your content, assets/media files, orders, payments, inventory, search, user accounts, and even the site design via the same platform or application (WooCommerce, we're looking at you!).

Your single system is responsible for literally everything. And hence, we refer to it as monolithic.

The higher-ups have demanded additional functionality and tracking, so you're up-to your eyeballs in plugins, apps, and tracking scripts, and you're not actually that impressed by the user experience the store delivers anymore. Perhaps you're even a little concerned.

If your tech team is really responsible, they've probably also setup a staging environment for the store, but it doesn't really work as it should and you can't actually test things properly before deploying the same changes to live (which you'll do manually by editing some files or code, am-I-rite?).

When making changes to your frontend, there's a frenzied panic as to whether it's going to break something as you deploy those changes live. The uncertainty is crippling–we know–we hear it all the time from brands who reach out seeking a solution. Luckily, we have one (more down below).

In a monolithic/traditional ecommerce setup, all of your "stuff" is housed in the one single platform. Maybe you've connected a few plugins which are siphoning off data elsewhere so you can better track inventory, but for the most part, it's all under one roof.

The backend powers the front, the frontend kinda powers the back, it's all a jumbled mess of sticky, buggy, bloated code that nobody wants to edit or update.

Think WordPress/WooCommerce, or open source Magento. It might even get this bad on a traditional Shopify setup with a heavily customized Liquid theme and an overuse of frontend plugins + oversized assets.

But what's the problem with monolithic architecture for ecommerce?

That one's simple. Just as you wouldn't have the same contractor work on all parts of your home, there are big drawbacks to entrusting a single piece of software to manage all of your ecommerce operations. 

Over-diversification, in any respect, can lead to a loss of specialism, and this is the crux of the problem with the monolithic software model. 

Particularly for ecommerce, where digital experience is responsible for a large portion of your bread and butter, a degrading lack of software specialism isn't sustainable forever.

Web and marketing teams will commonly use plugins or apps in an attempt to extend the specialisms of the core ecommerce platform, but this is not without its drawbacks in performance, security, and longer term maintainability.

For smaller brands who operate storefronts of lower traffic volumes, the monolithic model can work very well. Challenges start to arise when poor architecture over the long-term has resulted in high levels of bloat, complexity, and deferred technical debt. 

This will be far more prevalent for medium-sized or growing businesses, who may experience volatility in traffic volume and feel the need for a more stable delivery of experience.

Headless is the proven alternative to monolithic commerce architectures

With Headless Commerce, we do a bit of a dissection. It's quite a big dissection, to be honest.

With headless, you completely separate the frontend of the store from its backend platform or application, so your storefront is no longer directly delivered by the backend software.

In other words, if you're running on Shopify, your storefront will not be served by Shopify after going headless. If you're running on WooCommerce, your storefront will no longer be served by WooCommerce/WordPress. 

They'll exist as two independent applications, connected via a middleware layer that sends and retrieves data via APIs. 

These APIs might be called frequently or infrequently, depending on the frontend's implementation.

And just like that, a bunch of experience, performance and scalability problems just go poof.

The new headless storefront will be entirely decoupled from the backend, and this process unlocks the opportunity to select best-in-class frontend technology to deliver the powerful, engaging, and highly personalized user experience that's key to driving up sales.

Traditional ecommerce platforms aren't agile. They don’t provide the ability to rapidly develop progressive user experiences, nor do they promote wide-scale transformation in a short period of time.

And to be honest, they aren’t meant for that. A lot of these systems are growing old, and use quite legacy technology in order to deliver the frontend. PHP, jQuery, and the age-old "templating" process.

With a headless approach to ecommerce, you can utilize other technologies to design and display your content, with a stronger level of control and development convenience without even touching the backend.

It's actually quite exciting.

Top Headless Ecommerce Benefits

Headless commerce introduces a host of benefits for growing ecommerce storefronts, but here are some of the most sought-after and future-first headless ecommerce benefits, when compared with the monolithic way of doing things.

1. Unparalleled Omnichannel Customization and Flexibility

Your brand must be represented with the same theme across all channels - your website, app, social media, and all other touchpoints you're leveraging. 

Your customers expect a consistent experience across all platforms. For brands lacking this, the experience delivered is disjointed and, I believe, can cause a bit of uncanny valley.

Headless commerce puts the control back in your hands, with your brand no longer at the mercy of its ecommerce platform insofar as the frontend experience it can deliver.

Because of the type of technology used to develop headless storefronts, all of your preexisting frontend rendering challenges disappear. Headless storefronts are developed using modern Javascript frameworks such as Next.js and Remix.run. 

These frameworks offer developers a completely blank canvas upon which it's possible to build experiences of a different level, and achieve a greater level of complex logic execution than would be practical or feasible in a traditional PHP-based, templated theme (ahem... WordPress/Woo).

Regardless of your backend, you're able to deliver a user experience that sings your brand story from the hilltops – in a compelling, and exciting way.

And on omnichannel, we've discussed how the decoupling process unlocks the frontend from the ecommerce backend, with the two connected via API. 

The question is... why use these APIs solely for feeding data to the frontend, when you can now distribute your content and product line literally anywhere? 

One of the biggest gains with headless commerce is the freedom we gain from the availability of these APIs, which can be repurposed for things like content syndication (think a multi-site setup), funneling content and product data through to feeds, and integrating or syncing data with other systems in your tech stack.

2. Rapid Market Adaptation and Future-Proofing

The speed at which you're able to react to market trends will determine the long-term success of your ecommerce business. The market moves fast, and those who fail to keep pace risk being left behind to disruptive competition.

With headless commerce, you can quickly respond to market trends and external factors with an agile deployment process and more nimble, decoupled applications.

Consumer preferences are ever-changing, and influences from business competition, supply chain disruption, and the general market require agility. 

Brands who are unable to meet the need for agility are likely to over-spend in order to keep up the pace. Bloated, clunky technical setups are responsible for this, as they require significantly more input and maintenance in order to keep moving.

With headless, you can deploy game-changing enhancements to your frontend without having to get stuck in swathes of backend code, allowing for faster innovation of the storefront experience.

Again, this is all down to the decoupling of the frontend from the backend, allowing changes to occur at a rapid rate in either (or both) major components without directly affecting the other. 

Primarily, you'll feel these benefits on the frontend in the form of cyclical updates that can occur at a rate of many times per day, incrementally boosting user experience with a low overhead and a lack of downtime or risky server-side code changes. 

You'll also have peace of mind that backend updates are not going to directly impact the frontend. All we need to do is keep our APIs returning responses as expected. 

With a headless setup, the time to swiftly respond to changes makes you able to adapt with the market trends in more flexible ways than ever. 

For example, launching a new product line or promotional campaign will no longer require weeks-long preparation in terms of its effects on website presentation. 

Instead, you can rapidly introduce new pages, create and deploy microsites that leverage the existing headless APIs, and pump out new features without disrupting your core systems residing in the backend. 

All you need is a robust API layer to seamlessly connect your frontend and backend, allowing for rapid innovation and adaptation.

3. Improved Website Performance and Scalability

Slow load times can result in higher bounce rates and lost sales, especially during high-traffic periods like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. And it’s something that no business wants! As consumers grow increasingly time-poor and with so many distribution channels & devices vying for their attention, you're not on the forefront of their mind for long. A challenging checkout with slow response times on a mobile 3G connection just isn't gonna fly.

One of the key advantages of headless commerce is that it allows businesses to independently optimize the front and back ends of their website, which allows businesses to easily scale their website without compromising on the website performance or user experience. If your traffic spikes due to a holiday sale, you can scale up your backend infrastructure without touching (or incurring additional undue costs for) the frontend. The same applies vice versa, but with a headless setup it's possible to deploy your storefront as a static or hybrid site, which means that the majority of content is served by CDN (not just images, but also the pages and page data itself). This means that for a lot of headless storefronts, spikes in traffic volume isn't going to cause nearly as much cause for concern as a traditional setup where the backend is being hit numerous times with each page load.

In a traditional ecommerce setup, where your ecommerce platform is handling everything under one umbrella, things start to get messy. With all the bloated, much unused, and inefficient code residing in your backend or theme files, the site will become progressively slower as traffic numbers ramp up. It not only makes the shopping experience worse, but it also impedes your longer-term SEO performance, particularly as Core Web Vitals have now long-been a ranking factor by Google Search. While all-in-one ecommerce platforms (especially those that are self-hosted) might promise low cost of ownership and high levels of flexibility, the opposite tends to become true as the system grows further bloated. If this is a problem that affects your brand, you'll be feeling it tight around the waistband–every time you anticipate a traffic spike.

3. Enhanced Personalization through Best-of-Breed Integrations

If personalization isn't already a big part of your strategy, you risk being shunned by consumers and left behind. Consumer demands for highly-personalized shopping experiences is on the rise.

Generic, one-size-fits-all experiences just aren't resonating consumers anymore. You'll need to be providing personalized recommendations to your customers based on their current and past interactions with your store, and deeply embedding this as part of the entire omnichannel brand experience. Headless commerce helps you achieve this more accessibly, by integrating AI-powered engines specifically designed to bring more personalization to your store for smooth customer experience. With headless, even integrating the likes of on-site search powered by AI is more readily accessible.

The best example of such an AI-powered engine is Amazon’s product recommendation system. Amazon uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze user behavior, such as browsing history, past purchases, and items in their cart, to recommend personalized products that align with their interests.

Headless commerce also makes accessible the opportunity to integrate other third-party data-driven tools, like chatbots, loyalty programs, and email marketing platforms to help you automate tasks, without concern for restrictions or limitations of your backend. Through decoupling your store's data and funneling it through to a hand-selected mix of best-of-breed tools, purposeful integration of considered functionality into your storefront becomes significantly easier than before.

5. Long-Term Cost Efficiency and Streamlined Development

You may have preconceptions about the initial costs of headless commerce development, and concerns with the financial feasibility for your brand. We think you'd be surprised! Chat with us about your needs, and we'll see what we can do.

Traditional ecommerce models can be real money pits as a result of the increasing technical debt that acts as a barrier to optimal experience delivery. Costly and highly-involved upgrade & maintenance cycles, complicated self-hosted setups and hacky workarounds, and cost associated with scalability issues can all lead to lighter pockets or potentially lost sales. With headless commerce, you gain infinitely more flexibility, and we find the ROI to often show itself within weeks, for small to medium sized businesses.

The newfound agile development cycles that are native to headless setups allow your development team to iterate efficiently and at pace, making impactful frontend changes that aren't tied intertwined with the backend.

Reimagine Ecommerce with Cocoon

Headless commerce acts as a powerful gateway toward stronger, more composable technical infrastructure for growing ecommerce brands.

Cocoon specializes in making this transition as smooth as possible, helping you adapt to current market trends and deliver stronger, more meaningful user experiences that resonate with consumers and drive them to action.

Ready to illuminate your brand with headless ecommerce benefits? Let Cocoon help you transform your storefront effortlessly. For us, it’s just like changing a lightbulb!