Service
Headless Commerce Agency
We build powerful headless storefronts for disruptive digital retailers.
We draw ecommerce sites into the twenty-first century with impactful headless ecommerce development that delivers on personalization, performance, and infinitely nuanced functionality.
Liberate your storefront from platform contraints.
Break free of platform limitations and effectively execute an online retail experience that finally makes sense for your brand – and your consumers.
Sell everywhere, from a single point of origin.
Market products & content to all touchpoints from a single source of truth, ensuring that updates to your catalog appear everywhere in an instant.
Personalize experiences continually & in real-time.
Enrich customer experiences with deeper, more meaningful personalization techniques that reflect your user's preferences in real-time.
Outpace competitors on storefront performance.
Deliver a faster, leaner browsing experience using static & hybrid rendering techniques provided by modern Javascript stacks.
Free your configurable products from variant nightmares.
Put an end to messy and unmaintainable variant nightmares for highly custom or configurable products with appropriate data-sourcing & backend architecture.
Modernize your legacy stack & join us on the frontier.
Stop fighting against legacy tech, and start future-proofing with the latest and greatest in modern web and commerce-enablement technology.
Headless commerce for highly integrated & scalable retail.
With our rich experience & passion for the modern web, we develop API-first, integration-rich ecommerce stores with a headless approach. Reap the rewards of greater flexibility and on-demand scalability with a high-availability storefront that's specifically engineered to drive stronger engagement.
Performance.
At its peak.
Our Headless Commerce development services.
We're a full cycle development agency that lives and breathes headless commerce.
Headless Storefront Design
Ecommerce Experience Design for Headless Commerce Stacks
Our designers will collaborate closely with your brand to ensure that your vision is effectively and accurately realized. We have a rich experience in designing storefronts and interfaces for headless commerce builds, particularly for brands who sell custom, made-to-order, or luxury products.
Headless Commerce Development
Architecture & Development Services for Headless Commerce
We build bespoke headless commerce storefronts that aim to solve unique challenges for fast-moving brands. From setup and development of your ecommerce application, to the integration of third-party platforms and services, we provice end-to-end headless commerce development services to future-proof your tech stack.
Headless Commerce Replatforming
Migration & Replatforming to Headless Commerce
We provide migration and replatforming services to move your existing store to a headless commerce stack – seamlessly. We recommend replatforming projects where you've outgrown your current provider, in order to better support your growth longer term.
Omnichannel Strategy & Implementation
Implementation of omnichannel commerce
We'll support you to implement a powerful omnichannel strategy that connects with customers wherever they are. With headless, omnichannel content distribution can be achieved with less friction due to the API-first nature of the tech stack. Whether that involves pushing to marketplaces, social networks, or elsewhere – we're here to help.
Headless Storefront Optimization
Stellar speed with headless ecommerce
We utilize the latest in modern web technology to achieve site performance that rivals that of even your most established competitors. Our team is proficient in higher-level techniques such as suspenseful loading, hybrid rendering, and incremental regeneration – all playing a part in achieving the fastest possible response time.
Speak with Headless Commerce Experts.
Your success is our success. Arrange a no-obligation informal chat to discuss headless ecommerce with our team.
Let's talk HeadlessHow we can support your headless commerce journey.
New Headless Builds
Start on the right foot with a fast, sleek new headless build that does your store justice.
Best-fit, headless-first tech selection according to your needs
Design, development & software engineering of new headless commerce builds + storefronts
Moving to Headless
Our in-house team will architect & deliver your move to a headless setup from your existing platform.
Deploy a headless storefront using your existing commerce platform
Replatform or migrate where your existing platform is not headless-ready
Existing Builds
We'll support your existing headless build to continue innovation or resolve preexisting issues.
Extension of your build to implement new features & functionality
Rapid development through cyclical sprints for existing headless storefronts
Speak with us about Headless Commerce.
Commerce is moving fast, and headless is now the safest place to be. Get in touch – we'd love to chat.
Let's talk HeadlessOur Process
Our headless commerce development process aims to simplify the unique challenges of high-octane digital retail.
Deep Discovery
During the initial discovery phase, we'll host a series of collaborative workshops that aim to expose your current challenges and surface core needs. With this insight, we'll explore best-fit technology selection, potential replatforming requirements, and must-haves in terms of experience delivery, and enablement for sales & marketing.
Strategy & Kickoff
As headless commerce builds involve various moving parts, it's essential that we establish a clear strategy and route to delivery. Drawing on our learnings from the discovery phase, we'll spec-out how each component of the build will work, in order to deliver on both functional and non-functional requirements.
Purposeful Prototyping
In a phase of rapid prototyping, we will build your headless storefront inclusive of backend integration and early integration with third-party tools and platforms. This will also include content modeling, feature development, authentication, early-phase experience design, and other key components of the build.
Agile Development Cycle
Our agile development process sees us engage in multiple sprints to iterate and conslidate upon the work started during the prototyping phase. Here, we'll refine both functionality and experience design, in addition to solidifying integration with the backend ecommerce platform, the headless CMS, and any supplementary tooling.
QA & UA Testing
Quality assurance forms an integral part of our development process, and we find this particularly critical for headless commerce builds as they'll involve a brand-new storefront. User Acceptance Testing is conducted to ensure that the implementation works well for your team and resulting end-users.
Deployment & Aftercare
Our team will orchestrate a fully-managed deployment of the headless storefront and any new/associated components of the stack on your behalf, to ensure for a smooth and successful go-live. This will be coordinated to occur during off-peak hours for minimal disruption.
Cyclical Iteration
The post-launch period is when you'll start to really feel the benefits of your move to headless commerce. We'll remain on-hand to support you, and through ongoing agile, cyclical iteration, we'll further strengthen and enrich your new ecommerce build to achieve internal and user-focused needs.
Fueling industry-leading experiences with headless.
Cocoon migrated Bock's legacy store to a headless commerce setup, implementing an ultra-modern, bespoke frontend experience.
What are the advantages of Headless Commerce?
A data-first approach to ecommerce, headless empowers fast-moving ecommerce brands to connect better with consumers through richer frontend experiences, and ever-connected omnichannel diversification.
Do more with decoupled storefronts
The data-oriented nature of headless commerce builds provides the perfect foundation to craft an industry-leading experience that resonates with your consumers. Deliver more impactful frontend experiences through interactive decoupled storefronts that leverage the latest & greatest in frontend technologies. Abolish the embedded challenges and limitations of your current ecommerce platform to deliver the experience your consumers crave.
Superior logic & intelligence capabilities
Whatever your platform, we bet it's not as smart as you'd like it to be. Headless commerce frees up your data, decoupling it from your commerce backend. This affords you infinitely more freedom – to integrate more intelligent, automated solutions throughout the rest of your stack. We use headless commerce as a means to augment your existing commerce platform, so that we can provide the logic and intelligence that your brand needs to thrive.
High Performance
By its very nature, headless commerce architecture is more performant than traditional all-in-one ecommerce platforms. With headless, you can finally be confident in your brand's ability to deliver improved uptime and reliability, through static site generation, aggressive caching, hybrid rendering and utilization of the edge. We utilize the latest, proven frontend technologies to build our headless storefronts (such as Next, Remix, Hydrogen). These frameworks have performance-focused features built-in, such as SSG and ISR, which means that pages can be served to shoppers without a moment-in-time reliance on the ecommerce backend or server.
Omni-channel Commerce
Since headless commerce is API-first, it's the perfect implementation approach for noisy brands who strive to deliver via a multitude of touchpoints. Deliver device-agnostic, synchronized commerce experiences with a multi-channel approach.
Because your products, variants, and collections will become accessible via API, we can easily integrate your data with a plethora of new tools and technologies that you may not have been capitalizing on before. This includes multi-storefront setups, microsites, web & mobile apps, IoT devices, and more.
Effortless syncing that breaks the mold
We often augment our headless commerce builds with powerful API-driven data synchronization and custom, built-for-purpose flows. Headless commerce is all about data. Take it, move it, sync it, stream it – send and retrieve it however, and wherever, you need. You can forget about messy plugins and broken integrations, because with headless commerce you can better dictate where your data goes and how it's formatted and integrated.
Stay ahead of the curve
Javascript-based frontends (and backends, for what it's worth) have been rapidly growing in popularity over the last few years. If your competition hasn't gone headless already, then they're likely already considering it. Talent is moving fast in the direction of more modern, Javascript-based tech stacks – not only due to improved developer experience, but because brands are recognizing the the performance, personalization, and integration benefits that headless can bring.
Real-time personalization
Because headless commerce stacks are built with modern Javascript technology (such as Node.js and Next.js) – your ecommerce architecture has the potential to receive, analyze, and respond to data in real-time. And with 71% of consumers expecting a personalized ecommerce experience, there's never been a better time to consider headless commerce implementations as a potential driver of additional sales. For value-driven ecommerce personalization, this is a win-win, as it allows your frontend to adapt dynamically in response to user behavior.
Sell your way with Headless Commerce.
Break down barriers with how you sell. Headless commerce provides the flexibility in logic and experience design that you've been looking for.
B2B
The flexibility afforded by headless allows you to develop a uniquely tailored and fit-for-purpose approach to B2B commerce. Deeply custom, complicated logic? No problem.
Direct to Consumer
Deliver consumer experiences that are simply stunning. We'll help you lose the shackles of your legacy platforms & adopt a new approach using Headless Commerce. Let's deploy a radical, future-first experience that truly resonates with your audience.
Tiered Experiences
Headless is perfectly suited for tiered, relationship-based ecommerce models that rely heavily on pricing & experience personalization.
Our headless-enabled platforms of choice.
Shopify
Shopify
Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus
BigCommerce
BigCommerce
Our trusted tooling for high-performance headless storefront development.
Next.js
Next.js
Remix
Remix
Hydrogen
Hydrogen
Astro
Astro
React
React
Gatsby
Gatsby
Deliver a best-fit experience with Headless Commerce. However that looks.
Break free from traditional storefront limitations, and sell however suits you, whether D2C, B2B, or a combination of both.
Custom B2B & Sales Rep commerce platform for O2O, a leading canna disruptor.
Cocoon built & services a custom B2B storefront using Headless Commerce, including marketplace & interactive dashboards for vendors and sales reps.
Leave legacy (and your problems) behind. Hello, headless.
Delivering poorly on experience?
Your current platform is slow, and the experience fails to compete with industry leaders or your brand ideals.
Products too complex to configure?
You sell complex products with many interchangeable options, and tens-of-thousands of possible SKUs. But your current ecommerce platform can't handle the complexity.
Hate your apps & plugins?
Do you suffer from broken-app, messy-plugin, or hacky-fix syndrome? We hear it all too often.
Poor site performance?
Does your current site performance cause constant frustration? If so, it's likely costing you sales.
A storefront that's all about experience
Deliver the experience your audience expects with headless commerce.
Offer total configurability
Headless commerce solves the problem of complex product configurations, allowing us to implement additional data sources and logic to handle highly complex or custom products.
Bespoke integrations that work
Integrate with all your third-party systems in precisely the way that you want, with headless.
Faster than you can say "headless"
We'd stop short of making you dizzy, but we'll make you a guarantee: you'll be passing on metrics like never before.
An experience that finally hits the mark.
As forward-thinking industry disruptors, Bock Lighting requires the ability to iterate fast.
Cocoon delivered & services a headless commerce solution, enabling both B2B and D2C customers to configure made-to-order products, save them to their account, and checkout later using Headless Commerce.
Drive deeper commerce experiences with decoupled storefronts.
With headless commerce's API-first approach, data takes center stage - allowing you to do more by sourcing and sending it wherever you need. And craft unique experiences from the data, without rendering limitations.
Pulling data in...
Source data from multiple systems, backends, and APIs to deliver a more personalized, bespoke, and connected experience.
- Data sourcing via GraphQL, RESTful, & JSON APIs
- Pull data from multiple sources directly into the storefront, for an experience that goes deeper.
- Render the data however you want – literally.
...and sending it back out.
Sync and send data out from the storefront, directly to your third-party systems and platforms, specifically in the way format want it.
- Leverage enhanced tracking, sending data back out from the headless storefront to external tools.
- Drive deeper personalization through continual data streams. Understand users better through stronger automated insights.
Decouple your data, and plug it into... everywhere.
Through decoupling your commerce data, your organization can find agility and modularity through an API-driven approach to ecommerce.
Extract greater value from your data with headless commerce.
Headless Commerce
Send what comes in back out with deep, API-first integrations.
Headless vs Traditional Commerce
Explore the differences between Headless and Traditional commerce capabilities.
Headless Commerce
A data-first development approach to ecommerce, fueled by APIs and Javascript-based frontends.
Traditional Commerce
How things used to be: an all-in-one DIY platform attempting to juggle all the responsibilities.
Unique like you
Headless commerce stacks are one-of-a-kind, in the sense that no two will be the same. With headless, the components of the technology stack are chosen purely based on the needs of the business, with a best-fit frontend framework, your backend platform of choice, and all the integrations required for your business to thrive. Often, a purpose-built headless CMS will supplement the store, to provide additional, rich content that goes beyond the limits of your ecommerce platform.
Cookie cutter
As with all prebuilt platforms and applications, traditional commerce architecture is cookie-cutter by design. With the promise of a DIY, "one-and-done" solution, your business sacrifices its autonomy and control over all parts of your ecommerce experience – from the frontend to backend operations and default integrations. While this works for many businesses, cookie-cutter ecommerce platforms aren't a great fit for businesses with nuance or complexity.
Custom functionality is a breeze
With traditional all-in-one ecommerce platforms, and particularly in the case of SaaS-based platforms, you rely heavily on the vendor to provide sufficient tool-suites in order to achieve what you're aiming for. For highly-complex builds, it's not always possible to achieve the high degree of experience customization that you require in order to deliver a storefront that makes sense for your specific audience. While this can sometimes be solved (even if partially) by third-party apps and plugins, they often leave a lot to be desired and can contribute to additional slowness or performance issues on the storefront. With headless, custom functionality can be built directly into the storefront in a bespoke manner, with the customer-facing experience revolving directly around the functionality requirements for your brand.
A chore to develop deep customization
Traditional commerce platforms aim to solve a plethora of issues within a single, unified solution. The problem? An inherent lack of specialism and potential difficulty to largely customize operational workflows & experience. Breaking free of the architecture, content modeling, and default behavior of traditional ecommerce systems can be a challenge to achieve, although most-often possible through copious amounts of custom code. The code will typically be layered above the existing core functionality of the platform, though, not replacing it. This has the potential to contriute to performance issues and aggravate frontend latency. In contrast, with headless commerce, your storefront can be engineered specifically around your custom requirements – which means less bloat, and more efficient, straight-to-the-point code.
Unrestricted storefront
Headless commerce storefronts afford the highest level of frontend flexibility possible. Essentially, there are no limitations or platform/plugin-related restrictions with headless. This is because the frontend is developed using an entirely separate technology to your backend – and comes with no opinionated structure, procedural rules, or restrictions at the outset. It's possible to craft an experience that reimagines the status quo, delivering a truly unique experience through a fully bespoke, custom storefront. This works brilliantly for brands who sell deeply unique products that satisfy a specific need for the consumer. In scenarios like these, it's often pivotal that the experience is unique too – drawing the consumer closer to their ideal purchase.
Limited storefront flexibility
In a traditional commerce setup, you'll often find yourself struggling with messy templates and half-baked plugins in order to customize your frontend experience. And yet, it's still far from ideal, and most certainly not industry-leading. You might find that some functionalities are impossible to achieve, or that when you do, site performance takes a hit. As you add more and more functionality to a traditional commerce storefront, it's common to see site speed and customer satisfaction take a nosedive. Headless commerce decouples your storefront from this messy backend layer, enabling you to craft the ideal customer experience – whilst saying in the green with Page Speed Insights, and your customers.
Prime Performance
Storefronts built on headless architecture have a unique advantage above traditional commerce stacks. Principally, there is a broad selection of modern-day frontend technology at your disposal when building headless. Unfortunately, these modern technologies aren't utilized by traditional ecommerce platforms, which work in a fundamentally different way. These frameworks sport next-generation tooling and functionality that enable deeper, more intelligent control over caching, hybrid rendering and performance. It's this degree of control that opens up the potential performance gains with headless commerce, which is something traditional stores can't compete with.
Throttled Performance
In contrast to headless storefronts, traditional commerce storefronts lack the modernity of the latest advancements in frontend web technology. This means that they're inherently behind, in spite of platforms' best efforts to keep up. With hybrid rendering methods and performance-centric tooling at the core of headless stacks, legacy platforms will struggle to achieve the same level of performance and delivery optimization that headless commerce can. This is due in part to the overall system architecture (API-first vs monolithic), but crucially the availability of modern rendering technology and techniques.
Agile by design
Headless commerce builds layer and combine multiple technologies together in order to extract the maximum value from each. The tech that's utilized is newer than traditional commerce platforms, which allows headless commerce stacks more agility. This makes it faster to innovate, preview, and deploy changes throughout the storefront and the rest of the stack. In general, more modern technology is built using better practices by today's standards, which favor agility, nimbleness, and rapid development. The use of microservices and composable architecture in headless commerce builds takes this a step further – allowing components of the stack to be swapped out efficiently as needs change over time.
Slower to innovate
Traditional ecommerce builds are slower and more complex to innovate than their headless counterparts. They often aren't multi-environment as standard, and lack the defacto tooling to support rapid development and deployment cycles. In addition to the fact that they're often based on older technology, this makes traditional ecommerce stacks harder to continually augment – slowing down the pace of movement and innovation. Updates take longer to deploy, and operational problems run the risk of becoming embedded as opposed to fleeting. In contrast, headless commerce builds introduce modern, progressive tech directly into your stack – enabling rapid innovation through cyclic, incremental deployments.
Scale up, down & sideways
Headless commerce stacks have a key advantage over traditional commerce stacks when it comes to scalability – which is largely down to their system architecture. First and foremost, because headless storefronts are decoupled, they can be scaled independently of the backend from which they source & send data. This typically means you can scale faster and at a lower cost, particularly if your storefront is static or leverages a high degree of prerendered routes. And because headless storefronts can often be hosted on a CDN or via serverless architecture, it's far easier to scale up and down on-demand - which is the gift of modern, progressive platforms.
Harder to scale
Traditional commerce platforms tend to be harder to scale due to the legacy technology that they're built on. Often PHP based, legacy commerce stacks require specific types of server environments (like LAMP stack), which will often require scaling of the entire server environment in order to access more resources. This isn't ideal, due to lost efficiency. It doesn't make much sense to scale up the entire server when all you require is additional database reads, for example – which is a common caveat of legacy hosting infrastructure platforms.
Omnichannel by default
Since headless commerce stacks rely heavily on APIs, omnichannel implementation is more within reach. Product, order, and customer data can be distributed across multiple systems with relative ease, and served via a potentially infinite number of storefronts & interfaces. Your new headless storefront forms just one of these interfaces.
Single channel focus
Traditionally, ecommerce platforms focused on single-channel delivery through a centralized frontend directly attached to the backend ecommerce application. While this works to keep everything in one place, it limits the freedom of omnichannel data and content distribution, making it harder to extract information & distribute it elsewhere. While traditional ecommerce platforms tend to include APIs nowadays, they're not API-first, which often means excessive data output, slower performance, and a messier data structure.
Greater level of ownership
Particularly if your headless commerce platform is SaaS-based or provisioned by a third-party, headless commerce provides a greater level of ownership over your storefront and your tech stack. With headless, your storefront is within your complete ownership & control – meaning you aren't reliant on the backend platform to serve up the storefront. This can help to mitigate concerns regarding availability and long-term vendor lock-in, as the backend commerce platform can in theory be switched out in the future, should your needs demand. You also have greater options in terms of hosting and deliverability of the storefront with headless commerce, and aren't bound by infrastructure, availability/uptime, or performance limitations that may be imposed by your current provider.
Less ownership of the stack
With a traditional commerce platform, you could potentially have far less control than you'd like over the store and its codebase. If you're using a SaaS-based platform, you're fully reliant on the platform vendor in all respects; uptime & platform availability, appropriateness of experience, timely issue resolution, and core site performance. And crucially, if you decide to move to an alternative platform, your storefront (and its functionalities, plugins, and any custom code) can't come with you. In contrast, a headless storefront engineered with a modern frontend framework is completely independent of the backend commerce platform, and can effectively come with you wherever you go.
Drive conversions with decoupled experiences
Through our deep understanding of data-first solutions, we develop forward-thinking decoupled storefronts.
Multi, Omni, Any Channel.
Deliver multi-channel commerce by building & leveraging powerful APIs.
Experience. On steroids.
Drive transactions with blazing fast, integrated decoupled storefronts. Optimize storefronts for conversion with powerful recommender systems.
Move faster & with agility.
Provide constant innovation with a continuous delivery approach.
Headless is the direct route away from your current challenges.
Better access to data. Stronger insights. Experience-driven storefronts. The ability to make impact.
At its heart, headless commerce provides a data-driven approach to ecommerce storefront development. In freeing up the data from your commerce backend, you're able to better select the appropriate stack of technologies to manage the rest – frontend experience, customer management, and more.
Traditional, all-in-one ecommerce platforms excel in many areas while simultaneously failing in others – and for brands who come to us, this tends to be the reason. After all, it's a tall order to expect a single application to do everything well, which is often why businesses seek out headless commerce in the first place.
There are some unintended benefits to headless commerce, such as the ability to scale up a storefront rapidly and on-demand – as well as reduced infrastructure costs as the forward-facing storefront no longer requires a direct connection to the backend.
We empower forward-thinking brands to deliver engaging and seamless e-commerce experiences. Through the power of headless commerce, we build highly scalable websites and apps that cater to the demands of retail consumers through every channel.
Decision Maker
So tell me, what will we actually gain from going headless?
Sending a reply instantly...
Experience Advisor
There are so many opportunities to be gained from going headless. Freedom. Connectivity. Ever-connected omnichannel automation. Infinitely stronger data insights. A modular, best-of-breed tech stack. The ability to scale quickly, and to innovate significantly faster.
Let's talk Headless.
We build modern digital experiences for disruptive brands.
Tell us about your project, and we'll get back to you with details on how we can make this happen.