Headless Commerce Replatforming
Make bigger moves with Headless.
Legacy e-commerce systems drain resources in the form of lost time, money, and opportunities. In an effort to keep legacy systems up-to-date, roll out feature updates, and resolve long-term bugs, businesses are left with compounding losses as a result of technical debt.
Replatforming to headless involves a fundamental re-architecting of the ecommerce store's technology stack, positioning content, data, and connectivity at the core of the implementation. This approach allows for the coupling of a best-fit ecom backend with a separate, decoupled frontend – one that is more capable of delivering the modern, hyper-personalized experiences today's consumers desire.
We've successfully replatformed ecommerce brands from Magento, WordPress / WooCommerce, Drupal, XCart, hosted Shopify & Shopify Plus, and even custom content management systems to future-ready headless commerce stacks.
Let's discuss your replatforming.
Consultancy Services
Tech Selection & Implementation
Custom Data Migration
Development & Deployment
We use headless tech to craft custom solutions that allow ambitious brands to better represent themselves and their nuanced products through powerful digital experiences. Whether you're just starting out on your headless journey, or you're already building on a headless stack and looking to replatform, we can help.
Legacy systems – such as Woocommerce and open source Magento – were built to serve the masses, during a different era of commerce. Back then, the goal was to get online and provide a functional vehicle by which to sell product.
Today, things are different.
Everyone's online, and many businesses are either only online, or primarily conduct business online. With more than 5.5 billion members of the population now connected, the race is on for businesses to deliver pristine, progressive & error-free digital experiences that boast high levels of personalization and genuinely engage consumers.
Contact Cocoon to discuss replatforming to headless.
Hyper-
Optimized.
Deliver faster ecommerce experiences and ace critical performance metrics by replatforming to Headless.
270% Performance Increase
We helped Stringjoy achieve a 270% increase in platform performance by replatforming to a Headless Commerce stack, taking PageSpeed scores from 27 to 100.
Why take your commerce headless?
That's easy.
Amplified Digital Experiences
Headless Commerce unlocks the potential for brands to build & deliver stronger on-site experiences. Legacy ecommerce platforms are known to cause frustration as a result of their inherent inflexibility, which often manifests itself as lackluster, cookie-cutter frontend experiences that don't allow you to deliver a shopping experience that meets your brand's ideals.
Personalization Power
Today, users expect and prefer retail experiences that are highly personalized and tailored to them. Hyken's 2024 survey, as reported by Forbes, found that 81% of consumers favored a personalized experience. Leverage the power of personalization by replatforming to headless; achieved directly through the unlocking of commerce data through APIs and its subsequent connectivity & integration with best-in-class personalization platforms powered by rules engines, machine learning & AI.
Be Everywhere with Omnichannel
Reap the rewards of omnichannel retail by replatforming to a headless, API-first commerce stack. Liberate siloed, pigeon-holed data and make it work for you through its newfound interconnectivity with... everything. Or should that be, everywhere?
Present a consistent brand experience across all channels, with a single source of truth for all your data. Simplify management of your product information, inventory, and customer information – and serve up an aligned brand experience wherever your consumers are.
Smash Performance
Fast commerce, faster sales. Build a future-proof storefront on best-of-breed frontend technology powered by Javascript. Ace Pagespeed Insights, deliver greater customer satisfaction, and deliver a multi-modal frontend experience that feels as fluid as it is fast.
Future Forward. At the Frontier.
Ditch the legacy and make a sound, future-forward investment in your business' growth by replatfoming to headless. Rapidly establishing itself as the defacto in capable, modern commerce experiences, headless is a digital transformation strategy that promises big gains on data leverage, omnichannel retail & robust user experience.
Commerce is changing has changed,
and it's not consumers who are behind.
Built for the traditional web, monolithic systems thrive on all-in-one centralization of data, administration & experience. Regrettably, this sacrifies the flexibility, openness of data, and intraoperability required to deliver modern, customer-centric ecommerce experiences.
Consumers want to be totally immersed in your brand experience, following them from touchpoint-to-touchpoint, and serving them with the right content & recommendations, at precisely the right time. Is your current ecommerce stack up to the task?
No longer is ecommerce a matter of cheap WordPress themes, dodgy servers, and a little bit of SEO.
It's data that now takes center stage. In order to effectively implement the experiences that sets today's leaders apart, businesses must be able to leverage their data and reduce the friction caused by siloed, legacy systems.
Personalization, AI-enabled experiences, omnichannel retail, and high-performance commerce are setting the pace of today's digital commerce landscape.
Legacy ecommerce platforms can't keep up, and it's no surprise!
As a decision maker, ask yourself:
How personalized is your user & brand experience? On-site, does your experience fall short of what consumers expect and that of your competitors?
Are consumers able to customize products to the full breadth of options that you are actually able to offer?
Do consumers receive personal recommendations based on parameters they've shared with you, or that you've inferred from their behavior?
How connected are you? Are your consumers able to shop you via the channels they're spending their time, inclusive of an experience customized to them?
Are you "making do" with less-than-desirable platform restrictions and limitations? Is product variant & option management causing you lost time & compliance/accuracy issues?
If you're dissatisfied with the answers to these questions, replatforming to a competent, needs-based stack is a consideration worth making.
End the commerce chaos and get ahead again.
Put a stop to the rigid inflexibilities of your current ecommerce platform, and reposition yourself as a commerce leader with a bespoke, fit-for-purpose tech stack that provides a tailored solution to your specific business challenges.
Using modular headless platforms & composable web technologies, we engineer bespoke builds that finally afford you the flexibility and control that your current platform can't.
We conduct both lift-and-shift headless replatforming projects for ecommerce brands, as well as comprehensive site overhauls & rebuilds.
Our tailored approach involves a process of deep discovery workshops, the architecting of custom data migration pipelines, and effective backend customization to facilitate the management of your unique products.
We'll work with you to isolate existing pain points within your current stack, in order that we can jointly design a winning build that sees you outperform.
How we orchestrate intricate replatforms to
Headless Commerce.
Deep Discovery, Deeper Outcomes
Forming a crucial part of replatforming success, we engage in a lengthy discovery process that aims to surface all existing points of friction in the current build.
Since headless builds are individually tailored and comprise copious amounts of custom code & engineering, this early stage is pivotal in identifying all areas where architecture and custom development can help alleviate existing pain points.
We'll engage in a series of discovery workshops with your team, with a subsequent phase of open software development prototyping, where you will be privy to our early-stage thinking and proposed direction for the headless commerce build.
You're Only as Good as the Tech You Select
Thorough discovery informs our tech selection process, where we'll work with you to jointly identify the most effective technology from our trusted arsenal of vendors and platforms. This goes for both the ecommerce backend, the frontend framework, and all required integrations in-between.
The better the fit, the more effective the resulting outcome, whilst minimizing the amount of bespoke development required (a big win from a cost efficiency standpoint). Poor selection of tech in a headless build can result in a build that doesn't work nearly as effectively for the experience you seek to deliver.
Rearchitect with Composability & Modularity
Approaching the build from a place of knowledge, we'll architect the new headless stack with modularity and composability. Using each technology component as an individual building block, we'll engineer a flexible stack that provides solutions to your specific challenges. Where existing data architecture is fragmented or broken, we'll re-engineer for more fluidity, with relational-based data structures.
Embrace the Data & Dance with its Complexity
No two replatforms are the same – and we say that from experience. Each project requires us to develop a deep understanding of the existing data structures, how data is used across the existing platform and ecosystem, and its respective place within the rearchitected solution. This understanding comes from a collaborative process of data discovery and planning.
Even where two projects utilize the same tech stack, data structures and storage often differs greatly. Very complex projects may involve copious amounts of structured or unstructured data, often related to complex or custom products. We love data, which is probably a good thing – because most clients don't!
Map, Transform, Migrate.
The new ecommerce platform won't store or interpret data in the same way as your current system. Once we've created the new respective data structures, we'll extract and map the existing data to the new structure using a process called data mapping. Our data extraction process involves a direct connection to the existing platform's data source, rather than "do-it-yourself" exporters. This allows us to extract every single piece of data, regardless of how it's formatted or stored.
Oftentimes, the inflexibility of your existing platform may be forcing you to store data in clunky or nonoptimal ways. You may be relying heavily on plugins and apps to ease this process, which all compound the data fragmentation problem. These issues often cause headaches for our clients in the way of data management and ease of product updates, and you'll be well-aware if this also applies to you.
The good news – with a solid architecture, going headless is primed to finally alleviate these issues.
Through data transformation, we'll reformat and restructure this data so its easier to manage going forward. Sometimes, data anomalies or poorly stored/formatted data in the existing system requires reformatting or correcting, which will occur through this data transformation process.
It's also a great time to link or relate pieces of data that were previously fragmented, siloed or disconnected. The transformed data is then migrated into the new headless commerce platform, using the new entity types & structures we've created.
Many agencies use existing connectors or pre-built migration tools to conduct this task. We prefer a custom approach, that sees us develop a completely custom migration pipeline & automated scripts for each project, as your data will be infinitely more unique than our last clients'.
Re-frontend to serve your users.
This is where the fun begins! From our experience, one of the biggest reasons brands choose to migrate to headless commerce architecture is to rid of the inherent limitations and rigidity imposed on the existing frontend by legacy commerce platforms. With headless, we can jointly engineer and deliver a storefront experience that delivers on all the nuances and intricacies of your brand & your product range.
Whilst some of our clients opt for "lift-and-shift" site migrations (i.e. the frontend site structure & presentation remains the same - albiet on a different technology stack), other clients see this as a perfect opportunity to rebrand, reposition, or develop impactful changes to the frontend experience that deliver greater immediate value to their users.
Say goodbye to the frustrating frontend limitations and UX bottlenecks of your current storefront, and finally deliver the experience your consumers crave.
Integrate Deeply for Added Value
With an API-first headless backend, flexible Javascript-based storefront, and your data now liberated and accessible, it's time to get it connected. Working with you to identify the most effective integrations for strong ROI, now is the time to add profound levels of value to the stack, powered by your data.
With the newfound flexibility from your modular stack, we'll work with you to build on product customization options, customer retention, ingrained and deeper levels of omnichannel personalization, and identify integration opportunities for key revenue drivers such as subscription-based commerce.
Contact Cocoon to level up your commerce game with an impact-led headless commerce migration.
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.