Service
Headless Shopify Agency
Disruptive ecommerce builds with Headless Shopify
We develop custom storefronts with Headless Shopify that enable daring brands to deliver breakthrough experiences in their niche.
Every millisecond counts. Stop the counting with headless.
Reach consumers faster and more reliably with ultra-high-performance headless Shopify storefronts that deliver consistently on speed, whatever the traffic volume. No need to drop your apps & pixels – just call them with better, faster tech that's built for the modern day.
A store that scales. On the frontend, and the back.
The progressive architecture that powers headless Shopify stacks caters to moment-in-time scalability of the storefront on demand. As for the backend, leverage APIs & bespoke headless apps to augment the Shopify backend as your needs require.
Empower consumers with the power of deep customization.
Say goodbye to never-ending variants and deliver a truly bespoke product customization experience, deeply embedded within your storefront. Integrate powerful custom configurators that sport best-of-breed 3D & AR, dynamic pricing & spec generation.
Do content better, in the way it works for you.
Leverage multiple data sources to feed the headless storefront, including a fit-for-purpose headless CMS architected specifically for your content needs & multi-touchpoint strategy.
Deliver tailored experiences for each & every user.
We hate cookie-cutter (and your users do too)! Personalize experiences in real-time with segmentation-based user journeys, deeply algorithmic recommendations, & AI-enabled content prioritization.
Expand your touchpoints while reducing your workload.
Going headless with Shopify symbolizes your brand's first step toward a data-first strategy. Start reaching more users through multiple storefronts, microsites, IoT devices & distribution platforms.
Because cookie-cutter commerce just isn't cutting it for you anymore.
For retailers who want to push the boundaries, going headless with Shopify offers significant gains in experience flexibility & truly puts your data to work. We work with brands on Shopify & Shopify Plus to develop pioneering experiences with headless.
Unlock Headless Shopify with Cocoon.
We know. You're looking for something next-level, something that differentiates your brand and does it well. Your cookie-cutter online storefront just isn't cutting it anymore.
We use Headless Shopify to build experiences that resonate with consumers and inspire them to action. Personalization, brand story, and a seamless user journey.
What's Headless Shopify all about?
We develop scalable custom storefronts using Headless Shopify: for unparalleled speed, deep experience customization and rich feature availability.
"Headless" Shopify involves a development technique whereby the frontend implementation of a store exists and functions independently of the Shopify backend. Traditionally, Shopify stores are skinned using "Liquid" templates, which allow for styling of Shopify’s native frontend. With headless, your store’s frontend is completely independent of Shopify, removing design constraints and other technical limitations. Due to this increased flexibility, Headless Shopify stores are able to incorporate more advanced functionality than their traditional counterparts.
Many storefronts powered by Headless Shopify look and feel more like web apps, rather than simple websites.
Shopify is known for offering a full-circle platform for e-commerce, and they’re the best in the business. However, as consumers demand more from e-commerce frontends, decoupling your storefront can reposition your brand for success through stronger customer journeys and more immersive user experiences.
Headless Shopify provides a greater level of flexibility on both the frontend and the backend, and enables a greater level of integration with third-party APIs and services. Higher-level functionality can include the development of 3D product configurators, powerful recommender engines, and custom commerce logic, allowing your headless Shopify store to deliver tailored experiences to your users.
It's a common practice for headless storefronts to also source data from an additional CMS, in order to provide enriched content to users on the frontend. A headless CMS coupled with headless Shopify can create a powerful way to store complex product data, rich media, and more. A separate CMS also provides a way for brands to create dedicated campaign pages on a headless Shopify store, often using an easier workflow than would traditionally be possible.
Hydrogen is a frontend framework that can expedite the development of headless Shopify storefronts. Shopify released the framework with the intention of providing a quicker time-to-market for brands who wanted to rapidly build and deploy headless storefronts with Shopify. Hydrogen includes an exhaustive library of ready-made components that integrate with Shopify out the box. Utilizing Hydrogen for development of your headless storefront can kick-start the development process, negating the need to otherwise build these components from scratch.
Shopify Plus is not required for Headless Shopify. However, Shopify Plus comes with many other benefits, some of which can improve the headless experience. Headless Shopify storefronts can be developed with minimal limitations, even for stores without Shopify Plus. As a Shopify Partner, we can help you make the most of your plan, using our diverse arsenal of development expertise.
The approach to headless commerce will typically involve a JavaScript-based frontend, which is separated from the shopify backend. We specialise in React-based frameworks such as Gatsby and NextJS, which provide a powerful toolset for the development of highly interactive, immersive frontends.
Of course! The beauty of Headless Shopify is that it can be developed for existing stores retrospectively, empowering your ecommerce business with the flexibility to implement advanced functionality and enhanced user experience journeys that better suit the needs of your consumers.
Is Headless Shopify right for you?
Let's discuss your project & identify the best-fit technology stack for going Headless with Shopify.
Disruptive commerce, for the now.
We harness the latest & greatest tech to engineer indusry-leading commerce experiences for our clients. All with Headless Shopify.
Fast commerce for Stringjoy, maker of the world's finest guitar strings.
Headless Shopify for a highly-trafficked retailer of premium guitar strings.
We solve technical challenges for our clients using Headless Shopify
We leverage API-driven technologies & headless architecture to create Shopify-powered websites and applications that address technical challenges in your existing build.
Personalization
Product configuration, visualization, dynamic pricing, intelligent retargeting, and more. We believe in the power of personalization as an accelerator to sales and an enabler of conversions.
Complex Data
We're experienced in data-rich headless commerce implementations — the kind that blows your mind. Impossible product combinations, dependency resolution, thousands of SKU combinations, and more.
Logic
We help merchants & retailers break down barriers by developing complex code-driven solutions to nuanced business logic.
Integrations
Challenging integration requirements might be a problem for you — but they aren't for us. We develop headless Shopify solutions that are connected wherever you need them.
Start winning with Headless Shopify.
Tell us about your Shopify project, and we’ll get back to you with details on how we can make this happen.
Let's talk ShopifyEmotive, results-driven headless storefronts with Shopify.
We're a headless Shopify agency that has a strategic focus on experience.
Headless Shopify Development Agency
Deliver impactful experiences through implementation of engaging storefronts and product configurators—using modern web application frameworks. Leverage Shopify's robust platform for managing products & processing payments, without reinventing the wheel.
Web & App Storefronts
Highly-integrated, feature-rich headless storefronts for web or mobile.
Omnichannel
Expand your reach with powerful omnichannel content through Headless Shopify.
Builders & Visualizers
Live product configurators & real-time builders and visualizers.
Intelligent Ecommerce with Headless Shopify
Leveraging the unrivaled flexibility of Headless Shopify, we're driven to deliver intelligent solutions for the modern-day web. With automation, commerce logic, and recommender systems, we position user experience at the forefront of our focus.
User Journey & Experience
Emotion-driven headless ecommerce experiences with Shopify.
Integrations
Powerful integrations to leverage the power of your headless Shopify application.
Replatforming
Replatforming from your existing ecommerce platform to Headless Shopify.
Specializing in Headless Shopify development for complex use cases
By combining Shopify’s intuitive commerce management with high-performance headless storefronts, we develop cutting-edge ecommerce stores that engage consumers and drive sales.
Stronger Journeys
Renowned for their high level of interactivity and lightning-fast response times, we believe headless frontends are capable of delivering more intuitive user experiences and stronger customer journeys.
Personalized Experiences
Successful modern commerce is all about intelligence & the ability to cater to the needs and behaviors of individual users. In today's world, consumers expect greater relevance in their online retail experience.
Intelligent E-commerce
Highly configurable product lines, deep customization, & interchangeable parts are best managed with commerce logic. We build systems under the hood that better understand user's selections & deliver tailored pricing.
Passionate about driving sales.
With a headless implementation, Shopify provides a powerful backend for management of products & payments, with an independent, decoupled storefront powered by modern JavaScript.
We're a team of expert Shopify developers who specialize in headless & composable Shopify.
We use a headless approach to maximize Shopify's value for disruptive brands.
Shopify
Shopify
Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus
Hydrogen
Hydrogen
How we help brands build richer customer experiences with Headless Shopify.
01
Personalization
With a composable approach to stack implementation, we can access data easier from all your sources, allowing the development of deeply-personalized experiences across platforms.
02
Performance
Through the use of modern Javascript stacks, performance challenges become a bane of the past. Make the most of every session through a performant, consistent user experience.
03
Intelligence
Because headless builds are inherently data-first, it's easier and more practical to implement intelligent functionality such as recommenders, configurators, and personalized content.
04
Integrations
The development of strong, purpose-build middleware allows for limitless integrations at any touchpoint in a headless Shopify build. We integrate with PIMs, CRMs, ERPs, WMSs, DAMs, and more.
05
Experience
We help brands break free of the traditional constraints of Liquid-based templating, building disruptive customer-centric experiences that open new possibilities for your marketing teams.
06
Data Connectivity
Data siloing can cause of a lack of productivity and impede agility for the modern retailer. With a headless or composable approach to commerce, this can be solved.
07
Maintainability
As it's fully managed, Shopify as an ecommerce backend will require no maintenance in the way of DevOps, reducing business overheads and the potential for downtime.
08
Scalability
In carefully selecting appropriate tech, your storefront is better positioned to scale as viewership and transactions require.
09
Omnichannel
Using automation at the system level, we build headless Shopify implementations that are capable of omnichannel distribution utilizing only a single source of truth.
Fast commerce, fast conversions.
Feel the need for speed with headless. We engineer headless storefronts with Shopify that unlock greater conversion potential.
Why Headless Shopify?
Because cookie-cutter commerce is no longer working for you.
You're a disruptive ecommerce brand that desires to deliver more compelling, higher-converting experiences, and leverage hyper-personalization to actually engage your audience.
Match experiences to the uniqueness of your product offering, through bespoke product configurators & more routes to product personalization.
Deliver a frontend that's actually scalable, fast, and capable of handling x50 increases in traffic without breaking a sweat.
Integrate cutting-edge technologies like AI-driven product recommendations, hyper-personalized content, and more.
Cater to wholesale & B2B customers with the same data source, but a completely different experience, user journey, and dynamic, real-time pricing computations.
Headless vs Traditional Shopify
Explore the differences between a modern headless build, and a traditional storefront hosted on Shopify.
Headless Shopify
The modern, future-first approach to building high performance Shopify stores that excel at user experience delivery.
Traditional Shopify
The traditional way of building Shopify stores - where your storefront is hosted on Shopify & customized via a theme.
100% Frontend Freedom
Because headless storefronts are essentially derived from custom code, you have 100% frontend freedom after going headless with Shopify. This is a game-changer for brands in certain markets or verticals, where highly customized user experiences form a key part of a successful sales strategy. Think luxury retail, made-to-order products, or product lines with a high degree of user-driven customization & configurability. You'll no longer be bound by Shopify's defacto storefront architecture (collections, pages, and products), but can instead architect a bespoke experience that makes sense for your industry, the particular products you sell, and the consumers you sell them to.
"Hacky" frontend workarounds
If you're a brand who requires a high degree of frontend flexibility on Shopify, you're likely to have found yourself implementing "hacky" workarounds in order to get things looking – and working – the way you want. The restrictions associated with Liquid templating and Shopify's default product data structure can be limiting when attempting to implement a highly-specific vision of your storefront. As these workarounds accumulate, you'll find that they lead to bloated code, and are a headache to maintain over time. Headless Shopify builds, on the contrary, allow for a bespoke frontend architecture that doesn't require workarounds, an can display content in the way you seek – by default.
Fast. Faster. Fastest.
Headless Shopify storefronts utilize the latest and greatest in frontend web technology. Whether the frontend is built using Hydrogen, Next.js, Gatsby or Remix – the Javascript-based foundation of these frameworks unlocks a plethora of performance-ready tooling that rivals that of legacy setups. The hybrid rendering capabilities of these frameworks allow for deep caching, static site generation, and selective prerendering of pages - all of which contribute to a faster, more performant storefront.
Limited Performance
In contrast to a headless build, traditional Shopify storefronts are inherently limited by the performance of the Shopify platform. In general, the Shopify platform itself provides for robust, reliable performance out-the-box, but performance problems can result from heavy storefront customization. Most often, this relates to a) poorly-optimized themes, b) apps that are loaded into the storefront, and c) the addition of pixels. The difficulty arises when these components are critical to your store's ability to deliver the desired experience, in which case you may feel stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Multi-storefront
The API-first nature of headless provides a straightforward solution for deploying multiple storefronts from the same data source (in this case, Shopify). There are no limitations to the number of storefronts you could deploy, leveraging the same Shopify store time-and-time-again to distribute content and enable sales from multiple interfaces. This flexibility can be used to create market-specific storefronts, microfrontends, or a multi-storefront setup that caters uniquely to different groups of users. Each frontend can display a unique set of products and prices, or they can be uniform across all multiple storefronts.
Single storefront
Currently, Shopify is primarily a single-storefront solution when using the traditional Shopify platform. While the platform's capabilities in this area can be somewhat extended through the use of Shopify B2B, custom apps, and templating – there are scalability issues for brands who want to specifically intend to deploy fully segregated storefronts that deliver significant differences in experience, branding, and customer journey. For brands aiming to target multiple markets or user segments, the innate multi-storefront capabilities of a headless solution is guaranteed to provide a stronger level of control.
The business case for Headless Shopify
Going headless with Shopify enables bold businesses to do more with their storefronts.
It's the answer when your storefront experience demands more than just straightforward collections and cookie-cutter product pages.
We use Headless Shopify as a solution for brands looking to deliver & execute stronger implementations in the following key areas:
- Storefront Experience
- Your challenge:Difficulty in customizing the storefront experience or implementing complex custom functionality. You sell a complex product line, possibly with highly-configurable custom products, or require deep product filtration capabilities. You may also be considering implementing deep functionality to the site outside of pure commerce.
- Our solution: Custom storefront developed using pioneering frontend technology, decoupling the front-facing experience from the Shopify platform entirely. This allows for the flexibility required to achieve unique, nuanced, and niche-specific storefront experience that is no longer limited by traditional Shopify constraints.
- Personalization
- Your challenge: Your business model relies on deep personalization to meet consumer needs and expectations. We find this particularly common for clients who operate in certain retail markets and niches, where products are highly customized, made-to-order, or require some level of customer-driven specification. You've experienced challenges in personalizing the experience & customer journey with traditional Shopify or your existing platform, and are seeking a solution that allows you to deliver the highly personalized experiences your customers require.
- Our solution: When business requirements demand deep levels of personalization, we'll develop the headless Shopify build using a composable approach. This sees us unify multiple best-in-class technologies to facilitate dynamic & real-time computations, AI-enabled recommendations, and user-specific experience personalization.
- Site performance
- Your challenge: Stubborn performance challenges that you've been unable to resolve through traditional optimization techniques. You have a high dependency on injected scripts, Shopify apps, & pixels – but are frustrated by persistently sluggish performance. You're concerned that this results in lost conversions, and prevents you from delivering optimal user experiences.
- Our solution:Hyper-optimized decoupled storefront that connects to Shopify for data and nothing else. This provides for a transformative storefront performance that improves user experience & organic search performance potential. We deploy a combined approach by utilizing hybrid rendering - meaning that selective content is aggressively cached & prerendered, to further reduce latency and guarantee unbeatable, reliable response time. Live data fetching is then used for personalized or moment-in-time data, dependent on the goals & requirements of the page.
- Data limitations
- Your challenge:You currently experience challenges with Shopify's core data structure and are looking for a solution that makes sense for the products you sell & the way that you do business. For example – we often hear about difficulties with using variants for customizable products, line item challenges for configurable items, and difficulties with combined/autogenerated SKUs and their subsequent impact and viability with a third-party inventory or fulfillment management system. Other frequent challenges we hear about relate to complex real-time pricing calculations that need to be contextually aware of the user's session, delivery location, or other variables.
- Our solution:A decoupled Shopify solution that takes a holistic approach to solving your current data-related challenges, integrating additional data sources, events-based data processing, and a composable technology stack to maximize Shopify's value for your business. For areas where Shopify is not a best-fit, or is inherently limited, we'll build custom microservices, edge functions, or serverless environments which are more suitable of the data processing and computations that your business logic requires. These will then be integrated into the headless stack via middleware that sits between Shopify and the custom headless storefront.
Decision Maker
What do we stand to gain from going headless with Shopify, and is it right for us?
Sending a reply...
Experience Advisor
Headless Shopify allows brands complete flexibility over their storefront & shopping experience, while still being able to leverage Shopify's best-in-class commerce engine as a backend. It's a great strategy for businesses who might otherwise feel constrained or limited by what they're able to do with their current Shopify store, or that their requirements have outgrown the capabilities of a traditional Shopify store.
Our Process
Because Headless Shopify stores use custom storefronts, each build is highly unique. After years in the business, we've refined our process to ensure that you receive maximum value out of your custom build with Headless Shopify.
Deep Discovery
As headless builds involve such a high proportion of custom code, and with each project architected differently, it's essential we have a deep understanding of your requirements & the specific challenges you're looking to solve. We'll achieve this through a series of in-depth discovery workshops, to identify how going headless can best work for you.
Strategy & Kickoff
Once we're aware of all your current challenges, our team will put together a plan and proposal on how we'll go about solving them. Going headless opens up huge possibilities, and is the #1 way to solve challenges with Shopify experience customization. Our strategy will detail, in-depth, our architecture & implementation plan. 3, 2, 1, kickoff!
Purposeful Prototyping
After completion of the planning, market research, and collaborative positioning undertaken during the earlier discovery & strategy phase, we'll begin a phase of rapid prototyping. During this stage, we'll work to build a prototype headless Shopify solution that demonstrates the core functionality of your new build, whilst remaining in close collaboration.
Agile Development Cycle
We believe in power of agile development with total transparency, and find that this helps to ensure maximum success for highly-involved projects such as Headless Shopify builds. This process forms the bulk of the development process, where we continually iterate upon the previous prototype.
QA & UA Testing
During a rigorous quality assurance and User Acceptance Testing phase, we'll work closely with you to ensure that all elements of the headless build are tested, and that each touchpoint works in exactly the fashion you'll require. Our quality assurance process is strenuous, but this helps to ensure that the build is production ready & fit for purpose.
Deployment & Aftercare
Our fully-managed deployment process will ensure a minimal-downtime deployment for your new Headless Shopify storefront, complete with all the necessary backend adjustments & Shopify app configuration required. After a successful go-live, we'll be available to provide the ongoing support & coaching you'll require in the post-launch period, to make for a smooth transition.
Cyclical Iteration
Go-live is just the start of your journey with the newfound flexibility of Headless Shopify. Through an ongoing series of cyclical iteration, we provide agile development to support the growth of your new storefront, through the development of new features & functionality into your headless build. This enables you to remain firmly ahead of your competition, with a storefront experience that differentiates.
Let's talk Shopify.
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.