Headless Shopify & Shopify Plus

You can create multiple headless storefronts without Shopify Plus.

Headless Shopify implementations use the Shopify APIs to source data, and a decoupled frontend to display it. Nothing stops you from utilizing the same data — from a single store — to build out multiple headless storefronts that display certain products based on explicit parameters.

To achieve this, you'll populate all of your products into a single Shopify store, regardless of the headless storefront you're aiming to display them on. This approach is best suited to businesses that sell similar products (or the same products) via multiple storefronts, because things could get a little disorganized if populating a single store with products that are completely unrelated. Still, it's possible to do. 

Another use case is where you want to create different headless storefronts for different user segments, such as a B2B portal, wholesaler storefront, and end-user/D2C storefront. Potentially, even multiple D2C or B2B storefronts, targeting different user groups.

In order to segment the products displayed on each storefront, there needs to be some differentiating factor between the types of product and what's intended for each storefront. One way to achieve this is via Collections, in which case certain collections would display on certain storefronts. A more reusable way could be via Tags. The cleanest approach, however, is to use a custom Metafield/MetaObject which would allow you to explicitly define the storefront for which each product is intended.

When your headless storefronts source data from Shopify, only the products relevant for that store would be selected, based on the defining parameter set via Shopify (such as the value of a custom Metafield).

Does Shopify Collective work with Headless?

A few of our headless Shopify builds do indeed make use of Shopify Collective to sell products from partner stores via their headless storefront. These have worked well and didn't require any extra "special" implementations from us in terms of the headless storefront - things worked pretty smoothly out-the-box. Whether you have the same experience or not will depend on how your headless setup is architected.

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