[{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BlogPosting","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/06\/07\/headless-commerce-solutions-vendors\/#BlogPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/06\/07\/headless-commerce-solutions-vendors\/","headline":"Dirty secrets of headless commerce: What some vendors intentionally don’t say","name":"Dirty secrets of headless commerce: What some vendors intentionally don’t say","description":"Interest in headless commerce solutions is surging, but some vendors are creating confusion about the technology. Learn what headless commerce really is \u2013 and what it's not.","datePublished":"2021-06-07","dateModified":"2024-06-13","author":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/contributor\/riad-hijal\/#Person","name":"Riad Hijal","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/contributor\/riad-hijal\/","identifier":493,"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/5d8dfa078eb822b65a92b06bba2d98ae19baa2ab56d3dd880263142298dab0fb?s=96&d=mm&r=g","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/5d8dfa078eb822b65a92b06bba2d98ae19baa2ab56d3dd880263142298dab0fb?s=96&d=mm&r=g","height":96,"width":96}},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"The Future of Commerce","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/logo-foc-schema-app-1.png","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/logo-foc-schema-app-1.png","width":172,"height":60}},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/HeadlessCommerce_1200x375.jpg","url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/HeadlessCommerce_1200x375.jpg","height":375,"width":1200},"url":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/06\/07\/headless-commerce-solutions-vendors\/","about":[{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/commerce\/b2b\/","name":"B2B Commerce","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/B2B_e-commerce"]},"B2C Commerce",{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/commerce\/","name":"Commerce","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Commerce","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q26643"]},{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/commerce\/commerce-general\/","name":"Commerce","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Commerce","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q26643"]},"Commerce Platforms + Software",{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/commerce\/e-commerce\/","name":"E-Commerce","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/E-commerce","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q484847"]},{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/e-commerce-solution\/headless-commerce\/","name":"Headless commerce","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Headless_commerce","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q106254305"]},{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/commerce\/omnichannel-commerce\/","name":"Omnichannel Commerce","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Omnichannel"]},{"@type":"Thing","@id":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/retail\/","name":"Retail","sameAs":["https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Retail","http:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/entity\/Q126793"]}],"wordCount":1433,"keywords":["Headless Commerce"],"articleBody":"The dirty secrets of headless commerce solutions: What some vendors are (intentionally) not telling you can cost you, big time.Headless commerce\u2014or, simply, \u201cheadless\u201d\u2014is the darling of the B2C world right now. According to Google Trends, search requests for headless commerce have grown exponentially since early 2020. From an e-commerce standpoint, it\u2019s easy to see why.Consumers have been housebound, tethered to their social media feeds during the pandemic. Direct-to-consumer brands can take advantage of media like Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook and take their wares straight to their intended audience. Headless commerce solutions are a no-brainer.Headless architectures provide great flexibility. Because of the decoupling of the frontend and the backend (and the availability of APIs), it\u2019s much easier for organizations who want to deploy commerce on new channels to do it with a platform that supports headless.Headless commerce solutions also provide greater agility as the frontend and backend are deployed separately. Since agility has become a tremendous business differentiator, interest in headless is surging.      What is headless commerce: Definition, benefits, examples, history                Customers tell brands what they want via actions, social media, and surveys \u2013 learn how headless commerce provides the flexibility and freedom they desire.      Headless commerce solutions: Cutting through the hypeBut what exactly is headless commerce? As is often the case in the worlds of tech and marketing, there\u2019s a tendency to latch onto the latest shiny buzzword — think back to big data or artificial intelligence\/machine learning a couple of years ago — and inject it into as many conversations as possible.When people can\u2019t really define what a thing is, however, the waters around that thing tend to get pretty murky. That\u2019s exactly what\u2019s happening with headless commerce.We can\u2019t be too hard on marketers; they\u2019re not the only ones muddying the waters. Plenty of vendors are adding to the mix, intentionally or otherwise, by conflating headless, cloud, APIs, and microservices. They have their agendas, so it\u2019s to their advantage to blur the lines between these things. And to be clear, none of them is the same.Simply put, headless commerce means:The frontend\/storefront\/glass is decoupled from the commerce engine (i.e., the backend).Since it\u2019s decoupled, it consumes backend capabilities like pricing and promotions via API calls.Therefore, by definition, for a commerce platform to be able to support headless deployments, it needs API coverage of the commerce backend functionality.Let\u2019s jump in and take a closer look at exactly what headless is (and what it isn\u2019t), where it came from, and who it\u2019s for.Headless commerce isn’t anything newWhile the term itself might have only started to gather steam in the last couple of years, the concept of headless isn\u2019t remotely new. As mentioned above, it\u2019s an API-first approach where the front end\/presentation layer\/glass is decoupled from the core (using the APIs).For example, at SAP (and formerly Hybris), we\u2019ve been enabling commerce capabilities via our Restful API layer (Omni-Commerce connect) for over a decade. About half of the 3500+ customers that run SAP Commerce (on-premises and in the cloud) do so in a headless fashion with a third- party CMS or bespoke decoupled storefront.The point is, don\u2019t be fooled by the buzz; headless hasn’t just emerged onto the scene.      Building the future of DTC e-commerce, one hack at a time\u2026                How many hackers does it take to create the perfect omnichannel e-commerce storefront? SAP Commerce Cloud is about to find out - join us!      Pure headless commerce solutions aren’t for everyoneHeadless, as with everything else, isn\u2019t for everybody. It\u2019s complex, for starters. Developers must have depth and breadth of skill across multiple codebases.But that\u2019s not all. They require IT maturity and development capacity, as a bespoke presentation layer\/storefront has to be built entirely from scratch using front-end frameworks and libraries (such as Angular\/React\/Vue) or through a partner solution at the bare minimum. These custom frontends are generally not vendor supported.Moreover, bespoke frontends typically limit the ability of business practitioners to design and update the frontend without the help of IT. If that’s an important consideration for your business, then headless-only commerce solutions might not be a good fit for you.The good news: Vendors offer \u201cheadless and head-on\u201d capabilities with 100% API coverage and a decoupled storefront without the need to build it from the ground up. This approach accelerates frontend development and the overall project delivery timeline.Headless doesn’t equal microservicesAs we mentioned at the beginning, some vendors are intentionally muddying the waters by conflating headless with microservices. Let\u2019s set the record straight.No, Microservices are NOT equivalent to APIs. And no (I am about to use my \u201coutside\u201d voice here), A MICROSERVICE-BASED ARCHITECTURE ISN’T A PREREQUISITE TO HEADLESS (APIs, on the other hand, are).According to Martin Fowler, \u201cthe microservice architectural style\u00a0is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API.\u201dYou read that right \u2013 microservices expose their capabilities via APIs and, as such, are complementary, not interchangeable concepts. Compare a microservice-based architecture to a monolithic architecture where the entire application consists of \u201cone piece\u201d of code. In the real world, few applications are either fully microservices based or fully monolithic; they typically fall somewhere in the middle.While microservices can do lots of things, they are also costly (lots of overhead) and are by no means a silver bullet for agility. Without going into the pros and cons of each architectural pattern, it\u2019s worth noting that the main advantage of a microservice-based architecture is the speed and agility at which large development organizations can build software. The overhead is small compared to the time to develop code in a monolithic architecture.      Like and buy: How to strike gold with social commerce                Social platforms provide brands with a unique window to meet shoppers where they are most engaged. Find out how brands can build a profitable social commerce strategy.      So, it\u2019s quite valuable for a commerce platform vendor like Amazon that typically has hundreds of developers working on it. However, this sort of architecture wouldn\u2019t work well for everybody. It\u2019s a particularly poor fit for organizations that don\u2019t have the IT chops and corresponding commerce development resources to benefit from it.It’s better to consider what Gartner calls the composable business architecture. This model of interchangeable building blocks enables a business to rearrange as needed, depending on factors such as a shift in customer values or sudden change in supply chain or materials. These building blocks or modules could be micro, but also macro services.According to Gartner, this architecture provides: speed through discovery, greater agility through modularity, better leadership through orchestration, and resilience through autonomy. This couldn\u2019t have been more important than during the pandemic, when organizations had to completely rethink and pivot their business models in a matter of days or risk going bankrupt.Now, if you\u2019re wondering why some vendors are conflating headless with microservices, the answer is as old as the enterprise software market itself. By emphasizing a new shiny capability, it allows emerging vendors to divert focus from capabilities where they fall short like platform and feature robustness.And while a modern architecture is definitely an important consideration when selecting a commerce platform, it can’t be at the expense of functional richness or the ability to empower business users.Headless is here to stayAs the number of touchpoints continue to grow, headless commerce isn\u2019t going anywhere. When selecting a platform, consider all the functional and non-functional requirements applicable to your business, not just today, but also tomorrow.Selecting a platform that might do the job today but won\u2019t support your growth down the line (e.g., international localization)\u00a0is short-sighted and will only result in kicking the proverbial can down the road.Finally, the fact that some vendors want you to look at the bright, shiny object doesn\u2019t mean the other requirements suddenly don\u2019t matter. Product information management, web content management, order management, B2B capabilities, B2C capabilities, and personalization are essential.Don\u2019t fall in the trap of conflating robust functionally with legacy architecture, despite what some vendors say.  Start-ups, mid-market, enterprise:No matter the business, today you need e-commerce to grow. See how top sellers are winning NOW.  "},{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"2021","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"06","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/\/06\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"07","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/\/06\/\/07\/#breadcrumbitem"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":4,"name":"Dirty secrets of headless commerce: What some vendors intentionally don’t say","item":"https:\/\/www.the-future-of-commerce.com\/2021\/06\/07\/headless-commerce-solutions-vendors\/#breadcrumbitem"}]}]