The future is headless: e-commerce gets a new architecture

Aristotle said the human body is at its best at age 30. The same can now be said for e-commerce, which turned 30 this year, and celebrated the milestone with a new headless architecture.

If you’re not already familiar with the term ‘headless commerce,’ it’s essentially the separation of the front and back end of an e-commerce application.

Because the front and back-end function independently, headless commerce gives merchants the freedom to customize their online storefronts with much more agility and flexibility – without having the changes or maintenance headaches at the back end.

This has huge implications for customer experience, allowing businesses to quickly adopt new technology touchpoints, shape the buying journey, and interact with innovative digital experiences and personalization features, as well as potential for experimentation and testing.

The traditional ‘full stack’ approach to web stores (where front and back-end systems were closely connected) made sense for its time, as e-commerce sites were only focused on one experience – the desktop.

Today, these same sites must tailor customer experiences across all available digital channels, while keeping the overall buying experience consistent across the brand (think 1-click checkouts or message-based sales channels to become more plug-and-play). A study by Google revealed consumers are 40% more likely to spend more than planned when experiences are highly personalized, so there’s never been a better time to go headless.

Headless architecture: When and how to go headless

But how do you know when the time is right to take your e-commerce site headless?

There are two key scenarios to bear in mind:

1. First, if your company is already using or planning on using multiple channels to connect with customers.
2. Second, if you’re looking for your commerce platform to focus on the user experience rather than just bare transactions.

If either of these scenarios apply to your organization, then headless commerce is definitely worth a closer look.

The key, of course, is how to go about the move to headless architecture – and now that choice is easier for you.

SAP Spartacus is a free, open-source JavaScript web application that allows you to quickly create your own branded storefront for SAP Commerce Cloud.

Developed under an open-source license, users can utilize Spartacus without any cost. It’s 100% API-driven and runs in a headless fashion, and you’re free to extend the libraries that come with Spartacus to include your own customizations.

Many SAP customers have been ahead of the game by using headless commerce since 2012 – in fact, almost half our customers are using us in a headless way. The arrival of Spartacus and the growing importance of user experience are now driving even greater adoption and seeing fantastic results.

If you’d like to see for yourself what a real-world headless e-commerce implementation looks like, The Body Shop is a great example. The company was one of the earliest adopters of Spartacus and are now utilizing headless commerce solutions to support demand for its strategic omnichannel strategy. Adam Plummer, Digital Product Director of The Body Shop features in our upcoming webinar, where he takes you through the drivers and background for moving to headless commerce, insights into the digital journey, the rationale around the company’s technology choices, lessons learned, and benefits gained.

Thanks to the ever-expanding gap between front-end and back-end technologies, more and more storefronts are now adopting the headless commerce approach.

By replacing the old practice of packaging a commerce solution with a fully integrated storefront, a headless commerce solution becomes a set of back-end services, which can be used by any front-end solution. This enables you to innovate with your storefront UI independent of your back-end system and applications offering the best customer experience.

Separating development cycles between the commerce engine and storefront also makes it possible to react quickly to market changes and help reduce time to market around enhancements and features. This is critical in an ever-changing economy.

If you’re looking to unlock your organization’s own digital agility, enable better scalability, performance and speed, then headless is the way to go.