Over the past fifteen years, e-commerce has been shaped on the basis of so-called “monolithic” solutions. Solutions with a large catalog of functionalities but which could be complex to use, maintain or evolve due to the strong interlocking of all its components. An “all-in-one” approach that was attractive at first, on paper, but which began to show its limits in the face of the new challenges of modern e-commerce: the need to be able to evolve rapidly and to offer an increasingly personalized and rapid customer experience.
The emergence of headless e-commerce
As an alternative to these historical packaged solutions, publishers have successfully positioned themselves on very specific segments of the e-commerce journey: online assistance, customer reviews, loyalty programs, delivery information, statistics, payment methods, tax calculation... An approach deliberately limited to a targeted subject, hence the term “micro-services”, with the aim of becoming an essential hyper-specialist. E-commerce à la carte, also called “composable”, then allows any type of merchant to select the services they really need.
At the same time, sales channels have multiplied: mobile applications, social networks, marketplaces, digital terminals, voice-activated devices... The customer experience is lived through several contact points, each with its own commercial opportunities.
The e-commerce architecture is therefore increasingly fragmented. It relies on several variables: platform, micro-services, sales channels, but also on the mainframe bricks necessary for the business operations of the company: CRM, ERP, PIM, CMS, OMS, WMS, POS...
Headless e-commerce and composable e-commerce
A merchant will therefore select an e-commerce solution and a set of partner services that will be connected to each other. Communication between these actors takes place through short, automated and secure messages (API connections) It then becomes possible to change one or more services of this architecture over time without destabilizing it. We speak of scalable architecture because the rise in power of the whole can be done without questioning the entire system.
The main role of the e-commerce solution is the management of the catalog and online orders. Each micro-service manages a specific set of functionalities (customer reviews, payment methods, carriers, search engine, etc.) A content manager (CMS) can complete the system in some cases. It allows you to manage editorial content related to the brand and its products.
Concretely, what are the advantages of headless e-commerce?
More reactivity and freedom
For the creation of branded content and the editing of product content, especially in different international markets.
More sales
By separating the customer interface from the platform, we can optimize the customer experience (CX), make the buying process more fluid, speed up page loading and thus improve the conversion rate.
More security
Once the webservices are secured, access to the management tools is totally isolated from the merchant site, thus reducing the attack surface for potential hackers.
Less maintenance
Compared to a monolithic solution and therefore potentially more development budget for generating sales topics.
Our guide to headless e-commerce
Headless e-commerce remains a complex subject: it is changing the way e-commerce has been organized for many years and leading merchants to question the choices to make: should we migrate? On which solution and at what cost? What is the impact on my sales? We decided to devote a guide to it in order to offer them a framework for reading and to help them see more clearly.
