ULTRO, headless e-commerce agency
Ultrō is an agency specialized in headless e-commerce. We design and develop e-commerce sites with Shopify, Shopify Plus and Centra. If you are wondering about the potential of headless e-commerce and its possible suitability for your project, you will find below our feedback and some advice that can help you in your choice.
Reminder on the origins of headless e-commerce
To talk about what headless e-commerce is and why we became a headless e-commerce agency, we need to put into perspective what e-commerce has been like over the last fifteen years.
The providential arrival of Magento in 2008, followed by those of Prestashop in 2009 and Woocommerce in 2011, opened a new chapter in the history of e-commerce. The few mastodons specializing in the subject (IBM, Oracle, SAP) are then inaccessible, except for major accounts. Developing an e-commerce site yourself is a tour de force. These new open-source platforms will become the starting point for tens of thousands of commercial sites.
Their ecosystem of modules developed by contributors, volunteers or salespeople, offer each merchant the possibility of customizing their store.
With the widespread use of online shopping and the challenges associated with acquisition and conversion, some functionalities of these “all-in-one” or “monolithic” solutions are proving to be ineffective or even counterproductive. The best known is that of the Magento and Prestashop order tunnels, whose simplification and customization are particularly complex.
While historical solutions have made it possible to lay down the outlines of a standard that is now universal (catalog, customer account, basket, logistics, etc.), they have sometimes gone too far in the field of possibilities, until they have become complex and rigid sets.
A cumbersome legacy to support the priorities of modern e-commerce in search of ultra-personalization, speed, scalability and flexibility.
The principle of headless e-commerce, a paradigm shift
In response to the limitations of the “all-in-one” model of monolithic solutions, modern e-commerce relies on a combination of several specialized technologies and services, connected to each other by API. Hence the term architecture. Rather than piling up functionalities on the e-commerce platform and making it heavier (the better known case is that of plug-ins), the principle is to separate and connect.
We are therefore talking about connecting an e-commerce solution to specialized services (customer reviews, payments, transport, taxes, marketing), all hosted in the cloud. This is where a headless e-commerce agency comes in whose expertise lies not only in choosing an e-commerce platform but also in selecting the services that will complement this platform.
Our feedback as a headless e-commerce agency
It is undeniable that the development of headless e-commerce projects is changing the situation for the agency. Relying on SAAS services and solutions considerably reduces the instability factors found in monolithic solutions (native bugs, regular updates required, code overlays linked to modules).
On the side of the user and the commercial experience, it is also a significant step forward since it is possible to design a graphic theme that is not necessarily dictated by the constraints of the e-commerce solution. A real breath of fresh air for the creativity of agencies and indeed for brands. An additional reason that gradually led us to abandon so-called “monolithic” solutions to become headless e-commerce agencies.
Headless e-commerce solutions for which we are a partner agency
Shopify
Offered initially with a classic theme system, Shopify can also be used as a headless e-commerce solution. It is possible to create pages in another technology to gain speed and go further in the scripting of the experience. You can find a complete description of our Shopify offers on our dedicated page.
Centra
Centra is an exclusively headless e-commerce solution. It natively offers a D2C channel as well as a B2B wholesale channel. You can find our feedback on Centra on our dedicated page.
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Refer to the term headless e-commerce agency
Unfortunately we had to be a bit insistent on the expression headless e-commerce agency to hope to get the good graces of Google. We're sorry if you found this page long and tedious to navigate. We regret that despite their intelligence and the complexity of the data they manage, engine algorithms give so much importance to these writing methods that are so poorly thought out for the end user. Who wants to read “headless e-commerce agency” a good twenty times? Not a lot of people. As far as we are concerned, we try to find the right compromise between SEO and content of interest. Thanks for reading.