The Future Is Headless: Is Your Company Ready?

“Headless commerce” is one of the hottest buzzwords in ecommerce right now. But what does it really mean? 

In its simplest form, headless commerce is an ecommerce solution where the front-end presentation (head) has been decoupled from the back-end commerce functionality. The front end — or head — is often a user interface, social commerce, or digital marketplace that can be updated or changed individually without interfering with the back end. 

This provides more flexibility to create unique experiences for your visitors. They can select and customize the features and functionalities of their commerce platform. 

The boom in the digital space over the past two years has put a focus on this front-end flexibility. Let’s learn more about headless and why investing in a headless strategy is so timely in today’s market. 

Why Go Headless Now?

If your company has avoided going headless up until now, it may be difficult to see why it’s so necessary to do it now.

But in order to optimize the customer experience and ensure you’re offering as connected of a commerce experience as possible to your customers, it no longer makes sense to have a separate, siloed tool for each type of customer interaction. 

This is why API-driven platforms, which can connect new touchpoints and critical legacy systems, are rising in popularity. 

Headless commerce overcomes the limitations of traditional systems by using the API as the core to interface with separate business systems. Admins can lock down each system by only authorizing those who require access to any given machine, as well as limit the amount of data that is available to the API. 

Since there is no code intertwined with the back-end database that stores content, front-end developers are free to adapt layouts as they see fit. This means content and products aren’t restricted to only a single site or app — a touchpoint can be any device connected to the internet. 

As customers become more and more demanding of the brands they shop with, it’s crucial for your company to have that additional front-end flexibility if it doesn’t already. 

Why Replatform With Bloomreach and BigCommerce? 

Partnering with BigCommerce and Bloomreach as one solution can unlock commerce growth and enables the headless content experience your company needs to scale. A headless approach allows you to incorporate all of the best parts of your business together as one. 

A headless strategy enables you to extend and blend ecommerce site-building techniques into a new experience that is truly unique and that works best for your specific business needs. This is possible due to our partner-first approach to ecommerce.

What specifically makes the Bloomreach and BigCommerce partnership great: 

• Improve Website Speed and Optimize for Search Engines. The longer visitors have to wait for a site to load, the less likely it is that they’ll convert. By off-loading catalog management in BigCommerce, your company can ensure your site is responding and loading with as little latency as possible. Improved site speed is also an important ranking signal for search engines. Since developers are free to use whatever front-end platform they want within the stack, they have total control over how their SEO strategy relating to site design is implemented.
• Produce Customized Shopper Experiences. To attract more online shoppers, businesses have been showcasing their goods and services in new ways online. Bloomreach works to offer brands a unique customer shopper experience that goes beyond the typical online storefront template. Separating the storefront from the commerce engine allows designers to work with the presentation platform or coding language that’s best suited for the brand’s intended experience. A headless strategy can combine the design liberty granted by your CMS or custom Javascript app with the speed, stability, and ease of use you get with a SaaS service.
• Manage Multiple Storefronts. The decoupled architecture is also natively better suited to power and manage multiple storefronts. In a headless commerce setup, you maintain a single, centralized catalog that communicates and coordinates product data out to multiple places (like your primary web storefront and other localized or regional storefronts). Orders from those channels all flow back into a central order management system. Having a single source of truth for your catalog helps ensure product data (like stock level) stays up to date and consistent across channels within BigCommerce.

The Future Is Headless With Bloomreach and BigCommerce

The benefits of a headless strategy with Bloomreach and BigCommerce are obvious. Providing connected commerce experiences to your customers that drive revenue for your company is best done with a headless strategy, and the partnership between Bloomreach and BigCommerce helps rapidly facilitate that. 

If you’re ready to learn more about how specifically this partnership can help your company, don’t miss this opportunity to learn more about Bloomreach and BigCommerce.