Headless Commerce solutions - The complete guide

Headless commerce has been around for a few years now but what does it really mean?

In a few simple words, headless commerce just refers to a platform that allows eCommerce businesses to build stores for all the channels out there. From voice assistants to smartphones and to literarily any digital device your want to send information to.

How does it do it? It all has to do with the way it is built and why its called headless.

What developers have done with headless commerce architecture is separate the frontend from the back end and put APIs in between.

Again in simple words, with a headless platform you are free to connect any system to your platform, link your CRM, your customer service, your payment gateway, send content to smartphones, create push notifications etc.

Nothing is predetermined for you and you get the flexibility of building the commerce platform that works best for your business.

What is Headless Commerce?

Headless commerce is an eCommerce platform without templates or predetermined framework or pathways. It offers a solid backend - the pillar for your online presence - and a versatile front end - what your customers will see - so the brand and business can create whatever their heart desires.

This is only possible because the headless architecture has an API first approach.

Developers can use the APIs to deliver content such as product info, blog posts, landing pages, customer reviews to any screen or device while front-end developers can get to work on how to present that content using any framework they desire. 

Now, you would ask? How did the non-headless commerce solutions work? and why did we have to invent headless?

In contrast, traditional eCommerce platforms only offer predefined front-ends, meaning they can only deliver content to websites or native mobile apps.

Unfortunately, a solely traditional eCommerce platform will become obsolete sooner rather than later. With the prevalence of Iot devices around us and how customers are browsing for products now, it becomes almost mandatory for business looking to create true omnichannel experiences to embrace headless commerce solutions.

But let's not discount traditional platforms just yet. The best of both worlds is possible but that is another discussion: The Hybrid CMS.

How does Core dna support Headless Commerce

Core DNA supports headless commerce in a few key ways: 

1. It allows building completely headless e-commerce solutions by utilizing Core dna just to store and retrieve content/products via APIs. This gives full control over the front-end. 
2. Its APIs enable easy integration of Core dna content/products into any custom applications or omnichannel experiences. 
3. Products and other content can be managed centrally in Core dna and distributed across different sales channels. 
4. Checkout and shopping experiences can be customized independently of the Core dna backend, giving flexibility to meet different brand/store needs. 
5. Caching and delivery of content is improved through the decoupled headless architecture, enhancing performance of e-commerce sites.

3 Headless Platforms for Commerce

Headless commerce is an emerging space, but there is a range of eCommerce platforms offering APIs that facilitate a headless or decoupled approach to eCommerce. Here are three names to consider in the space:

1. Magento 2

Magento 2 users can leverage Magento APIs, but will need to rely on a third-party web content management system to handle large quantities of content at scale. 

2. Shopify Plus

Similarly, Shopify Plus users have access to APIs which can expose product information to third-party systems. However, a CMS will be needed to handle additional content at scale.

3. Core dna

As a digital experience platform (DXP) with eCommerce functionality, web content management functionality, and APIs, Core dna is an all-in-one headless eCommerce solution that can power omnichannel eCommerce experiences. Clients such as audio technology brand Tivoli Audio, office supply retailer Staples, and Swiss luxury appliance manufacturer V-Zug have used Core dna to power their eCommerce sites

• Core DNA allows for flexible product structures and attributes that can be customized for different types of products.
• It offers composable layouts and components that can be reused and structured in different ways for things like pages, products, blogs etc. 
• Checkout and e-commerce experiences can be customized for different store/brand requirements. 
• Integrations with third-party systems like ERPs and CRMs are built-in and configurable through the hooks engine. 
• Content like menus, forms, pages can be managed centrally via the admin interface. 
• Sites can be set up as individual sites or managed together as a multi-site installation. 
• The platform demonstrated complex e-commerce sites, configurable products and multi-brand capabilities. 
• Developers have access to tools and environments for customizations when needed.

What makes Core dna different from competitors?

What makes Core dna different from competitors? With a large choice out there, you need to make the right choice when picking a platform so you don't have to replatform ever again.

Here's what makes Core dna unique from the rest. 

1. Core dna is a CMS and eCommerce platform in one. It has a wide range of built-in applications and solutions like CMS, e-commerce, analytics etc. Which means all your information and content can be gathered under one login. You can manage your eCommerce shop as well as your blog, FAQ, news across all channels you choose to use.
2. Core dna headless and decoupled architecture provides front-end flexibility. This Hybrid approachgives marketers the tools they need to manage their content without technical knowledge
3. Core dna has a composable and flexible content structure using a Lego-like building block approach with customizable layouts, components and product structures. It also offers templating which is rare for headless solutions. We decided to offer this option to reduce the time to market for our customers and reduce the cost of having to hire front-end developers. 
4. Core dna has a native admin system with integrated Marketing Campaign Trackers, Tools to Drive Engagement, SEO, A/B Testing, and Email Integration, among others. This is all out of the box. No add-ons, plug-ins, or upgrades are needed. 
5. Core dna powerful hooks engine allowseasy third-party integrations and workflows. Developers have access to a sophisticated workflow engine that enables them to communicate with external systems and have the external systems send data back to Core dna.
6. Core dna is designed to help give developers multiple ways to extract the most value from the platform. Developers can use their regular IDE. There's no need to deter from your favorite IDE to use Core dna.
7. Core dna offer enterprise-grade performance, security and scalability with regular product updates and releases to keep the platform modern. 
8. Core dna offers Multi-tenant SaaS model allowing centralized content management giving brands the ability to manage individual or multiple sites through one login.

The Key Benefits of Headless Commerce

Amazon might be the biggest case study for how a headless eCommerce platform can help a brand offer the best digital experience for their customers. A study by Salmon reported that 60 percent of consumers want an Amazon Prime-like service — but you can't achieve that with a traditional eCommerce solution.

1. Offer omnichannel experiences without pain

The power of headless commerce platforms is their ability to offer true omni-channel content delivery.

For brands who are looking to stay relevant and available within multiple or all digital devices: smart watches, voice assistants, mobile phones, smart cars etc ... a headless commerce platform is your answer.

Going omni-channel can offer many benefits for eCommerce brands; it allows you to become a top of mind and hence optimized your sales funnel.

The best news is that with a natively headless commerce platform — like Core dna — you don't have to re-architect your platform to publish across channels. It's all just part of the same, future-proof package.

2. Flexibility to remain competitive

A headless commerce platform enables you to deploy rapid updates without impacting your back-end system. And you can easily make any changes to your front-end to coincide with the speed of consumer technology.

A real-life example that illustrates this quite well and is yet not the best experience we all had is Covid.

When the pandemic hit, businesses that were present online saw the biggest increase in sales and the success of a brand like Peloton can be partly attributed to its headless architecture and its ability to deliver content to many platforms embracing the modern customers needs.

Also when a front-end system is not tightly coupled to the back-end, you don't have to roll out an update to the entire system, only part of the system. So you can deliver what your consumers want more quickly and still remain competitive. 

3. For agile marketing

A headless commerce architecture can support new technologies as and when they arise. This is perfect for when designing new and exciting customer experiences. It puts marketing teams back into the driving seat where they can roll out multiple sites across different brands, divisions and portfolios.

This flexibility provided by headless commerce architectures gives marketing teams the gift of time: new sites can be setup in days instead of months.

A Core dna customer is a great example of a marketing team claiming back their time. The team at Tivoli Audio, a global audio brand reduced the time it takes to launch a campaign from a few weeks to a few days.

4. Makes customer experiences more personal and consistent

Creating coherent customer experiences are key for brands to create brand recognition and build their reputation.

Being present on all devices and channels while offering stellar customer experiences will only guarantee success for any business.

In addition, people want to buy from eCommerce brands that understand their needs across all channels. This goes beyond the usual “people who bought X also purchased Y”. The back-end already knows what a consumer has bought. It uses this data to power the personalization engines on CMS, mobile apps and social channels.

An example of outstanding digital experience was the Jetblue "The better Wingman"campaign. To showcase Jetblue's very human customer service, they reliable on a true blend of omnichannel experience with a digital screen store front experience hiding a real flight attendant.

5. For seamless integrations

As we talked about earlier in the article, at the heart of a headless commerce solution there must be an API (such as GraphQL). The API makes it easier to integrate and communicate with other platforms.

By allowing brands to release content to any new device, it expands their opportunities and outreach to more customers. More over, APIs and Webhooks can reduce the time eCommerce business integrate new devices or platforms from months to a few hours.

Core dna's customer Stanley PMI experienced this first hand, using our headless commerce platform to integrate with Oracle and Slack, an integration which helped streamline their customer service workflows.

Stanley PMI leveraged Core dna to integrate with OSCV. Here, they collect customer support requests, warranty claims and other questions while simultaneously executing a customer lookup to ensure it isn't a duplicate request.

It if is, the system appends the request, otherwise, it creates a new customer record. This is all done with the Hooks Engine.

As for Slack, the Stanley support team uses the Core dna hooks engine once again to monitor all new transactions. They're on the lookout for orders that are over a certain limit, or from a certain location, or order which contain certain products. The Core dna hooks engine automatically checks the contents of each purchase and if it meets a certain criterion, it's shared on the relevant Slack channel.

6. Better conversion optimization

As headless commerce platforms reduce the time to market, it allows businesses to test different approaches and new UX and UI more easily than traditional eCommerce platforms.

This is possible again because of the decoupled nature of a headless commerce architecture. The iterations and testing can happen in one layer without affecting the other.

For example, you can decide to experiment with the search results your customers see. You can configure the back end to give different results without touching the front end.

As a result, a headless commerce allows you to run continuous tests and optimization cycles which will help you get a better understanding of your customer and adapt to their needs and their behaviors.

7. Faster time to market

If you do manage to build a multi-channel or omnichannel retail experience with a traditional eCommerce platform, your time to market will be painfully slow, and scaling will be arduous. 

A headless commerce platform, on the other hand, enables brands to focus on building front-end experiences on different devices and touchpoints, as the content and products are housed centrally and delivered via API to anywhere. This facilitates faster time to market when adopting new channels, entering new regions, and so forth.

8. An AI ready platform

This may seem obvious now as we have been talking about it through this article but the beauty of headless commerce is its capacity to be agile and flexible.

No exception if AI. The API first approach of the headless commerce architecture allowed Core dna it instantly integrate Chat GPT in its platform so that customers who need to use AI for their content or any other purpose can access it directly on their profile in Core dna.

How headless commerce supports omnichannel retail

The idea of “omnichannel retail” means that a shopper can use the same online platforms to shop both online and offline, on any device, at any time.

Since the primary objective of headless commerce platforms is to offer a seamless user experience across channels, these platforms are an essential component of the omnichannel retail mission.

Research has shown that companies with omnichannel strategies have 89% customer retention rate vs 33% for those who don't pursue and omnichannel strategies.

So it goes without saying that omnichannel strategies are key to success in eCommerce. They are now necessity for any brand.

A recent study by McKinsey focuses on omnichannel for Asian luxury brand but this can be applied to customer behaviors across the world. As the study showed, most people will blend and online and offline experience and will have multiple touchpoints with a brand on different channels before making a purchase.

Omnichannel is way more than just digital channels, it about creating coherent and integrative experiences when and where every someone comes in touch with your brand. Data is of course at the center of an omnichannel strategy as it empowers brands to create digital experience that fit their customers needs and behaviors and make it possible to have positive and enjoyable experiences.

Having the data to make the right decision is crucial to create such experience for your customers. The power of integrations of a headless commerce system can help business gather, analyze and act with information from different data points.

The Future of eCommerce is Decoupled

Whether it is headless commerce or headless content management system, the freedom of separating front-end and back-end offer many advantages while still creating some new challenges.  

At core dna, we decided to look at it differently; how can we solve the issues of headless while still offering all its advantages?

So we came up with a Hybrid Solution - a blend between traditional and headless commerce.

The hybrid solution or or decoupled commerce system is similar to a headless system in the sense that both front-end and back-end are separated, yet, unlike a pure headless architecture, a decoupled solution doesn't remove the front-end delivery layer from the equation entirely.

Meaning we keep the layers that allows marketers to be in charge of their content and gives them frees them from developers and IT teams.

In the Core dna Hybrid platform, marketers have access to content authoring, content preview, global content component to make it easy to duplicate content and much more while still enjoying the benefits of headless and API integration for omnichannel delivery.

It's the best of both worlds—and that's why we believe its the future of eCommerce.

Core dna core products

Core CMS is a content powerhouse. As a business we give your the tools to own your growth with a powerful content management platform. Our API-driven design and omni-channel approach gives content creators the freedom to execute and scale their strategies without technical roadblocks.

Core Commerce is like an optimized sales machine. eCommerce businesses can elevate their sales game with our integrative commerce approach and create high-performing sales funnels. With our API-first strategy, Core Commerce adapts to your needs and existing tech stack, ensuring a secure, unified, and successful business.

Core Automations creates effortless automations for a connected world. We make it simple for your business to connect and automate tasks between and within web applications. A library of custom automations and workflows to save you time and boost efficiency without any technical know-how.