ECOMMERCE

What is Headless Commerce?

Discover what is headless commerce, headless commerce meaning, what is a headless commerce architecture and what does headless commerce mean to your organization.

Headless Commerce

headless commerce is a term for an ecommerce solution where the frontend presentation (head) has been decoupled from the backend commerce functionality.

The frontend or “the head” – think user interface, social commerce, digital marketplace, IoT and more – can be updated or changed individually, without interfering with the backend.

Headless Commerce Meaning

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

What is a Headless Commerce Architecture?

Headless architecture is a subset of decoupled architecture. It is aimed at pushing your data or content to any type of platforms through APIs.

Headless Commerce Digital Experience Platform Headless CMS

In headless approach, architecture focuses purely on background processes, making data available to separate frontend applications via commerce APIs. The backend – items like infrastructure, pricing, checkout and security – invisibly runs in the background. The frontend and backend speak to each other via simple API calls.

Part of building a headless commerce architecture includes a headless CMS.

From a high-level perspective, a headless CMS for any purpose (including commerce) has distinguishable parts.

The backend database includes different kinds of content such as written copy and images.

However, headless commerce requires a few additional systems compared to headless designs that simply deliver content.

Headless commerce uses a separate inventory management system in conjunction with the backend database that stores the content.

Other backend systems usually include customer relationship management systems (CRMs), payment processing platforms, multi-channel security systems, and others.

Here, the API becomes responsible for pulling information into specific systems after certain actions are complete, rather than just providing content to different channels.

For example, let’s say a user is viewing a product on a mobile browser and makes a purchase.

If they’re a new customer, they would fill out a form which is used to update the business CRM.

Too, this information might come from a platform like PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, or some other service to expedite the checkout process.

After the transaction is complete, backend systems are updated by the API calling on data to log the financial exchange, update the inventory system, and store the customer information.

 

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