Philippe Bodart

Switching Away from Traditional Commerce Platforms

Traditional commerce platforms offer a one-size-fits-all solution from a single vendor, many complete with the basic capabilities to set up and run an e-commerce site.

This worked well for businesses in the first wave of digital commerce when companies went online for the first time and customers required simple, standardized experiences.

Fast forward to the 21st century and that is no longer the case. Today, there are now many headless commerce platform options competing with, and even surpassing, traditional platforms.

The addition of new digital touchpoints that these original platforms were not built for, the ever-increasing consumer expectations for modern, engaging digital experiences, and the steady rise of e-commerce as the primary channel for most businesses to engage and convert customers have changed all of that.

In order to keep up with the pace of rapidly changing consumer behaviors and expectations, let alone differentiate and innovate in a saturated market of online businesses, companies are rethinking their tech stack and shifting away from the traditional commerce platforms.

This is where headless commerce platform options and the whole headless eCommerce suite of related technology come in.

No single vendor can offer all of the applications needed to deliver e-commerce experiences that meet the demands of today’s customers. After all, we now have progressive web apps, mobile apps, and other applications that need to be displayed on your online shops or used in conjunction with managing your internet business. Tech needs to adapt and engage customers continuously.

Meanwhile, the need to innovate and evolve marketing and merchandising rapidly means the legacy stacks that require a single code base to be tested and deployed no longer work.

Today, choosing one of these platforms may be fine to start out, but results in trying to “fit” business requirements to the architecture and limits your business's ability to compete.

Take note that the keyword here is "architecture". Yes, that's right - building websites now can be likened to architecture. Not only should the website code be structured in a way that will boost functionality, but also in ways that will support SEO endeavors. Structured content also comes into play and they need to be accessible by a variety of applications and display systems, without giving a headache to commerce managers, business owners, and website developers.

Headless eCommerce platforms can meet all these needs and to better understand why it is best to understand the concept of composable commerce.

Composable Commerce allows e-commerce teams to select and assemble best-of-breed commerce solutions and compose them to satisfy their unique business needs.

Instead of using a one-size-fits-all e-commerce functionality to serve business needs, Composable Commerce leverages modern technologies and approaches like MACH (Microservices, API, Cloud, Headless) and JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) to adapt to the ever-changing market dynamics of today and tomorrow. These modern technologies are flexible and are not only useful to the tech guys but to laymen who need to manage a business website as well.

The basic tenets of Composable Commerce are:

Business centricity. It empowers business users to make changes to digital strategy, enable new business models and create unique experiences without heavily relying on IT. Imagine a content management system that enables the structuring of content, product data, and other shop information by a handful of people from multiple access points without causing chaos. Can you be sure that traditional eCommerce platforms allow you to do that? No, they don't! 

Modular architecture. It supports more agile delivery, faster time to market, and improved experiences across all touchpoints. That means that your customers will be able to view your website or your shop anytime and anywhere, and using different types of devices, without the content or the display being wonky or without those annoying downtimes. 

Open ecosystem. It empowers brands to assemble best-of-breed solutions using various accelerators, third-party applications, pre-composed solutions, and best practices.

 as using packaged business capabilities (PBC) to move toward future-proof digital commerce experiences.

By 2023, Gartner predicts that organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation.

The message is clear: the future of commerce experiences requires application leaders to adopt a composable approach, and with headless eCommerce platforms in connection. We agree.

How is Composable Commerce Changing Commerce Experiences?

Composable Commerce and any composable commerce strategy are all about using the best-in-class technology from various vendors rather than relying on a single vendor to provide a standard functionality that is supposed to work for everyone.

A typical composable stack, for instance, would include a range of best-in-class services covering various capabilities and might look like the following: 

 for Structured Content and Content Management, 

Let’s look at the four key tenets of composable commerce:

Each component of the system — your shopping cart technology, customer relationship management (CRM) system, etc. — can be deployed and interchanged independently. You can manage the content of your product line, enable commerce experiences, and reach your customers via multiple channels without too much hassle.

Applications can be seamlessly integrated with all other applications in the system, with no vendor lock-in.

Imagine the business benefits of this matter. You need not be tied down to anything, which means that your online shop can scale and grow as it should, without limits from third-party applications. Your marketing teams can engage in all sorts of advertising campaigns without being bogged down by the commerce technology you're using.

With your unique stack, you can create totally unique commerce experiences tailored exactly to what your customers want. Be able to meet complex business requirements and deliver highly differentiated commerce experiences. With a traditional eCommerce model, you won't be able to do this.

However, a composable commerce strategy executed via a well-developed headless commerce solution will give you the flexibility you need.

Until relatively recently, enterprise and midmarket businesses built their eCommerce platforms on a monolith architecture by default. Using this monolith framework, all of the necessary pieces of the platform are tied together. The front-end interface that customers interact with is tied to the back-end that controls everything behind the scenes.

Composable commerce is the latest in a series of steps away from the traditional, all-in-one software monolith. These platforms can be rich in features and functionality, but they are not nimble, and they tend to slow business innovation rather than enable it.

This is also where headless eCommerce platforms come in handy. Headless eCommerce makes full use of headless CMS, which can also be called decoupled CMS. What that means is that the backend and frontend of a headless eCommerce platform are not helplessly tied together. Different from a monolithic traditional eCommerce platform, a headless solution to your business is simply more flexible and more profitable.

While it might seem like an all-in-one platform would be easier to use, many brands find that, as they grow, the challenges of working within a monolith grow, too.

Monoliths, by definition, feature a tightly coupled front- and back-end system. Any customizations to the code can make the system more complex over time, particularly as business capabilities increase and technologies evolve.

That same complexity means that the business can’t respond as quickly. Monolithic systems don’t provide the agility to implement meaningful changes quickly without the risk of unintended consequences.

Unintended consequences are often the result of dependencies. In monolithic platforms where parts are tightly coupled, making changes can be like playing a game of Jenga — one wrong move can impact the whole system.

How composable are you? The various technological approaches to delivering composable commerce exist on a spectrum of complexity. One such approach, which has been much buzzed about in the eCommerce community, is headless commerce.

Headless commerce refers to the decoupling of the front-end presentation layer from the back-end eCommerce engine. The front-end (or ‘head’) of many simple eCommerce websites is the theme or template that controls what customers see.

Headless enables more flexibility in delivery because you can connect a content management system (CMS), digital experience platform (DXP), and progressive web app (PWA). You can then swap out and make changes to/customize the front-end without affecting essential eCommerce components like checkout and payment security.

Headless commerce platforms are easier to scale than monoliths; front-end traffic does not impact the back-end because they are operating separately. Decoupling also helps to increase speed and flexibility because one team can make updates to the user interface while another team tests the back-end. Additionally, multiple front-ends can connect to one back-end, so you can experiment with different front-end options.

With a headless commerce system, some of the parts of the system are decoupled — but in a true microservices architecture, the platform and service-oriented architecture are fully decoupled.

This means that the content management system side is independent from the design, look, and feel side of the website. This is helpful because whatever changes you make to the content and backend part, they will still be pulled directly to the frontend without disrupting the frontend side.

No need to keep asking your web developers and designers for assistance whenever you change some content.

As such, microservices enable businesses to combine the best individual services to suit their business. These pieces communicate via APIs to create complex business transactions. However, they can also operate independently — meaning one piece of the puzzle can be swapped out without impacting any other pieces of the system.

In 2020 a community of developers called the MACH Alliance was formed to help enterprises navigate the modern technology landscape, 

Their community perspective on building these open environments has four key elements:

 are the building blocks. A microservices architecture offers a decentralized, decoupled approach. Instead of one solution that does everything, it separates different business requirements into different services which then communicate with each other. This means even as the business and its needs grow more complex, microservices can offer speed and flexibility.

 is what enables an integrated, best-in-breed solution. This provides the flexibility to assemble a tech stack based on your exact business requirements without needing to rely on standardized, pre-built plugins fully.

Cloud: Cloud-native architecture provides the scalability you need to deliver fast, reliable shopping experiences to your customers, wherever they are. The platform will scale automatically based on your needs and assure speed, performance, and security.

 refers to decoupling the presentation layer from back-end management. This flexibility can enable commerce at a wide range of touchpoints to ensure a seamless cross-channel customer experience.

Advantages of Adopting Composable Commerce

As technology continues to evolve and retail finds new ways to innovate, businesses must be poised to react quickly to — and even anticipate — changing customer expectations.

 shut-downs in 2020, digital commerce competition is higher than ever. Customer acquisition, then, is a continuing challenge and, often, a growing expense.

Proponents of composable commerce say that this modular approach offers businesses the agility they need to deliver innovative experiences at speed and scale and differentiate themselves from a growing number of competitors.

1. Construct your own personalized end-to-end customer experiences.

In their report, one of the factors Gartner was laser-focused on was the customer journey. Touch points have expanded from “in-store” and “online” to social channels, marketplaces, IoT devices,eCommerce and more. Shoppers are interacting with brands in contexts and mediums never seen before.

“Where customers are spending their time-shifted. Consumers choose to follow a brand, a person, and that's a very different dynamic than having to push ads into a search box,” said Jimmy Duvall, Chief Product Officer at BigCommerce.

 started in search. Today, they're happening from social; they're happening from direct; they're happening from content, and less and less people are starting from search.”

Constructing a shopper’s journey with all of those factors in mind requires a level of flexibility that just wasn’t necessary or practical in e-commerce in earlier days. But providing this additional level of customization can pay off: As many as 60% of millennials say they’re loyal to brands that offer a unique shopping experience.

2. Respond rapidly to changing business needs.

In March 2020, daily life was upended by COVID-19, and some businesses found themselves more prepared than others to adjust to changing needs and expectations.

Stores that could adjust quickly to offer needed services like buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS), or 

 to minimize the close contact of in-person shopping were better able to weather some of the pains of the pandemic. In fact, the use of 

 increased by 195% year-over-year in May 2020 due to the pandemic.

Accounting for this functionality may not seem difficult, but any change to your system can be complex in a monolithic system. A modular, best-in-breed approach allows you to address only the area of functionality in question without risk of impacting other business capabilities in your ecosystem.

 and changing consumer perceptions of advertising are two of many factors contributing to a rise in customer acquisition costs. Relying on paid ads alone simply isn’t a sustainable solution.

That’s why many enterprise brands have moved to content- or experience-led commerce, which calls for a more modular approach to the technology stack. In our survey with Retail Dive, 60% of participants identified two strategies as the most important to managing or reducing customer acquisition costs: creating content to publish via their own channels and improving their overall digital experience.

. Discovered a better product from a different company? You’ll have to wait until your contract expires, or be on the hook for a potentially expensive migration. With a modular build, you can swap components in and out when it makes sense for your business.

Disadvantages of Adopting Composable Commerce

There are clearly a number of advantages to a composable commerce approach, which explains why many 

 are moving in that direction. However, there are some potential roadblocks and challenges you’ll need to consider, particularly if you’re eyeing a full microservices approach versus a headless eCommerce platform.

If there’s one advantage you can give to the monolith, it’s that you only have to deal with one vendor. Negotiating terms of enterprise subscriptions, reviewing terms and conditions, integrating with the software — it takes a lot longer to do this when you’re talking about upwards of 40–50 vendors versus just a few.

Service level agreements pose another challenge. Resilience to traffic spikes will vary across vendors, and the guarantees they offer in their SLAs will, too.

“Think of microservices like Lego blocks without an instruction manual to piece them together to build that creation you had perfectly envisioned,” 

Composable commerce is a complex model that requires a digitally mature organization and deep, cross-functional collaboration among sophisticated developers. “It can be extremely difficult — and potentially expensive — to put all of those Lego pieces together in a way that creates a compelling and manageable customer experience,” Duvall said.

3. Change infrastructure and monitoring tool needs.

Switching to a microservices architecture might change the infrastructure and tools you need to monitor those different microservices. Be aware of what changes will be required and factor them into the total cost of ownership.

A pure microservices or completely headless experience requires merchants to build a cohesive user interface on top of other components. Because everything lives in different systems, tasks made simple by a more out-of-the-box platform become much more difficult to manage.

How WebriQ can help you overcome the entry barriers of Composable commerce

With WebriQ as a service provider for your composable commerce stack, there is no real need to manage multiple vendors because that is essentially WebriQ's job as a service provider.

We have a ton of experience with Front-end storefronts, commerce back-ends, payment gateways, tax and shipment providers, Search, CRM amongst others. The migration to composable commerce does not need to happen in one go.

The main thing is to start with commerce and search, and then integrate your other tools into a datahub, in order to democratize all data available to whoever needs access to that data. It is possible to build an entire composable stack on essentially open source software and on software that has a pay-as-go structure.

We have already helped numerous eCommerce brands to take their eCommerce business to the next level with the right composable commerce technology stack. If you want to enable commerce experiences that are in line with modern customer needs, WebriQ is here to help.

Whether it is content management systems, ecommerce functionality, or other technical benefits - WebriQ has got your back.

The high digital maturity level requirement

WebriQ has the required expertise and digital maturity level to get you into the learning curve quickly. As an organization, you can acquire that maturity level over time from your hands-on experience with your composable commerce stack.

Composable Commerce Made Simple 

Alex Belding

Historically, the manufacturing sector hasn’t been filled with early adopters or fanboys on some bandwagon. But manufacturing firms certainly follow the market - especially when visionary leaders decide to challenge the status quo, and spark meaningful change to the market.

Often times these leaders are focused on production. For example, Henry Ford reimagined the automotive sector with the conveyor belt and integrated supply lines. Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss changed textiles with the creation of a new category and the world fell in love with denim.

Meanwhile, modern brands such as Nike, Audi, and Siemens among others are honing their fully automated smart factory solutions.

Tackling production has its merits but there seems to be a market revolution that has been slow for manufacturers to adopt. I am of course talking about ecommerce. It seems that manufacturers, especially in the B2B space, have overlooked a major and important transformation happening with their buyers and how they want to buy.

Today B2B consumers do not stick to traditional methods or a single sales channel, online or offline. They have so many choices and options at their fingertips and constantly changing demands from their own customers yet, for the most part, B2B manufacturer buyers are stuck waiting for a revolution in their online buying experiences.

If you want to be among the industry pioneers, this post offers a deep dive into e-commerce for manufacturers — from new customer expectations to essential prep steps for running digital commerce operations.

How B2B Manufacturing Buyer Habits Are Changing

Talking about COVID-19 seems obvious now many months into the aftermath of the pandemic, but it really has caused major changes. The pandemic greatly affected manufacturing companies. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) reported in Feb-March 2020:

35.5% of manufacturers faced supply chain disruptions.

78% felt that the uncertainty around COVID-19 would also have an impact on their businesses.

This is of course pushing most manufacturing companies to reconsider many aspects of their business. From sales, operations, vendor relations, purchasing, etc. many manufacturers are looking to make changes to improve their position in the market and make a lasting impact on their bottom line. One particular way firms can make a major impact is by exploring and implementing ecommerce into their brand.

Last year, in 2020, total manufacturing and distributor sales grew by 1.5% to $17.5 trillion. But B2B buyers in all industries spent almost $9 trillion online. That is over 10% more than they spent online in 2019. Business is moving online and it is moving there at speed.

This of course makes a lot of sense when considering the pandemic but the trend was there long before COVID-19 and stay-at-home orders. The chief reason is millennials. Tech-savvy millennials are now a major cohort of B2B buyers. Many members of the millennial generation had embraced e-commerce long before the pandemic and they have come to expect similar shopping experiences from their B2B suppliers and vendors.

This trend line is set to grow in the coming years, due in large part to millennials becoming the largest segment of buyers in the market. On top of that millennials prefer to purchase directly from manufacturers versus distributors or marketplaces. In the 2019 UPS study, millennials made the largest portion (38%) of their total industrial purchases directly from manufacturers. For comparison, only 29% of Boomers choose to buy from manufacturers.

It won’t be as easy as placing a Buy Now button on your website. Online ordering is just the beginning of what many B2B buyers are looking for. Many B2B buyers are looking for a complete buying experience. Accenture found that over 63% of B2B executives are looking for personalized information online. Many buyers, millennial and otherwise, want to engage with B2B suppliers who offer user-friendly and modern online ordering features, as well as online quote requests for personalized pricing. In fact, 64% state that they'd switch to another vendor if the company provides real-time, personalized pricing.

Factor in the other experiences B2B buyers are looking for online like shipping quotes, pricing tiers on bulk ordering, previous order history, real-time inventory, and other customization opportunities, preferably on demand whenever the buyer is looking.

These demands are not handled easily. They require a thoughtful approach to e-commerce and manufacturers will need best-in-class tools and services to deliver the buying experiences their customers are asking for.

What Manufacturing Firms Can Achieve with eCommerce

The world is spending more and more money online. Just the B2B spend is expected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2023. That’s trillion with a “T”. Put another way, digital commerce will account for roughly 17% of all B2B sales in the US by 2023. That’s a lot of cheddar. Having your own seat at the table is becoming a no-brainer. However, there are plenty of other reasons for manufacturers to jump on e-commerce than just monetary gain.

1. E-commerce is not as difficult as you think

You don't need to be ultra tech-savvy or know how to code in order to build an e-commerce site. There are now many convenient services available for you to build an awesome and highly functional site that will add huge value to your business.

. It is an excellent option for building e-commerce websites that is well-suited to your business.

This flexible tool allows users to select components and essential building blocks for creating a website. You can tailor-made each site page to your desired design and content. You can also build web forms and execute API calls for third-party commerce apps such as Ecwid and Square. You can even integrate with software such as Quickbooks and Hubspot.

You will then be able to manage the backend and your inventory with ease. Want to organize promos and bundle deals for your e-commerce site, too? It will not be troublesome to do all that at all.

With the help of the revolutionary landing page builder and e-commerce site builder that is Webriq Studio, creating and managing a successful e-commerce site is easy! 

The shortest path between two points is the direct path. There is a lot to like about a Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) business model. Plenty of B2C brands have experienced these benefits but B2B manufacturers can experience these benefits too by selling through their website too. This gives them access to:

Exerting greater control over brand representation.

Ensuring optimal pricing and discount strategies.

Collecting customer data for personalization.

Increasing customer loyalty through on-brand retention campaigns.

Access to your customer’s data creates a plethora of opportunities for developing new business opportunities. In addition to invigorating your sales and marketing efforts direct access to the customer does wonders for your product development too.

Many B2B manufacturers worry that e-commerce will cause problems with their distributors, but the inverse is more likely. With eCommerce, you can give your distributors a more personalized buying experience on demand. They can have private access, views on inventory, lookup previous orders, purchase with customized pricing and they don’t have to mess around on the phone, use cumbersome PDFs or excel sheets, or get lost in the shuffle.

Many distributors are looking for this very kind of buying experience to streamline their own business models. They’ll appreciate the touchless experience and on-demand access. If they need to pick the phone they can, and will, but the option to streamline their purchasing helps them out just as much as it helps you.

One of the many limiting factors in scaling up sales is order taking. Many B2B manufacturers have people-driven systems for collecting and processing orders, even with a well-implemented ERP the front end is a weak point. With eCommerce your front end on both direct and wholesales ordering is on-demand and much more scalable. No need to worry about having a highly staffed phone bank or experiencing the ups and downs of staffing.

To piggyback on the previous point, e-commerce offers better integrations for the rest of your operations. Orders can quickly move to production and fulfillment in a streamlined fashion. By embracing digital transformation on the front end of your business it can also have trickle-through effects on the rest of your business.

58% of B2B industrial manufacturer buyers

 start their research online with product focused search. Only after they’ve found initial information do they then follow up with a brand. Your ecommerce website can be SEO-optimized to receive traffic from search engines for both types of queries — product and brand-name ones. So that more buyers get familiar with your brand and full product range.

With full access to customer data, you can employ an array of ecommerce analytics solutions to boost CX and increase sales. For example:

Personalized similar product recommendations.

Dynamic real-time pricing for different customizations and order volumes.

Best suited warranty, servicing, or customer service packages.

Things that Manufacturers should understand about eCommerce

As we’ve noted above B2B buyers are coming to expect better customer experiences and digital commerce from their suppliers. In order to capitalize on this trend here are 4 things to consider as you prepare to start ecommerce with your brand.

Unlike B2C, B2B brands cater to a smaller universe of shoppers with highly specific needs. The knowledge of who your ideal buyers are, where they dwell and how you can best serve them has to stand in the mortar of your e-store.

Start with preliminary online market research:

Understand your own internal channels and opportunities.

Analyze the standard sales cycles in your industry.

Identify the key steps in the customer lifecycle.

Outline the main pain points your target audience deals with at every stage.

Brainstorm ways for alleviating these via digital means.

Then get to the virtual drawing board and start mapping the main customer navigation flows through your website. It's good to have a UX/UI designer at this point. Your goal is to envision how a potential buyer will move — from the homepage to the shopping cart — and determine what could help them progress faster.

Starting with your entire catalog marketed to every sales channel may not be the best idea. It is also worth noting that not all B2B goods can be sold online - nor should they if they require major customization and consultation. However, you decide to set up a dedicated product catalog it can be helpful to separate your products into two categories:

For the first product category, you can create a B2C-like shopping experience online that includes:

For your distributors and wholesalers, you can create a private section of your website with even more options like:

3. Figure out how you’ll build your storefront.

This step is where a lot of your time should be spent. How you create your online experience matters. Many businesses run head fist into the latest all-in-one platform and stand up a shop without taking a long-term view nor remembering all the careful considerations from steps 1 & 2.

Your storefront needs to be extensible and scalable and also able to meet the expectations of your niche buyers. In general, you have two options. You can choose the more traditional option with platform commerce or go for the more customizable 

 approach. While a platform will be easier to implement in the beginning it will be more expensive and harder to customize long term while a headless solution takes time and money upfront it is much 

4. Create your e-commerce team to support your store.

Remember: over half of buyers will still want to speak to a sales rep before purchasing online. So ensure that you have a properly staffed e-commerce sales division to support digital commerce. In many ways, you can use chat tools and software to help scale this and retrain existing CSRs.

Your existing inside sales team can also be very useful here as they can help to manage the website and their traditional sales support roles. These folks should keep track of average buyer re-ordering cycles and reach out to prospects when it's time for repurchasing. Plus, they can also introduce new customers to core products and/or after-sales propositions to drive loyalty.

Lastly, you may also need an eCommerce development partner on call to help with website improvements, troubleshooting, and new extensions. This is where we can help with our 

We have a number of manufacturer customers and know how to help not only create great experiences for your customers both direct and distributor but also how to create a system that fits uniquely with your brand.

No two manufacturers are alike and everyone needs different tools, experiences, and processes to make sure their ecommerce solution works exactly how it should. We don’t offer one size fits all solutions like Shopify or Magento. We offer 

 solutions for modern brands that want the best solution for their customers and for themselves.

And, of course, there is also Webriq Studio for more flexibility and control on your part.

 and learn more about Headless Commerce and Webriq Studio. When you’re ready, 

 - we’d be happy to take your digital commerce to the next level.

Why Manufacturers Need To Focus On eCommerce Now More Than Ever Before

A headless commerce architecture describes the decoupling of the presentation layer of a website from the eCommerce functionality. Developers can utilize their frontend technology of choice to deliver high-quality content experiences and plug in an eCommerce solution on the back end that manages all commerce functionality.

Ecommerce platforms in this model serve up PCI compliance, security, fraud management, and inventory management that can also connect to more extensive critical infrastructures points such as ERPs, PIMs, OMS, and POS.

It's easy for brands to see how headless commerce can provide more options when it comes to eCommerce platforms. For experience-focused brands like lifestyle products, direct to consumer (DTC) brands, and brands relying heavily on influencer and native advertising, a content-led or experience-led strategy like headless commerce is a no-brainer.

The most significant trend in eCommerce for the next few years - dealing with rising Customer Acquisition costs

Retail Dive surveyed 106 eCommerce executives and marketing managers globally and found that customer acquisition costs rose for the vast majority of those surveyed. More than half of the participants reported an increase of more than 20%.

These are not new trends. Research shows that it has increased by nearly 50% over the last five years. What’s the reason for these rising costs? The cost of ad placements in paid media is increasing, just as their effectiveness is decreasing. Businesses choose to diversify their marketing to draw in organic traffic through creative content that captures the attention of potential customers.

Form a monolithic eCommerce model to an experience-led eCommerce model

Until recently, most eCommerce implementations were either monolithic or at best commerce led, basically focused on the checkout process and the integration with backend ERP systems.

The experience led eCommerce implementations to decouple the eCommerce platform from the presentation layer. You can use popular CMS solutions like WordPress, DXPs like Drupal, PWAs (progressive web apps), or custom frontend solutions, like Gatsby for unparalleled experiences that increase brand value perception and drive to checkout. In this model, the eCommerce platform provides PCI compliance and inventory management, though it can connect to new systems like ERPs, PIMs, or OMS tools via APIs.

1. More customization and personalization.

A headless commerce platform and approach best service brands looking to drive increased engagement on their sites through content experiences .Add to this, the flexibility of a Headless CMS approach such as Sanity or Drupal with the security of an eCommerce platform like BigCommerce, which manages PCI compliance and checkout uptime, among other aspects.

2. Marketing effectiveness for innovation.

The keys to growing eCommerce revenue month-over-month is innovation at speed and cost. Agencies and eCommerce marketing teams need to get programs and campaigns up quickly, A/B test them and then double down on what is working and get rid of what isn't. A headless commerce platform approach can make this easy for everyone. Working within a headless CMS speeds up productivity while maintaining the security, inventory syncing, and data orchestration needed for the larger organization.

Headless is an effective way of reducing these costs because your brand can use a content- or experience-led strategy to draw in organic traffic instead of relying on paid advertising. Dynamic and smooth customer experiences also help increase conversion rates.

4. Better organic traffic to the website and the eCommerce website

With the possibility of creating original content published on various web and social media channels, the brand can expand its scope and reach, resulting in better organic ranking for essential keywords and better organic traffic to the platform. eCommerce is not only about selling but about educating and guiding your existing and potential new customers.

Technology trends in headless eCommerce - Progressive web apps

Progressive web apps (PWA) are web applications that use the latest web capabilities to deliver a native app-like experience to users. PWAs are web applications that are regular web pages or websites but can appear to the user like traditional applications or native mobile applications. PWAs combine the capabilities of websites and mobile software to create an immersive user experience that can lead to higher conversion rates and more time spent on site.

These technologies are becoming more valuable for businesses to have as more and more customers are shopping on mobile devices. By 2020, 50% of online sales will be on mobile, according to research by eMarketer Inc. Big brands from AirBnB and Twitter to BMW and Starbucks are already using PWAs and seeing big results.

Here are a few ways brands can leverage PWAs on the frontend in a headless implementation.

Vue Storefront: Vue Storefront allows merchants to build engaging user experiences across all devices. It easily connects to all primary eCommerce backends, including BigCommerce. The solution uses PWAs to power the rest of the experience and allows brands to improve their UX without making changes to the back end.

Gatsby: Gatsby is a static site generator popular with developers for creating blazing fast, modern apps, and React websites. Gatsby can be used in a headless implementation to create PWAs by tying into the BigCommerce APIs. Here's an example Gatsby, BigCommerce, and Netlify CMS project meant to jump-start JAMStack eCommerce sites.

Traditional versus headless eCommerce for Swampfox optics - 

Swampfox optics is convinced that headless was the way to is mainly due to their desire to create and publish original content on the various digital channels owned by the brand.

For WebriQ, having done hundreds of Jamstack content implementations, the choice of Sanity CMS combined with Gatsby was an easy one. With Bigcommerce as a headless eCommerce platform, we decoupled the transactional part of the platform and the content part of the frontend. All content is prerendered and published on a high-availability and ultra-redundant CDN.

For any merchant out there that is serious about lowering the customer acquisition cost, and improving the customer experience, a content-led or experience-led 

 model is the way forward. And headless CMS and headless eCommerce is the answer.

Headless eCommerce implementation

Why outsource to a Headless Competence Center

What is a Headless Content Management System?

A headless CMS provides all of the capabilities of the backend of a traditional CMS (i.e., the “body”), while giving the responsibility for content presentation/layout to the delivery channels (i.e., the head). For clarification purposes, “traditional CMS” from this point forward will refer to the next generation CMS described in the prior section, with back-end and front-end as part of the same platform and vendor.

Content is no longer pushed out to a channel in a predefined manner. Content is pulled or requested from the CMS by any channel, by way of a RESTful API, enabling each individual channel to take advantage of its own unique presentation capabilities. A RESTful API is an application programming interface (API) that uses the internet protocol HTTP to request data for a data source - the CMS in this situation.

In a pure-play headless situation, the headless CMS doesn’t generate any front-end code and provides content as a service, which is why headless CMS is sometimes referred to as “Content-as-a-Service” (CaaS). This process results in the best available digital experience for the end-users of a particular device since front-end developers are able to continue developing new functionality for any channel independent of the core/backend CMS.

As Wikipedia indicates, “a headless content management system, or headless CMS, is a back-end only content management system (CMS) built from the ground up as a content repository that makes content accessible via a RESTful API for display on any device.” Headless CMS can also be defined as only having the ability for creation, reading, updating and deleting (CRUD) of content, while downstream channels that pull content from the headless CMS are responsible for its presentation to end-users.

With that said, headless CMS can also be called decoupled CMS because the backend is separated or "decoupled" from the frontend. So when you see decoupled CMS terminology out there, then you are dealing with headless CMS technology.

Headless eCommerce is also known as Composable Commerce allows e-commerce teams to select and assemble best-of-breed commerce solutions and compose them to satisfy their unique business needs.

Instead of using a one-size-fits-all e-commerce functionality to serve business needs, Composable Commerce leverages modern technologies and approaches like MACH (Microservices, API, Cloud, Headless) and JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, and Markup) or HALO (Headless, Agile, Low-code, and Open) to adapt to the ever-changing market dynamics of today and tomorrow.

Business centricity. It empowers business users to make changes to digital strategy, enable new business models and create unique experiences without heavily relying on IT. 

Modular architecture. It supports more agile delivery, faster time to market, and improved experiences across all touchpoints.  

By 2023, Gartner predicts that organizations that have adopted a composable approach will outpace the competition by 80% in the speed of new feature implementation.

The message is clear: the future of commerce experiences requires application leaders to adopt a composable approach

Headless eCommerce

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