Over the past decade, e-commerce has grown from ~4% of US retail spending to ~15%. This growth has only sped up after the advent of COVID-19, by all accounts the trendline of online sales commerce is steepening. In the not too distant future, the majority of consumer spending will take place online.
The technical world of e-commerce is shifting away from monolithic systems and traditional e-commerce platforms, and into a new era of decoupled e-commerce. This new method for creating and deploying e-commerce is called headless commerce.
I am really excited about this episode. We’ve had a few shows on headless content management but there is a whole other universe to headless when we talk about headless commerce. Fundamentally headless commerce is very similar to headless content management. By decoupling your commerce you can place your commerce anywhere and any way that you want. It is really about having complete control over your commerce experiences and helping give the best experiences to your customers.
In today’s show, I sat down and spoke with Andrew Underwood who is the co-founder of Commerce.JS a headless commerce startup. We talk through some of the big concepts of headless commerce and the e-commerce industry at large. If you’ve never heard of headless commerce this will be a great place to get a bunch of information. If you are familiar with the headless commerce ecosystem you’ll find Andrew has a bunch of great details and insights that will be useful and intriguing as well.
As always be sure to check the show notes for more links and information to help you get more information.
Show Notes
What is Headless Commerce Currently, most of the e-commerce platform options available to businesses are monolithic (also considered traditional commerce). This means the entire system is held on a single platform. The product information catalog, design templates, database, shopping cart, and checkout process are all stuck together and a lot of your business choices have pre-ordained for you. This can be beneficial for a young webshop but, eventually, many online traditional commerce stores find themselves constrained everywhere they turn.
So what is headless commerce exactly?
Headless commerce decouples the presentation layer — in most cases, the template or theme — from the eCommerce platform. Another way to think of the headless approach is that all the components are modular. Meaning you gain a lot of choice and flexibility and access to the power that brings to develop better customer experiences.
Here are a few links to start your research into headless commerce.
https://www.webriq.com/business-case-for-headless-commerce
https://www.bloomreach.com/en/blog/2019/08/headless-commerce.html