Modern e-commerce platforms enable retailers to get online quickly, but they come with drawbacks, especially for national and scaling businesses.
Personalization
Consider a houseware retailer operating across an entire country. Consumer preferences and styles can vary significantly from coast to coast due to factors like population, demographics, income, housing, and weather. While local storefronts adapt to these market differences, most retailers’ websites present the same sales and products to every visitor. This lack of personalization can hinder engagement and sales.
Speed
This challenge is amplified for multinational retailers. Local buying behaviors differ greatly by country, and while international website versions address this to some extent, they often face the same nationwide personalization issues.
Imagine a high-end bicycle manufacturer and retailer based in Toronto. Their website is fast for users in or near Ontario, but for a potential customer in the UK, the website’s speed decreases because data (code, images, inventory, and product information) must travel further. This slight delay, though only a couple of seconds, degrades the user experience. The impact is even greater for customers in Asia or Australia, where data travels around the world. What should be a premium brand experience becomes mediocre, negatively affecting conversions.
Logistics
Retailers have varied distribution and fulfillment capabilities. Availability, shipping, delivery, and pickup options can differ by region, city, and even product. Most platforms offer app or plug-in capabilities for custom logic. While this provides extensibility, each app or plug-in adds processing time and complexity. If a retailer needs multiple apps to calculate regional availability, inventory, and real-time shipping estimates, each must load and process for every website visitor at runtime.
This adds seconds to page load times, negatively impacting conversion rates and SEO. During peak times like Black Friday or Boxing Week, this problem intensifies, potentially bringing hosting providers to a halt. One client of ours had to stagger Black Friday deals to prevent their site from crashing.
Headless is the Answer
The term “headless e-commerce” might sound technical, but it’s a simple concept. Traditional e-commerce platforms combine the back-end (products, customer, and transaction processing) with the front-end, or “head” (the storefront), on the same server. This limits speed and functionality to the server’s capabilities.
Headless e-commerce separates the two. You retain your existing e-commerce back-end for core functions but build a separate front-end. Instead of being on the same server, this front-end is hosted in the cloud and pulls data from the back-end via APIs. This allows your storefront (“head”) to be completely customized.
Here’s how Headless solves the challenges mentioned:
Personalization
By separating the front-end, retailers can integrate deep layers of personalization. This is based on virtually unlimited data sources, unhindered by server processing limitations. A furniture retailer, for example, could tailor its homepage for visitors from different regions, promoting products that sell better locally, and even incorporating data like local weather patterns or housing trends (e.g., condo furniture in cities, farmhouse furniture in rural areas). The front-end can also detect new versus returning customers to display appropriate products and promotions.
Speed
A key benefit of a headless storefront is that it doesn’t need to reside on a single server. Modern front-end frameworks are statically generated and deployed on a global Content Delivery Network (CDN). Returning to the high-end bicycle retailer example, while their business operations and back-end processing can remain in Milan, their front-end has multiple versions hosted globally. This ensures customers receive a lightning-fast website experience, regardless of their geographical location. Even during increased demand like Black Friday, cloud resources can scale up, maintaining website speed irrespective of transaction volume.
Logistics
The challenge with implementing complex logistical rules in traditional platforms is the reliance on third-party apps, which can lead to conflicts or slowdowns. With headless, this complicated logic can be built directly into the storefront. The e-commerce back-end handles products and transactions, while the front-end is programmed to display only products available to specific customers based on their location or other data points. This prevents customer frustration from trying to purchase unavailable items. Even essential site components like local inventory data can be synchronized to a CDN, ensuring a retail website of any scale remains incredibly fast.
A Balanced Viewpoint
Upgrading to headless e-commerce does have drawbacks. It’s more development-heavy than, for example, using a drag-and-drop interface of a commercial Shopify theme. There are also increased complexities when building your architecture via microservices.
However, in our experience, the opportunity cost of a headless approach outweighs the additional development and architectural requirements. The improved user experience, increased customer satisfaction, and benefits to SEO and security justify the upfront investment in build resources.
If you’re starting your headless e-commerce journey, feel free to contact 9thCO.
