Understanding Headless Commerce
A new customer-facing E-commerce experience for businesses to sell anywhere.
Overview
Introducing Headless Commerce. A new era for your business’ e-commerce strategy.
Think of your online store as the coupling of the visually pleasing interface shoppers interact with (Front-End) and the unseen code and background operations that power your site to facilitate sales (Back-End). Traditional Commerce exists when Front-End and Back-End remain tethered. On the flip side, Headless Commerce is the separation or ‘decoupling’ of these two systems, to allow for each one to fully optimise their core functions, via a series of APIs. This essentially means no more interference between either system when one of the two is updated, resulting in a multitude of benefits for businesses, developers and customers alike.
This ‘Headless Architecture’ to Commerce isn’t simply another emerging E-commerce trend. It’s a revolutionary opportunity for changing the way selling and buying are performed online. This shift in communication between Front-End and Back-End databases not only brings incredible flexibility in terms of design and development but also opens new doors for businesses to develop their marketing and sales strategies in unison.
Not to mention how Headless Commerce allows businesses to meet their customers at any discovery point and deliver a richer online shopping experience, thanks to new products like seamless checkout, which providers like Roqqett are delivering. Overall, by adopting Headless Commerce, brands will vastly improve customer satisfaction rates as well as contribute to the transformation of online purchasing behaviours.
Headless commerce will enable e-commerce sellers to sell anywhere on the web, mobile or social channels. This will drive audience engagement, building your brand and ultimately generate new sources of revenue growth. This is a super exciting space to be working in.
~ GLENN SMITH
Roqqett Founder & CEO
Business benefits
From a Business perspective, Headless Commerce can create new customer experiences specific to just one audience or for a subset of your products, thus unleashing a wave of innovation and opportunities. From more flexibility in creating new customer experiences that can be deployed across multiple channels will ultimately lead to happier, engaged customers and more revenue for the business.
1. Flexibility & Personalisation
Going Headless allows for flexible and customisable changes to the user-facing content layers, without disrupting the business itself (ie. inventory, merchandising, or any functions relating to the back-end of the storefront). The key opportunity here is the creation of personalised front-end designs and layouts for different endpoints, meaning more design freedom and memorable UX.
As a result of this headless architecture, you can have a more adaptable online business presence and ultimately scale a high volume of content across the web to meet your customers at discovery.
2. Speed
Headless storefronts are inherently optimised for speed, as they enable developers to update and implement changes to the front-end without interfering with any back-end functionalities. This means that metrics like page load speed and time to interactivity, drastically improve, minimising bounce rate and overall improving customer experience.
3. Employee Empowerment
By introducing a Headless architecture to your business, you can improve at an internal level. In other words, the simplicity of this innovative commerce technology allows for anyone in your team to easily access and update the front end of the brand storefront, without needing advanced developing skills. Ultimately, this will unlock the creativity of your employees.
4. Unified Customer Experience
Headless Commerce allows your business to expand and control all your customer digital touchpoints at once. These being Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), voice search, marketplaces, mobile apps and many more. The headless technology thus allows you to seamlessly replicate all your commercial elements (ie. product catalogue and order management) and content across all these touchpoints.
Overall shopping is becoming increasingly integrated into our day-to-day lives, especially with the majority of product discovery occurring via digital means. It is crucial for your business to be able to meet new and potential customers at these points of discovery to ultimately allow for a more unified customer experience than ever before.
5. Greater Conversion
More efficient checkouts to give a unified and familiar customer experience across multiple websites and social commerce scenarios are going to be part of a major trend. Roqqett is working on creating these higher-converting checkouts to help drive revenue for your business.
6. More Revenue
With Headless Commerce you can create customised experiences for very specific audiences or products in your catalogue, and optimise for both. This can help develop the brand and drive revenues at the same time. Roqqett plans to facilitate these new experiences, by integrating with your current shopping infrastructure while optimising the checkout experience and personalising it to the consumer all across the web and social.
Consumer benefits
From your consumers’ point of view, Headless Commerce will certainly evolve the traditional act of shopping by introducing more touchpoints in how online purchasing is fulfilled. Nevertheless, it is important to point out how the overall traditional shopping experience is not replaced but rather upgraded via the numerous benefits that Headless Commerce provides.
1. Fast
Headless technology means improved site speed, due to faster page load times, especially on mobile, which is where consumers predominately navigate. As a result of this faster experience, shoppers can complete purchases in a more instant and seamless manner, without even having to be on the seller’s online store. That is the power of Headless Commerce. Roqqett is able to facilitate this vision with its Fast Checkout offerings.
2. Unified
With Headless Commerce, you can create a more unified shopping journey, as the decoupling of systems creates a consistent customer experience across different front-ends. Roqqett is introducing the concept of a unified checkout across multiple websites and brands that make it more convenient and faster for the consumer to complete purchases. This ultimately will drive greater conversion and revenue while helping reinforce your brand as being consumer-focused.
3. Desirable
Headless Commerce, ultimately creates a more desirable shopping experience for consumers thanks to the interactive storefronts, which can be easily personalised. This allows for a more satisfying experience. Ultimately, shoppers will have the ability to purchase products directly from anyone and anywhere (ie. review pages, newsletters, blog posts, articles, and social media platforms), without being tied to the brand’s e-commerce website.
Roqqett for your Digital Business
Built for every shopping experience, Roqqett’s Checkouts places the customer’s mobile phone at the heart of the checkout journey.
