David Meakin, Senior Solutions Engineer at BigCommerce

Digital commerce is maturing. Buying goods online has become the norm for more and more customers, and evolutions in personal technology are making us more connected than ever. So how can you set your business – and the online experience for your customers – apart from the competition?

According to experts from the likes of McKinsey and Nielsen, a truly stand-out customer experience requires features such as omni-channel retailing or sophisticated personalisation.^1,2 However, implementing the systems to make these features a reality may seem like a daunting prospect.

Enter headless commerce, which is a way of structuring the digital architecture of your e-commerce store (or stores) to allow you to customise the technology and add in additional features as you scale.

Here, David Meakin, Senior Solutions Engineer at BigCommerce, explains how headless commerce works and what it means for your business.

“Headless commerce is the complete decoupling of the front end – the experience layer of the website that the customer sees – from the back end, which is the infrastructure that the customer doesn’t see.

Traditionally, you’d have everything bundled together in one system. Out-of-the-box web shop platforms, for example, you build your website on their system. If you want to change something, you’ll be restricted to what that system can provide.

Headless commerce allows you to build anything you want for your digital store – websites, apps, digital catalogues for physical stores.”

“It’s actually less complicated than it used to be. Previously, if a business wanted to create a headless technology architecture, they would have to build it from scratch. They might use an open-source technology as their basic platform.

Open-source technologies give developers open access to their code. If there’s something the technology doesn’t do, you can develop it exactly how you want to and add it on the code base. Or you can customise certain existing features because you are in control of the code. You just need access to a good developer.

But that means that when any updates are released for the platform, it’s down to you and your development team to merge in the update and go through your code to make sure nothing has broken. Plus, you’re ultimately responsible for making sure your technology is secure and your payment gateway is compliant.

The alternative to building your own digital architecture with open-source technology was to use software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology products to run an e-commerce store. These are on the other end of the technology spectrum from open-source technologies. SaaS technologies manage all the hosting and security and infrastructure for you and keep it up to date – but you’re limited as to how much you can customise. You wouldn’t be able to run a headless commerce system with a SaaS product, for example.

SaaS is good for some small businesses, but many want to be creative and do things their way. They want a combination of open-source products with the “service” element of SaaS products. That’s where ‘open SaaS comes in. Open SaaS makes it easier than ever to run a headless system.”

“Open SaaS works via an open suite of e-commerce APIs (application programming interfaces) that can communicate with each other and with the front end – the bit that the customer sees. For example, BigCommerce offers a suite of technologies for storing things like product data, orders, customer data, taxes, all of those things – which you can combine and customise.

You can be more creative. Headless commerce requires you to have full control over your tech stack and open SaaS allows you to have it. So if you want to add in a new tool that can do a certain thing, you can do so without breaking the rest of the architecture.”

“It means you can offer a true omni-channel customer experience and you can be more efficient. For example, it’s easy for merchandisers to create campaigns and schedule them in advance, or create more personalised experiences. With a headless architecture, you can be more creative because you can do all of these things in a more detailed way.

For example, one BigCommerce client is an international fashion retailer, which has six websites for different regions. Each site might have different products because some are only available in the UK and others in the U.S. They’ll have certain content scheduled to go live at a certain time in Europe and at a different time in the U.S. They sell B2B and B2C, so they need different content and different prices for each group. And they have segments of their customer base, such as influencers or VIPs, who get access to private sales. All of that is great for the customer experience.

And their B2B customers can go into a showroom and scan the barcodes of the products they’re interested in. And for that you’ve got to be headless. Operationally, that means that your sales team has more time to spend on the bigger accounts that make more money.”

“Actually yes. It’s easier to launch a headless system than ever before because of the tools that are available now. You can get up and running on those in a matter of hours and days – not months and years like it used to be.

And you have full ownership of your code, which means that if you want to change something about your website or add in an element of personalisation, you can be more agile and change the code – which can help small businesses compete with the big players.”

To learn more about headless commerce and how it could work for your business, head to BigCommerce.