Mobile shopping has revolutionized the way people shop and retailers sell. And it’s still revolutionizing the world of online business at a rapid pace. Recently, mobile e-commerce sales have significantly risen, especially in the retail sector. The interesting development of headless commerce platforms has caught the attention of many. For headless Commerce, there is a separation between the front and back end of the e-commerce application.
With this architecture, brands have the freedom to enrich the customer experience. The path to business success means pivoting quickly to meet the target customers’ expectations.
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The push toward mobile Commerce
The speed and convenience of mobile shopping compel most people to opt for mobile shopping. You can order whatever you want from the comfort of your house, and once you get used to this, it’s tough to get back to the traditional shopping style.
Of course, more than speed and convenience are pushing customers towards mobile shopping. Customers can make informed decisions and choose the best products depending on the features highlighted in the product’s description. The growing competition, advancing customer expectations, and new strategies imply that business owners need to improve their online business platforms.
To ensure that the customers are satisfied with the products and services offered, business owners are adopting one-fits-all e-commerce solutions. This implies that launching a website to start a business is becoming obsolete as most are focused on leveraging microservices. APIs connect different applications in the eCommerce microservice architecture. These applications can be scaled independently and still operate independently. Each module application has its specific responsibilities and must communicate with the other modules connected through the APIs to form a unified system.
There are several key growth drivers of mobile shopping and headless commerce platforms.
Customer experience
With advanced technology, customers’ preferences and tastes are changing quickly. As a result, most businesses strive to customize and personalize their services to meet the customers’ needs and expectations. Unlike the traditional platforms, the headless commerce platform doesn’t restrict the retailers to theme-based and templated storefronts.
There are endless possibilities for customization and personalization. This means you can change the front end of the platform depending on the customer’s changing needs. More innovative experiences are being launched, which deliver consistent sales growth for business owners.
True omnichannel capabilities
There are excellent omnichannel services designed to humanize the online journey for headless e-commerce. Most customers value these innovations and are actively changing their traditional purchasing habits.
The headless platform offers a shortcut to integrating your insights and creates great flexibility needed to facilitate a connected journey with the customers. By streamlining the creation and consumption of omnichannel content, your business can provide seamless purchasing experiences that the customers will definitely like.
Minimizes site downtime
Updates are vital for headless commerce platforms and can significantly affect your performance if you fail to act on them. With the traditional platform, updates on your website are likely to cause downtime.
Deploying updates on the headless e-commerce platform is smooth as it works through the APIs. This means you can deploy these updates without compromising the user experience.
How is headless Commerce different from traditional e-commerce?
Most businesses interested in headless eCommerce tend to have complex ordering processes and business rules. Some even have other systems that should be integrated elegantly with the headless e-commerce system. There are three key differences between headless Commerce and traditional e-commerce.
Limit for front-end Developers
In the traditional e-commerce platform, the front-end developers are limited to the front-end design and the process that is created. Whenever they need to change the experience for the front-end, they will have to change the database, the front-end, and the code.
With headless e-commerce, developers have the freedom to change the front-end design to enhance customers’ experience. Developers do not have to worry about modifying the database when making changes to the front-end design.
Customization and Personalization
With headless e-commerce, there is limitless customization and personalization. The traditional e-commerce platform used to come with a predefined experience for the end user and administrative user. This means that you cannot define the exact experience for both the customers and the administrative users.
With the head of e-commerce, there is no predefined front-end experience, which means you can build the front end according to the needs of your business. You can even translate your site automatically to the users’ local language. Indeed, the options for customization and personalization are endless.
Integration of New Changes
With the traditional e-commerce platform, you cannot integrate new software updates easily. Most tech companies are constantly releasing new software features at an astounding pace. Still, with the traditional e-commerce platform, it will be tough for you to benefit from these new integrations.
On the other hand, there is greater flexibility, and you can easily incorporate new changes without having so many hassles. This is a huge advantage considering that most developers are constantly releasing new features for their software products.
Even though headless Commerce offers many benefits, there are still several drawbacks to consider before getting started with it. Remember that most of the systems for the platform are complex, and you need a thorough understanding to work with them. Below are the cons that you should consider.
It’s Costly
From the simple setup expenses to the more significant investments of the developers to implement it, headless e-commerce is very costly and not for the faint-hearted. Any time there is a new feature for the software you are using, and you need to integrate these features, you need to pay developers for that. This cost is something that you should get worried about, especially when it comes to decoupling the systems.
Too Much Supervision
Unlike the traditional e-commerce platforms, you will require tremendous and continuous oversight for your headless commerce platform. The architecture requires a lot of mixing and matching, and you will need more than one development team to oversee the various processes. Even little challenges get unwieldy without adequate staff to manage and maintain the platform.
The Bottom Line
If you are reviewing your e-commerce plans for the future, you are probably aware of the various ways technology has impacted the business sector. Shopping habits are changing. And you should ensure that you adopt a platform that you will find easy to integrate all these new changes on. That said, is your e-commerce business ready to meet the shifting consumer needs and expectations?
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