Headless commerce: the next step in the technical evolution of e-commerce
Brazilian e-commerce is growing consistently and as of 2021 represented almost 18% of retail sector sales. Also last year, revenues rose 48.41% compared to the previous year, while sales rose 35.36%, according to the MCC-ENET index created by Neotrust/Movimento Compre & Confie in partnership with Metrics of the Brazilian Chamber of Digital Economy.
These volumes indicate a clear change in the habits of Brazilian consumers and, more than that, that the entire ecosystem involved here needs to prepare for continued growth. And that is already happening. On the technological side, the concept of headless commerce is starting to gain strength as a lever for sales success.
The headless store is a step in the technical evolution of e-commerce, and the difference will be in who will adapt to the new model faster.
What is a headless trade?
Headless commerce is the name for an architecture that has separate back-end and front-end components, which enables work on individual business elements. In this way, the front-end, or “head” of the business, is separated from the back-end, the “body” or core of the platform that contains the functionalities. The model allows developers to use APIs to deliver content and new functionality, while designers prepare it all in sales interfaces.
Here, the backend and frontend are independent, but integrated through an API. This ensures conceptual separation. So, while the specialized team works “inside”, developing the platform, designers work “outside”, developing and optimizing the online store to improve the user experience.
By adopting this model, the headless strategy makes it possible to add checkout, ordering, logistics, payment or custom applications to an online store, without the need for front-end designers to mess with the back-end code, just using an API. By extrapolating traditional monolithic systems, headless commerce brings much more flexibility and agility to commerce, allowing the creation or use of third-party applications that best meet customer requirements and giving much more freedom to customize sales interfaces.
The model was adopted as a replacement for the custom programming required to reliably manufacture and build a separate front-end and back-end, which often requires a large investment of development hours and development queues of months, in contrast to the speed required today to quickly test new designs, copies and templates on the front.
Advantages of headless trading
In addition to all that, headless trading also brings advantages such as:
- Better adoption – Having a modern trading platform coupled with the simplicity of headless trading solves the problem of resistance to adopting new technologies as all team members can easily access and update the front end without advanced skills.
- The right tools – Headless Store gives you the tools to create personalized experiences that customers can’t get anywhere else. This is thanks to APIs that provide coordinated, brand-consistent experiences across all channels, powered by common commerce services such as promotions, inventory, product information and more.
- Time saving – with quick interface changes, developers save time on user interface changes. Plus, with headless models and partner solutions, they only need a few clicks or light coding to launch conversion-boosting commercial apps.
- Time to market – with seamless commerce, you can quickly launch new front-end experiences, reducing reaction time to new market trends and with minimally expensive back-end development.
Technical evolution of e-commerce
From a business perspective, adopting a headless store means a quick turnaround to meet the expectations of new customers. It is possible to more easily manage all the elements with which users interact, bringing more creativity to the content published on the pages and to the design used. In addition, the universal headless store compatibility ensures that the website works flawlessly and as expected on all devices and display formats.
It is another step in the technical evolution of electronic commerce, and again the competitive advantage will be given to the one who adapts to the new model the fastest.
Read also: Headless trade: what it is, how it works and what are its advantages
