Recently, retailers have been migrating their ecommerce platforms to headless architecture. Headless architecture is a modern approach to building and delivering digital experiences, with many benefits compared to traditional monolithic architecture. Headless architecture separates the front-end and back-end, allowing retailers to deliver personalized and seamless shopping experiences, make faster updates to their websites, and easily integrate new digital channels for a consistent experience across all touchpoints.
Ecommerce retailers have traditionally used monolithic architecture, where all components of the platform are housed in one centralized system. This interdependence of elements makes it challenging to implement changes without affecting the entire platform. Headless commerce offers a different approach by decoupling the front-end and back-end of the commerce system. This separation allows for greater flexibility in design and changes to one aspect without affecting the other.
In this blog, we’ll dive deeper into the reasons why retailers are making the switch to headless commerce and the advantages of its architecture. Whether you’re a retail business looking to modernize your digital presence or simply curious about this growing trend, this blog is for you.
Advantages of Headless Commerce
Monolithic architecture has long been the industry standard for ecommerce retailers, but as business needs evolve, the limitations are growing. The dependency between components in monolithic models results in a complex, interwoven system. However, headless commerce provides a solution when decoupling the front end and back end. By breaking it down into independent elements, headless commerce eliminates the need for an “all-in-one” system.
For a visual comparison between headless and monolithic architecture, check out the figure below:
Monolithic Model vs. Headless Commerce
Read more: Keywords for Ecommerce
- Speed and Velocity: Every single day, the need for speed and velocity is increasing. Using headless commerce makes sure your commerce platform delivers a high speed and accelerates the process for your customers.
- Decoupling the Front End And Back End: As mentioned earlier, the front end is the customer-facing side of your business model, and there is a lot of traffic interacting with it. This interaction does not affect the back end and the complex operations of the APIs.
- Easy to Customize Front End: Similarly, the back end being decoupled from the front end provides you with the ease of designing or customizing your front end in whatever way your customer likes it.
- No Single Point of Failure: As tricky a monolithic model is to scale and enhance, the headless model is easy to modify by picking and fixing the desired area. You don’t have a single point of failure, so if something goes wrong, each service is separately dealt with.
- Flexibility for Developers: The developers get the ease to create custom headless solutions with their own comfort and ease. They can follow their own workflow that they are comfortable with and streamline the development process. Similarly, your IT team does not need to be skilled in everything. Anyone with a foundational knowledge of technology can make your commerce platform efficient.
Best Practices For Migrating to Headless Architecture
Now that we understand that migration to headless commerce is the way to ease your business requirements and get the most out of your ecommerce platform, let’s discuss the actual migration process. Migration is a challenging process. There are a lot of factors to be kept in mind before ultimately shifting your monolithic model to headless architecture. So let us look at these aspects closely.
Understand Your Requirements
The key to experimenting or making a significant change to your business product is to identify all requirements of your product. You need to thoroughly understand your product and how shifting your entire architecture affects your outcome. It is essential to understand the positive and negative impacts on your business platform. You need to make sure you have expert knowledge of all areas.
Technical Expertise
One major factor of decoupling the front end and the back end is that the front-end developers need to focus on the presentation and the customer interaction side of your ecommerce platform. However, the back-end developers do not need to be experts in that area. They must deal with services and back-end APIs. This requires a separate expert base for separate areas. You cannot rely on either of these experts for both the front and the back end. Make sure to have the technical expertise of all the areas before ultimately making the switch.
Data Assessment
Data is the core of any business product and primarily includes products, attributes, customers, orders, shipments, catalog management, etc. What data assessment means here is the careful assessment of the impacts of migration on your data. You need to deeply analyze which data no longer remains part of your migration plan.
Take a Phased Out Approach
Migrating your ecommerce data to a headless platform in one go is a terrible approach and can result in massive failures. Instead, make sure to plan the migration in bits and pieces. Headless commerce has this edge over other models that you can easily take a phased approach towards it. For example, you can phase it out by either migrating the products and their subcategories and then orders and other categories. The bottom line is that taking one step at a time instead of rushing into the whole migration process saves you time, resources, and a colossal failure.
Don’t Think of it as a Magic Fix
You need to avoid thinking of headless commerce as a magic fix to all the problems you are facing. Headless commerce might fail to satisfy your needs in some areas despite providing tons of advantages. For example, your system might not bear the often too complex logic, or the customizations required. So do not expect headless commerce to suddenly fix all your issues, and make sure to weigh the pros and cons beforehand.
Don’t Hesitate to Scale
You need to understand that your system and business platform need to be highly scalable for migration. If you are hesitant to scale up due to any reason, such as size or complexity, please reconsider migration at all. Remember that headless commerce options use a logic base for core operation systems, which means that integrated software can significantly impact your user’s experiences.
Read more: 5 Benefits of Replatforming to Headless Commerce
Why Are Retailers Migrating to Headless Commerce
Retailers are making the switch to headless commerce because it provides a better user experience, more flexibility, improved integration, scalability, and future-proofs the company. The separation of front-end and back-end allows for personalized shopping experiences, seamless updates on the website, and the ability to select best-of-breed technology. Headless architecture leads to a streamlined, consistent omnichannel experience for customers.
What do we do at UpStart Commerce?
We at UpStart Commerce provide you with the freedom of decoupling your front end and the back end. Our headless APIs make it easy for you to manage your content and improve the user experience for your customers. We have so much in store for you, and you can get a complete guide on how to use our services by following our documentation.
