Headless Commerce Meaning: Headless Commerce Architecture Explained

Headless commerce architecture for commerce enterprises — buzzword or necessity to keep up with the rapidly changing market landscape? Essentially, it’s the latter, as this approach offers flexibility and efficient multichannel communication for commerce businesses and faster development cycles and independence for development teams.

Keep reading the article to explore:

• what the headless commerce approach is and how it differs from other architectures;
• how the headless approach allows businesses to remain flexible;
• how to migrate an established e-commerce solution to headless;
• what factors influence a successful headless migration.

As a result, you’ll not only understand what headless commerce is but also whether this approach is right for your business and the initial steps to elevate your platform. All this is served with a sauce of practical insights from the Expert Soft team. Let’s dive in.

What Is Headless Commerce?

The headless e-commerce definition implies a digital platform, in which the back-end and front-end are decoupled and exist independently, communicating through an application programming interface (API).

The headless approach allows developers to build a project without a predefined user interface. Front-end, in this case, is created separately and uses the API implemented on the back-end to form a complete system.

Visually, headless commerce meaning looks like this.

With headless commerce architecture, back- and front-end teams are no longer dependent on each other and can work only in their respective areas. For example, back-end developers don’t need to modify the front-end codebase when implementing some upgrades, unlike what can happen in a monolithic system.
When understanding headless commerce, you shouldn’t overlook another advantage — storefront flexibility. A single back-end can connect through APIs to different front-ends tailored for various devices, such as web, mobile, and more, enabling an omnichannel strategy.

These and other benefits, which we’ll discuss below, make headless an attractive option for companies. In fact, 63% of businesses plan to invest in headless commerce development services to shift to headless principles.

Headless Commerce Architecture: Specifics

While you can build a headless custom system from scratch, the market also offers e-commerce platforms designed without a predefined front-end.

At Expert Soft, we work with one such platform — SAP Commerce Cloud, offered by a SaaS model in the public cloud. It’s important to note that not all platforms utilizing SAP Commerce are headless. Previously, SAP Commerce offered an Accelerator UI that allowed for the quick creation of a front-end from a collection of template extensions. This approach doesn’t align with headless principles, as these e-commerce platforms are monolithic.

But now, SAP is shifting towards headless, allowing you to create your e-commerce platform without a “head” (front-end). You can develop a custom storefront from scratch using any preferred technology or use SAP’s tailored headless storefront — Spartacus.

Spartacus allows developers to easily build and customize storefront, leveraging SAP Commerce Cloud’s APIs, being suitable for creating single-page applications (SPAs) and progressive web applications (PWAs).

A headless PWA for e-commerce combines the flexibility of headless architecture with the enhanced performance and user experience of PWAs. It enables faster load times, offline capabilities, and app-like experiences on the web, while allowing for independent front-end development.

Spartacus supports continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) practices and speeds up development cycles as designed specifically for SAP Commerce solutions. This makes it an efficient technology for our customer projects, including migration to headless architecture. With its flexibility, the combination of SAP Commerce Cloud and Spartacus allows dev teams to deliver efficient and scalable b2b and b2c headless commerce platforms.

Among other headless e-commerce platforms, we can name Shopify, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or Magento 2.

Headless Commerce vs. Traditional Commerce vs. Microservices

For many years, monolithic architecture was the most studied and widespread option for web platform building. That’s the reason why many e-commerce businesses still use it at the core of their software. This is often referred to as traditional commerce.

As technologies advance, new architectural options have come on stage, such as microservices, with 37% of companies using them at least partially, and headless commerce, with 20% adoption among retail companies.

So, what are the major differences between these architectures, and are they worth the squeeze? Let’s briefly compare.

Headless vs. Traditional commerce

A traditional e-commerce platform is a monolith application with a single codebase. Business logic, UI layer, and content management are in one place, requiring specific skills for management.

This is typical of many digital platforms, where changes on one side (back-end or front-end) often require the participation of both parties. This makes the system optimization lengthy and inefficient.

To better visualize headless and traditional e-commerce definitions, let’s look at the picture.

Monolithic principles are suitable for medium platforms requiring straightforward development and a streamlined setup and launch. However, global enterprise e-commerce systems are more likely to experience more disadvantages, including:

• time-consuming change implementation due to tied components;
• potential impact on the entire system when any changes are made;
• limited scalability;
• poor web performance.

So, if you find that your monolithic platform can’t ensure quick implementation of changes, it might be time to consider the headless approach.

Headless commerce vs. Microservices

Microservices architecture focuses on creating a modular and flexible system, in which a platform consists of numerous services, each responsible for specific business functionality. These services can be independently developed, tested, deployed, and maintained.

Here lies the key distinction between microservices and headless commerce meaning. While headless commerce decouples only the back-end and front-end, microservices divide the entire system into small, independent modules.

The picture below can help in better understanding headless commerce and microservices differences.

Although microservices offer almost the same benefits as headless commerce, they take it a step further. For example, microservices allow for higher scalability than headless commerce because each service can be scaled independently, not just the front-end and back-end. Also, microservices improve platform fault tolerance and technology diversification, allowing for building each service using preferred technologies.

However, such systems are usually more complex to develop and present challenges in establishing and managing the communication between services.

To create a comprehensive picture, we summed up the key differences between 3 approaches in the table below.

While understanding the pros and cons of different architectures, let’s focus on specific headless commerce platform benefits.

Headless Commerce Architecture Pros and Cons

With headless commerce explained, we’ve already mentioned that the decoupling of the back-end and front-end in the headless commerce approach allows teams to work independently and make improvements in parallel, speeding up development and time-to-market. But are there other benefits of headless commerce? Absolutely!

However, the headless commerce approach does come with some challenges. Establishing communication between decoupled architecture units and developing complex testing strategies to ensure software reliability can be tricky. But with a reliable and experienced software development team proficient in headless projects, these challenges can be easily overcome.

Headless Commerce Inside MACH Principles

MACH stands for microservices, API-first, cloud-native, and headless. The combination of these features under the MACH umbrella embodies a vision of composable architecture.

Composable commerce architecture aims to help businesses keep up with rapidly evolving market requirements through flexible and modular systems, consisting of various components that are easy to integrate and use. While this may sound like a lofty goal, it is achieved by combining MACH principles to create highly flexible, adaptable, and scalable e-commerce platforms.

Breaking down MACH into its components, we have:

Note that in the context of MACH, microservices and headless aren’t interchangeable principles but complementary ones. Together, they create a robust and flexible platform that supports rapid development, deployment, and scaling.

By working in tandem with microservices, API-first principles, and cloud-native solutions, headless architecture helps commerce businesses stay agile and responsive to changing market demands.

The Role of Headless CMS in a Headless E-commerce Platform

A content management system (CMS) is not strictly necessary but it’s an important part of an e-commerce platform, which facilitates content management. In fact, with a headless CMS, the main principles are the same as those for headless commerce explained.

A headless content management system is a tool in which the front-end is decoupled from the back-end and communicates through an API. This setup provides an interface for easy content placement and management without limiting you to a specific display or user layer, as traditional CMS does.

Like a headless commerce platform, a headless CMS, being a back-end system, can connect with multiple front-ends tailored to various devices, providing a consistent customer experience (CX) across multiple channels.

In fact, you can build a comprehensive headless commerce website based on headless CMS. However, for large enterprises, this approach alone may not be sufficient, as extensive systems require multiple integrations and advanced functionality that a headless CMS alone cannot provide. Nevertheless, it remains a valuable tool for content management within your headless commerce platform.

A headless CMS can be integrated into your platform similarly to how a traditional CMS is integrated into a monolithic system — using APIs. What other integrations might your headless commerce platform need? Essentially, the same integrations that are vital for any e-commerce system, regardless of its architecture:

Examples of Retailers that Choose Headless Approach

Seeing the potential that headless commerce architecture provides, many world-known companies have adopted it in their projects, achieving significant results.

Large health and beauty retailer

A large retail corporation with networks in over 25 countries turned to Expert Soft with one of the tasks to migrate their e-commerce platform to headless architecture. At that time, the company was in the midst of a global migration, unifying all 19 brands onto the same platform with a unified codebase.

As part of this migration, the company transitioned its sub-projects to a headless approach to enable effective customization and front-end management without being tied to the back-end.

Besides flexibility, the migration also increased the team’s efficiency. Previously, a front-end developer needed about 25 minutes each day to get the monolithic project up and running. With the front-end decoupled, the process now takes just 2-3 minutes.

Leading manufacturer of sports clothing

To stand out from the competition, Nike focused on providing an enhanced user experience for mobile users. They needed to optimize all interaction elements for small screens, including mobile-friendly links.

To achieve this customization without limitations from the back-end, Nike implemented the headless approach, using React for the SPA (single-page application) combined with Node.js back-end for front-end.

This strategic move to headless allowed Nike to differentiate itself from large competitors, e.g., Adidas and carve out a strong position in the market.

Global home decor company

With a large catalog of goods and extensive functionality available on each product page, Kirkland’s struggled with low website performance that impacted conversion rates. To improve customer experience and personalization and boost performance, the company turned to headless commerce.

It opens up new possibilities, allowing Kirkland’s to expand its sitemap and improve webpage functionalities while ranking among the fastest websites. Additionally, they introduced innovative solutions, such as a one-click login process and a thumbprint checkout option, improving the user experience.

How to Migrate Traditional Commerce to Headless Commerce

If you’ve decided that headless commerce architecture is the right fit for your platform, you need to prepare for migration. Here are two approaches you can take.

The first option is re-platforming, which is not really popular in the digital transformation course. It involves building a new headless system from scratch while maintaining your existing one. Although it ensures a fresh start, it is costly and time-consuming. You’ll need to allocate resources for both the new commerce system and the old one.

Alternatively, you can migrate your existing platform gradually, breaking up the back-end and front-end, connecting them through APIs. While you’ll still need to invest in building new front-ends and APIs, your back-end logic remains intact.

We asked Expert Soft developers with experience in migrating to headless e-commerce platforms how they advise to migrate. In a nutshell, the migration process can be as follows:

Headless commerce migration challenges

As with any significant change in systems, headless commerce platform migration comes with its set of challenges. Here are some of the main ones our experts have encountered:

Headless Commerce Migration Costs

To explain it simply, the cost of migration depends on the project’s size and requirements. This makes it challenging to provide an approximate cost, especially for enterprise systems. But to shed some light, the following factors affect the cost:

• licenses fees for your core e-commerce platform, e.g. SAP Commerce Cloud;
• the size and expertise of your dev team;
• tech stack for front-ends;
• third-party integrations, e.g. headless CMS;
• infrastructure costs;
• ongoing maintenance and support.

Considering these and some other factors, you can calculate the approximate cost of your system to effectively allocate resources and ensure a successful migration that delivers long-term benefits.

Conclusion

In the era of innovations and high customer expectations, staying flexible in a changing market landscape is not a luxury — it’s a necessity. This is the reason why technical solutions, such as the headless approach, are becoming essential, helping businesses stay ahead. The effectiveness of this approach is evident and explains market players investing; according to Forbes, $1.6 billion has been raised for headless technologies.

We at Expert Soft see this tendency among our current and potential customers as well, all aiming for innovative and efficient e-commerce systems. If you have a similar project in mind or need advice on your e-commerce strategy, contact us. We would be delighted to discuss how we can assist you in navigating this transformative journey.