As the race for customer experience supremacy gets hotly contested, brands across the board are now tapping into emerging and quite frankly somewhat quirky eCommerce solutions in a bid to offer best-in-class digital shopping experiences.
While most brands are still using traditional eCommerce solutions, a good chunk of them have been quick to realign their eCommerce strategies to the fast-changing consumer trends.
Remaining competitive and relevant in the digital retail space is paramount to a brand’s survival. As technology evolves, so must your digital marketing and particularly, eCommerce strategy must also keep up with the pace.
You see, eCommerce evolves constantly thanks to the ever-changing consumer shopping habits, not to mention the constant need and expectation for a better shopping experience.
A digital marketing or eCommerce strategy that worked flawlessly yesterday will obviously not work today and will be completely obsolete by tomorrow. There’s good news though.
eCommerce consumer and user experience developers have also been quick to identify and adapt to new and emerging digital shopping trends and have discovered a tactic that can help brands enhance their eCommerce experience.
Headless commerce, ladies and gentlemen, is now the go-to solution for brands that want to thrive in their respective eCommerce spaces.
This new and super effective trend couldn’t have come at a better time now that the global eCommerce space has blown up, thanks to the ongoing health crisis.
Online shopping is officially a big thing. According to Statista, over 2.14 billion people worldwide are expected to buy goods and services online this year compared to 1.66 billion global digital buyers in 2016.
Image Source: Statista
This is phenomenal growth, which also presents your eCommerce business with a remarkable opportunity to showcase your products or service, sell more, and also grow your company.
This is where headless commerce comes into play — to help you scale up quickly and efficiently! If this sounds like rocket science to you, don’t worry. This article explains exactly what headless commerce is, the benefits you stand to reap and how you can adopt and deploy the trend quickly.
Headless commerce is the separation of the eCommerce platform to give online retailers maximum flexibility to offer customers quality content and an enhanced consumer experience.
This process involves the decoupling of the front-end, which is basically the part that’s presented to the user to enable them to make purchases, and the back-end – the technology drives the entire eCommerce process and also enables the retailer to effectively manage the sales process.
By doing so, other departments are now able to make all the necessary changes to the front-end without affecting the back-end. For this, your IT department is not needed, which makes the process even faster.
These changes also do not affect the function of the other. They can also still work together through the use of Application Programming Interfaces or APIs.
The entire decoupling exercise will now make your eCommerce platform more flexible and super responsive and your customers can now continue to engage with your brand on your web portal across their digital devices.
So, if you want to offer a seamless eCommerce experience across mobile, apps, website, in-store, social platforms, and gaming, then headless commerce is your best bet. A seamless mobile experience is especially important, given that mobile devices contribute $92.2 billion in revenue, accounting for half of the market’s total earnings.
Still a bit skeptical about this headless commerce trend? Let’s take a look at some of the compelling benefits of this new eCommerce sensation.
Consumer preferences and trends are constantly evolving which means that your end-user experience also needs to change as well. Unlike traditional commerce, headless commerce allows the front-end developers to quickly and seamlessly affect the relevant changes to how your brand content gets delivered to all the touchpoints.
Headless commerce, therefore, allows you to scale effortlessly and instantly by making it possible to create custom delivery models that cut across various devices. This way, the right content or product can quickly reach the consumer regardless of what device they are currently using.
Content is king but only when it is delivered quickly. This is exactly what headless commerce can do for you. Headless commerce utilizes APIs to pull and push data without the need for coding, which can slow down the entire content delivery process.
Since resources are no longer shared, your content delivery efforts are now more enhanced and can deliver exceptional experiences for the customer.
Most businesses are still struggling with ballooning customer acquisition costs mostly due to increased competition in their respective spaces which, in turn, means they have to spend a bit more on their marketing campaigns as well as advertising.
Headless commerce brings all these costs down significantly by using content or better yet, an experience-oriented strategy to shore up organic customer acquisition and boost conversions.
Businesses that are super slow to respond to selling opportunities will always experience diminishing sales targets. And in a world that is moving with near-lightning speed thanks to technology, a quick reaction to showcase and sell your products and services is what will set your business apart from the rest and also ensure your survival.
This is exactly what headless commerce allows you to do by enabling you to bring additional functionalities and features hence making it super easy for you to respond quickly to marketing opportunities. Headless commerce makes it easy to personalize experiences as soon as you identify an opportunity to interact with a customer.
With crucial data like search and purchase history, headless commerce will enable you to contact specific customers with personalized offers, promotions, or incentives and, in turn, boost your chances of selling more.
And with over 1.83 billion websites on the internet, all jostling for attention, headless commerce will definitely help you take full advantage of every marketing opportunity that your marketing team comes across.
If there’s one lesson that the global health crisis taught businesses is that shopping habits can change drastically. This means that your front-end platforms need to be flexible enough to accommodate sudden changes in consumer buying behaviors.
Headless commerce strategy allows you to make quick changes such as modifying your marketing communication and only showcase what the customer might be interested in at that moment. Overnight changes to customer preferences are now painless thanks to headless commerce, which ultimately enhances your client experience without spending more money.
According to a study by Google, as page load times go from one second to three seconds, its bounce rate increases by 32 percent.
Image Source: WebsiteSetup
With an eCommerce website, every second matters. The last thing you want is a website that takes forever to load. If this happens, you can be sure that you are losing customers by the second and you know what that means to a business, right?
But with headless commerce, your website performance will be significantly improved because it basically supports a simple and fast user experience across multiple devices. The headless commerce architecture supports quick connections between APIs and services. The end result is that your website pages will not take ages to load and water hence negatively affecting your customer experience.
Headless commerce has completely transformed online shopping. It has exposed the customers to a seamless, better, and faster shopping experience by enabling them to access and interact with their favorite brands with just a few clicks.
And now that the consumer has become accustomed to such an experience, pressure is now mounting on eCommerce retailers who are yet to adopt this new trend to get their act together and implement it sooner rather than later.
To get your headless commerce groove on, all you need is an API-enabled integration partner that will, in turn, make it easier for other existing eCommerce systems, such as Shopify, to communicate with other platforms seamlessly.
Salesforce, for instance, comes highly recommended as a headless commerce enabler largely due to its ability to integrate with popular eCommerce platforms.
SyncApps Salesforce integrations such as Salesforce and Mailchimp or Constant Contact for Salesforce can significantly expand your opportunities and outreach to more customers at the same time.
This saves you the time you’d have spent manually reaching each customer not to mention the cost of such an activity. These Salesforce integrations also help to streamline your customer service workflows where customer queries are addressed within the shortest time possible.
Using SyncApps integrations gives you unmatched flexibility to tailor your eCommerce architecture to meet your own business objectives – whether short-term or long-term. You can also activate new payment gateways when the need or opportunity arises, reduce vendor lock-in and also create greater opportunities to test new services.
So, if you are in the process of shifting to headless commerce, just make sure to throw a reputable integration solution into the mix for maximum impact, flexibility, security, and scalability.
It goes without saying that business environments across all sectors are changing rapidly and consumers are the key drivers of these changes. Customer expectations are also rising each day as the said changes come into effect.
This means that businesses need to quickly adapt to new marketing trends that ultimately enable them to offer seamless experiences regardless of the touchpoint that a customer is using. The only logical solution to this is headless commerce. It’s super easy to adopt and it offers a super responsive user experience through improved eCommerce platform performance.
Integration on the other hand ensures that your front-end points-of-sale are integrated into your back-end systems to allow the seamless bi-directional flow of data. That way, your data integrity is assured, you get a clearer picture of your operations and most importantly, you are now able to fulfill orders faster.
