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Headless Commerce

Headless commerce is an eCommerce architecture in which the frontend and backend are decoupled. Learn why headless commerce is the architecture of choice for many top businesses.

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What is Headless Commerce?

Headless commerce is an eCommerce architecture in which the frontend and backend are decoupled. The frontend of your eCommerce experience is customer-facing. It’s the user interface customers engage with on your website, app, or another medium. The backend of your eCommerce operation is the business logic layer – your site’s structure, systems, data, and logic.

At the center of a decoupled, headless commerce architecture are headless commerce APIs. These APIs are software interfaces that help your frontend and backend talk to each other. With headless commerce, your brand can deliver unique customer experiences from best-of-breed business solutions.

Benefits of Headless Commerce

The advantages of headless commerce are significant, from elevated shopper experiences to reduced costs and dev and IT time and stress. The biggest benefits of headless commerce include...

Headless commerce vs. composable commerce

Composable commerce is distinct from headless commerce, as headless means decoupling the frontend presentation layer from the backend commerce engine layer. Composable commerce is an extension of headless technology, as the frontend and backend are decoupled and brands access a fully modular approach to solving business problems and arranging a tech stack.

Composable commerce technology is made up of MACH architecture, a combination of flexible technologies. Headless commerce is part of MACH architecture, which stands for microservices, API-first, cloud-native, and headless.

Kody meyers headshot

A headless commerce approach has always been very appealing. We need to move quickly and figure things out fast. The architecture that we have in place with Elastic Path gives us the flexibility to pivot when needed.

Paro-logo Kody Meyers Director of Product, Paro

Headless commerce vs. traditional commerce

The difference between headless commerce and traditional commerce comes down architecture, flexibility to make changes, and ability to offer elevated shopping experiences.

At the start of digital commerce, most customer browsed and placed orders online through a desktop browser experience. They didn't expect, or receive, elevated experiences. Businesses could have traditional, monolithic platforms that were tightly coupled to backend commerce functions. Even if the user experiences were clunky and desktop-specific, shoppers would still buy.

Now, buyers shop online through a variety of channels, and sometimes on their phone and computer and more all at once. Headless commerce decouples the frontend and the backend so that your business can offer different frontends for different channels. Plus, unlike traditional commerce, making changes to these frontends doesn't disrupt or require deep changes to your commerce backend. The result is better personalization and shopper experiences.

Traditional commerce architectures are tightly-bound and hard to change. Headless commerce architectures are flexible, customizable, and easy to change for developers and business users.

Want to learn more about the difference between headless commerce and traditional commerce? Read about the difference between headless and traditional to decide which approach is right for your business.

Ready to Get Started with Headless Commerce?

Discover the steps for getting started, how to implement your frontend, considerations for choosing the right platform, and more with our full guide.

Overcoming the orchestration challenges of a headless architecture

Hear from our CTO about why an iPaaS and DBaaS can help as you move away from a traditional architecture, and how we offer the only iPaaS solution that is fully integrated in a commerce platform.

Headless Commerce FAQs

Ready to give headless commerce a try?

You don’t have to buy. Elastic Path offers a headless commerce demo.

try headless commerce