Ecommerce businesses are addressing the problems of flexibility, scalability, and rising customer acquisition costs. With the increase in online competition, paid media costs are also rising. Customer acquisition cost rose over 50% in the last five years. Therefore, having a strategy to increase organic traffic has become more critical than ever. One of the best ways to stay ahead of the competition is by creating an online experience that brings in customers. That's where Headless Commerce comes into the picture.
But, what is headless commerce? How can it increase B2B online sales? Why is headless commerce the ideal approach? Let's have a look at the answers to these questions.
What is Headless Commerce?
Headless commerce is the process of decoupling the front-end of your e-commerce website from the back-end. This allows front-end developers to design and deliver high-quality content experiences to the visitors. In a nutshell, headless commerce is all about separating the customer interaction layer of your e-commerce website from the admin only layer such as inventory management and payment processing.
Difference Between Headless Commerce and Traditional Ecommerce
The most significant difference between headless commerce and traditional e-commerce system is the amount of customization that can be accomplished. In most traditional e-commerce (i.e., coupled) systems, the back-end system not only stores content, but it also stores code for layout and other plugins used in the front-end design. This limits the amount of customization a developer can make on the website. Since headless commerce relies on APIs to complete the user's request and deliver the relevant information to them, it allows you to provide multiple storefronts with unique interfaces tailor-made for each channel (website, mobile, etc.) without modifying your back-end.
Why is Headless Commerce Important?
The logic behind using headless commerce is that it allows you to do as many customizations as you want to improve user engagement without needing to change or edit the business-critical processes.
Headless commerce offers multiple benefits to e-commerce retailers such as:
1 - Seamless Integration
As mentioned above, headless commerce relies on APIs to connect the front-end with the back-end; it makes it easier to integrate and communicate with other platforms. This means you can use different tools for different parts of your e-commerce website to enhance user experience and convert them into customers. Moreover, having separate tools for each of the critical functions of your e-commerce business makes it more comfortable in the future to adapt the modern versions without having to change the code thoroughly.
2 - Better Customization and Personalization Options
Clients' needs and expectations change over time, and as an e-commerce retailer, you need to adapt to those changes to increase sales. Social media marketing is one of the best ways to improve branding and reach new customers. However, you need to leverage the power of data to improve personalization. You can use the data you've collected from your social media marketing campaigns to improve personalization. Besides, you can always integrate tools such as OptinMonster or Monetate for intelligent customer segmentation, personalization, and individual product recommendations. Since headless systems are decoupled, you can experiment with various designs to figure out what works best for your business without letting it affect the back-end of your website.
Headless commerce even also allows you to personalize content for different regions. By creating subsets of a page in the back-end of the headless CMS, you can deliver tailored messages to your site visitors depending on their geolocation to increase the likelihood of conversion.
3 - Flexibility and Speed
A decoupled structure allows you to make updates to the content layer without the fear of slowing down your website. It also allows marketers (with little knowledge of front-end) to run any promotion campaign at any time and update content/banners on the site without relying on the developers for support. Moreover, headless commerce allows you to make a quick update to the presentation layer (customer-facing content) without having to make changes to the entire code. Since the static content will be cached at the cache layer, the page loading speed will increase, and your website will be able to support colossal traffic when compared with a full-stack traditional e-commerce application.
4 - Lower Customer Acquisition Costs
As mentioned above, customer acquisition costs are rising due to an increase in the number of businesses using paid advertising media to acquire customers. Headless commerce is an effective way of reducing customer acquisition costs as you can use an experience-led strategy to attract organic traffic instead of relying solely on paid advertising. Your site visitors are more likely to convert when they receive a dynamic and smooth customer experience, along with heavily personalized recommendations.
Concluding Remarks
Headless commerce is one of the best ways to reduce customer acquisition costs and boost B2B online sales. It not only provides much more customization and personalization options than traditional e-commerce, but it also offers seamless integration and flexibility to modify customer-facing content without slowing down your business processes.