If you’re thinking of launching an ecommerce website, you’re probably thinking about the best platform to use. There are so many options, from your choice of shopping cart solution to picking the infrastructure and web host.

One of the ecommerce tech models that’s rising in popularity is that of headless commerce. It’s not some kind of nightmare – it’s a flexible, powerful approach that divides your content management and commerce engines into two connected, yet separate, platforms. With headless commerce, you can combine a deep CMS or DXP platform with a strong backend ecommerce solution.

Here are some of the reasons why separating your content and commerce engines might be ideal for your ecommerce business.

1. Deliver a deeper customer experience

Once upon a time, ecommerce was a functional and fairly shallow experience. Customers shopped across only a handful of channels and weren’t looking for a layered shopping experience. But today, digital shoppers expect omnichannel purchasing options and rich, seamless shopping experiences.

Meeting their demands requires a powerful content layer that enables you to deliver complex, multimedia content that crosses all touchpoints.

Most monolithic ecommerce websites focus primarily on the commerce side of things – inventory management, payment processing, security, etc. They have a relatively shallow content management layer that can’t support rich content or experience-led sites. Headless commerce allows lifestyle brands that rely heavily on omnichannel marketing, influencer and native advertising, and experience-led marketing to provide the customer experience which underpins their brand image. 

2. Access more flexibility

Separating your content management and ecommerce engines offers businesses more flexibility to add, change, or take away elements of your business site. With headless commerce, you can add more sales channels, expand the backend commerce solution, or change the site design quickly and easily. You can try out new marketing strategies without worrying about affecting the core backend functionality.

You also don’t need to migrate your existing architecture to a new platform in order to upgrade your commerce functionality or add more channels. You can just add another plugin, switch your host, or change your ecommerce backend. If you decide to change your host, you can do so easily.

You already own all your information and support your own hosting, so you can switch to a different platform without worrying about being locked into contracts or losing your customer data.

3. Enjoy secure, wraparound commerce solutions

Separating your content management and commerce engines improves your ecommerce functionality as well as your content management solutions.

Platforms like WordPress allow you to access a huge range of ecommerce plugins and apps that enable advanced inventory management, improved security and anti-fraud measures, PCI compliance, and a range of payment processing options.

Ecommerce backend features can extend to connect to other infrastructure points like PIMs, ERPs, POS, and OMS options.

4. Innovate further and faster

Headless commerce bears the added advantage of fast, advanced innovation. In the online business world, it’s critical to be able to test new products and services and to roll out innovations to multiple markets quickly in order to maintain a competitive edge.

When you’re working with a familiar CMS platform, you can work faster and test quicker.

Whatever you do can be easily and swiftly replicated and extended to other channels, so that you keep a competitive edge.

5. Hold on to your content marketing audience

A number of ecommerce businesses begin life as blogs. They build a loyal following of fans and readers thanks to the content that they offer and the experiential community that they build. The trouble is that once they get serious about monetizing their audience through ecommerce, they have to abandon the platform on which they built their entire success.

That could mean leaving behind valuable links, deep content, and potentially customer data.

But when you use a headless commerce solution, you can just bolt on ecommerce backend functionality to connect inventory management synchronization, secure payment processing, compliance, and fraud detection capabilities. It adds a full online store to your existing lifestyle brand without any fuss and without losing your content following.

6. Customize easily

When you use a CMS or DXP engine together with an ecommerce solution for your business, you have much greater customization and personalization options. Because there’s no need to change the code in order to change the appearance of the frontend, you can adjust your color scheme, web elements, font, and design as often and as much as you like.

If you’re still trying out your brand image, or you rely on swapping themes, layouts, and fonts on a frequent basis, headless commerce gives you the capability to tailor everything according to your design preferences.

Because your frontend and backend function independently, there’s no need to recode the entire ecommerce platform or edit databases just to change your business look.

Enjoy the best of both worlds

Separating your content management and commerce engines allows your ecommerce business to enjoy the best of both worlds. You can offer a rich, content-led customer experience on your CMS or DXP frontend, while also powering a secure, fast ecommerce solution on the backend, without compromising on flexibility, innovation, or design.