How To Avoid Headaches And Grow Profits With Headless Commerce Instead of companies trying to push their customer through a process flow within the constraints of their technology, they can use headless commerce to create a custom experience that feels tailored to the consumer's needs

When it comes to e-commerce, the concept of headless commerce is quickly gaining momentum. While you may have heard the term, few truly understand the advantages or how vital it is to brand survival. Headless commerce is based on the concept that a customer can benefit from a personalized shopping experience because the front end of a website is separated from the back-end technology.

What does this mean for the consumer?

Instead of companies trying to push their customer through a process flow within the constraints of their technology, they can use headless commerce to create a custom experience that feels tailored to the consumer's needs. Whether it is more relevant content, additional shipping options, or an action-based flow, a company taking advantage of headless commerce has unlimited pivoting options available on-the-fly.

First of all, what is headless commerce?

According to TechCrunch, headless commerce is an approach to building e-commerce systems that focus on the consumer first. Headless commerce is based on using an e-commerce technology solution built and tailored to the specific needs of different companies and brands. This model can effectively eliminate inefficiencies while streamlining the process of launching and building a successful e-commerce platform.

The benefits of headless commerce

Taking this sort of approach can yield a lot of benefits for your business, including:

Higher engagement: This approach could help you better understand your consumers as well as how to connect with them to build a more relevant relationship over time. In the long run, this kind of insightful data could also help you make more profitable decisions from a bottom-line perspective and create a more meaningful experience for the consumer.

Side note: Headless commerce gives developers and merchants more flexibility and a faster time to market. The API layer is your API layer, which means that possibilities are endless. Writing a new API call to collect a new piece of data will only take seconds to add in, without needing to make changes to any back end, which could take hours, days or weeks. Updating the customer order flow because you have analytics that say more customers prefer X to Y is done instantaneously.

The API layer also makes it easy for developers to build extensions and tools to work with that API. They can pull data, send data and navigate quickly. Without the control of the API, a company is still limited to the constraints of the software they use, requiring back-end updates and additional setup steps to get the same results and a lot of wasted time and money.

Big data analysis: Going headless allows you to collect more meaningful data from consumers because you can use real-time analytics to know what your customers want, what flow is preferred, and what products they would be interested in purchasing. With this knowledge, a marketing plan can easily pivot as the analytics change. Developer time and resources are freed up without the requirements of back-end updates and additional coding.

Improved search visibility: A big part of search visibility is the content on your website. With analytics, you can see, in real-time, what keywords consumers use in order to land on your website. With this information you can modify content on your website to implement these highly searched keywords, increasing the organic traffic to your website.

Data-driven personalization: Data-driven personalization enables retailers to tailor their e-commerce platforms to meet the specific needs of their customers. For example, this would allow companies to curate unique product recommendations for each customer based on their previous purchases and browsing habits. The best part about this approach is that customers will feel like they are interacting with individual brands, even though they are interacting with one e-commerce platform. One way this will be accomplished is through chatbots, which allow e-commerce platforms to communicate directly with customers in a personalized, human-like way.

Significantly Increased Speed of Development: Standardizing code for all of your eCommerce applications ensures that any changes made can be implemented across all of your platforms. In addition, the speed of development for developers is critical when launching new features. Having to schedule time to develop new features for each website is a distraction to development, often taking more time than expected due to unforeseeable issues.

Headless Means Staying Agile

To stay agile and grow profits year over year, you need to be running as efficiently as possible. That's where headless solutions like ResponseCRM come in. ResponseCRM is designed to give companies of all sizes the eCommerce capabilities they need to run effective marketing and sales campaigns.

ResponseCRM is developed using cutting-edge technology to streamline processes, create efficiencies and keep data secure. It's the same technologies many enterprise solution companies use. Additionally, ResponseCRM makes sure your data syncs across all devices, giving you reliable access to the information you need to make better business decisions.

Headless commerce also makes your team more efficient by removing redundant workflows. When eCommerce was first introduced, engineers didn't have any choice but to create a system that was completely dependent on the back end. This meant creating an application that did everything from product display and order flow to data management for order processing, fulfillment, and customer service. With headless commerce, developers have the opportunity to create APIs for every task, and teams can focus on their specialty.

"The processes for the path the website visitor took to become a customer are irrelevant to any of the post-transaction operations," says Behzad Sharifi, Co-Principal of ResponseCRM. "What's important is only that they are a customer, the data remains secure, and any necessary information is transmitted to where it needs to go and is managed properly."

"Requiring a client to use a payment processor's shopping cart with its limitations can set a client way back, not only with potential latency, but also with limitations on branding and browser compatibility," says Kali Brooks, Co-Principal of ResponseCRM. "Even milliseconds of latency can cause a drop in conversions, reducing the client's bottom line."

With an embedded CMS, your brand can also publish live content, including photos, videos, blog posts, social updates, and product pages, reducing the need for complex systems and workflows to publish content.

Real-world application

Here's an example of what headless commerce looks like from start to finish. Miracle Brand, which uses ResponseCRM for headless commerce, is a leading manufacturer of luxury bedding and bath towels with anti-microbial silver fibers. Miracle Brand has its company website with all of its products, sales letter content, discount codes, data collection, package deals, blog posts, FAQs, and more. However, they also have smaller, or microsites, which are more product-specific based on the company's marketing efforts, reducing the chances of a customer being overwhelmed with options or being confused and closing out the website altogether.

Regardless of the website, Miracle Brand has built its own API and content management system that manages what is displayed and what a customer sees next. This includes what pop-ups occur and when what data is collected, and finding the path of least resistance—turning a visitor to the website into a customer.

All actions can be modified or updated, with little to no coding, and no need for any updates to the back-end software or logic. Updates are only made to Miracle Brand's API, which can be done in just moments. Miracle Brand's API collects data from the website and controls the website actions, and also transmits that data to ResponseCRM so the data can be processed with relevant data sets going where they need to go—such as a call center for order verification, or a shipping facility for real-time order fulfillment.

A new shift in commerce

While headless commerce is evolving, companies will continue to find new ways to remain competitive and increase their conversion rates. By collecting more quality data to deliver an exceptional customer experience, headless commerce could help your company get ahead of the curve.