With a replacement approach or technology, it’s often hard to bridge the gap between a cool idea, and application of that concept. So hard, in fact, that tons of technology and concepts never make it across.
Headless and API driven tools have, thankfully, managed to enter the mainstream, but there’s still tons of confusion over what you’ll actually do with these solutions.
Today, we’re getting to dive into a couple of common ecommerce applications of this technology, so you’ll better understand what to try to do with headless ecommerce and choose if this approach is true for you.
- Create a Content Single Source of Truth
In a traditional setup, ecommerce content is siloed, usually by channel or format. as an example , display is kept break away Instagram content, or web page is stored aside from email content. Inevitably, mistakes happen. With a headless solution, you’ll centralize all of your content into one source of truth, so there’s one version of each piece, which is then dynamically sent to the right channel within the correct format via API.
- Responsive Marketing Teams
Your customers are always changing, and it’s a continuing challenge for marketing teams to stay up. WIth headless ecommerce though, you’ll quickly adjust marketing campaigns on the fly without involving back-end resources.
For example, say you sell outdoor gear. You would possibly notice an enormous summer storm is coming, and need to spin up a campaign with 15% off raincoats.
With a headless solution, you’ll easily design and distribute this across every potential channel from one place, without involving your development team. In contrast, a standard solution would require changes across multiple channels to be completed individually, massively increasing the lift to run the campaign.
- Fixing Mistakes
Mistakes happen. Eventually, every ecommerce store has pushed a purchase wrong, entered the incorrect promo code, uploaded the incorrect URL or product shot, or generally told people the incorrect thing.
These mistakes, while small, can take forever to steer back in a standard CMS because there are numerous assets to vary.
A headless solution makes it far easier to repair mistakes because they are often done from one central location which will cascade through every asset or product you’ve got .
- One Inventory, Multiple Channels
Currently, tons of major retailers have two inventory systems — one for in-store and one for online. This technique, while it is sensible, delivers a worse customer experience and finishes up costing sales.
For instance, say a customer wants to shop for a product that your business has available, but is shopping online and your product is in your in-store inventory system. That’s a purchase you won’t capture.
A headless approach would allow you to centralize your inventory systems into one, and surface the proper product at the proper time.
- Design Anything
Web design for ecommerce is usually restricted by the back-end requirements. Or, if not, takes tons longer to vary due to back-end restrictions.
One common application of headless solutions is to empower marketing and style teams to tweak and alter things quickly to optimize for a far better user experience outside the confines of what the dev team must make the entire thing work.
- Use the proper Language for Your Team
Because headless solutions believe API connections to wire in several systems, each of these systems are often created and maintained within the programming language that suits the tool best. Headless solutions also mean that you simply can build out a development team, again, round the language that suits you.
Wrap Up
Headless solutions have plenty of applications for ecommerce businesses. It allows marketing teams to maneuver faster and make decisions supporting the requirements of the user, not the requirements of the event team, it helps centralize content and data across multiple silos, and it means development teams can add how that suits them.
