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We hear a lot about Headless Commerce lately, but what exactly does it mean and why is it so important for E-Commerce?

This new technological system opens up new perspectives for online sales and digital marketing. It is basically a new frontier, which can concretely help E-Commerce to sell better and more. Yes, but what is it in essence?

To understand better, let’s first make an overview and distinction between traditional E-Commerce and Headless Commerce.

Ecommerce Tradition Vs Headless Commerce

Traditional E-Commerce

In traditional platforms, we know that there is a backend part, where we manage products, orders, shipments, and a frontend part, which is the real site that customers see. Backend and Frontend are essentially two sides of the same coin in traditional stores. The site is managed in the backend, while the frontend is essentially the E-Commerce site that we see online.

The customer must necessarily complete the purchase on the E-Commerce site. So all the marketing activities that are carried out are aimed at bringing the user to the E-Commerce site, because only them will be able to make the purchase. This system, in our times, could be a little too laborious. This is because perhaps the customer, may have seen the product that interests him on a post on social media and go through a certain path and then have to conclude the purchase on the site, could somehow discourage him.

Headless Commerce

With Headless commerce, on the other hand, there is a concrete distinction between product management backend and frontend. But above all, with this new technology you will be able to manage content related to products to sell separately, with respect to the channels in which they are offered to the customer. That is, you can create product sheets and then present this card both on the site, in an email, or on a blog or a social post. The system will automatically format it according to the channel on which this card will travel.

In this way, the customer will have the fabulous opportunity to be able to buy directly in the channel in which the news of the product reached him, without necessarily having to be sent back to the site. Obviously in this we reduce a lot the steps to make a purchase and we know that this factor becomes fundamental for the finalization of a purchase.

Basically, when you create a product or put it on promotion, we can immediately decide the channels on which we want this product to appear.

Some platforms, such as Sylius for example, are based on the concept of headless and are therefore able to decouple frontend and backend and take advantage of CRM platforms for content management.

In short, this is really an excellent system to make the user experience really fluid and to accompany the customer to the purchase. With this tool we can in fact customize the contents to the maximum, to create a solid relationship with the customer, throughout the purchase process.

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Headless and personalized marketing

An aspect not to be underestimated related to headless, is also that of being able to collect valuable information on the behavior and interests of the customer. In this way it will be much easier to structure a targeted strategy for each user. How does?

A customer purchases a product, the system thus acquires this information and the next time the user returns to our site, he will be shown articles related to the purchased product. Products that the system can send a few days later also via email or other channels.

So as you can see, truly an incredible tool!

Disadvantages and advantages of headless commerce

We are starting to see the negative and positive aspects of this new way of doing online sales.

Disadvantages

We have seen how many features are connected to headless, but this obviously leads to an infrastructure complexity. In fact, if a traditional E-Commerce consists of software + various plugins, the headless system is much more complex. In fact, there are different software that must work with each other, that interface and exchange data.

The management of this type of system can therefore be more complex.

Benefits

As advantages, we have already seen some of them, such as the ease of the purchase process and the collection of data to better target offers to the customer. So basically with headless commerce, there is an orientation closer to the customer and his needs.

Summarizing therefore, as advantages we find:

  • Ease of purchase with products that can be purchased anywhere
  • Collection of data for the finalization of ad hoc offers
  • Ready for marketing automation
  • Formatting for each publishing point
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