Does your business prefer to take the tried-and-true path or to forge a new one? For retailers, choosing an online platform that provides the best customer experience is key to business success; however, it can be difficult to decide between a traditional ecommerce platform and a headless platform. What's the difference, and can you combine both to provide the ideal experience for customers who visit your website?
Entering the Era of Personalization
Imagine walking into a store where the owner knows your name and has set aside items specifically for you. While this might seem like it would only happen in a small town or in an era long ago, this kind of personalization is an experience that today's customers expect as well.
While they want to shop and interact online, today's customers also demand an increasingly high level of personalization, whether it's in the e-newsletters they receive or in their experience of navigating your website and ecommerce platform. According to a survey by AgilOne, "more than 70 percent of people say they expect personalized experiences when they interact with brands." This is an expectation, not a desire. Your customers come to your website with the idea that they will experience a higher level of personalization than ever before, and your job is to meet and exceed those expectations.
What Is a Traditional Ecommerce Platform?
Traditional ecommerce platforms act as a department store. There are predefined experiences, both for those who set it up and for those who visit the site. Walk through the "aisles" of this store and customers will get the experience that they anticipate - a specific variety of products purchased in a specific way.
Vapulus calls this approach a "holistic, monolithic" approach to ecommerce. It pairs well with large programs such as Shopify and Wordpress. From this approach come websites and potentially mobile apps that allow you to engage with your customers. Like a department store, traditional ecommerce platforms create an infrastructure that works well together. Move through the website, and you'll see what you expect to see in the order that you expect to see it. This can be reassuring and predictable; however, the infrastructure is huge and not particularly flexible. It requires individuals who are trained to manage that immense infrastructure, and launching or even adjusting the infrastructure takes a long time.
What Is a Headless Ecommerce Platform?
What if that department store could shift into whatever boutique face you needed at the moment, while maintaining the infrastructure that supports it on the back end?
This is how a headless ecommerce platform changes the way that your website works and the way that you do business.
Headless platforms are very flexible. It's their flexibility that makes them alternately thrilling and scary to traditional ecommerce users.
Headless ecommerce allows your business to develop and maintain multiple customer touchpoints and to be flexible with the presentation of these touchpoints. These might include a blog, a social media post, an e-newsletter, or a landing page. It uncouples the face of your store from the backend where transaction processing takes place.
Headless Ecommerce Enables Flexibility and Personalization
In today's business world, businesses are challenged to be responsive to customers and to the trends of the moment. Headless ecommerce facilitates this.
In headless ecommerce, an ecommerce API manages the commerce logic of your store, but you can attach as many heads or touchpoints to this as you want. This allows your business to present multiple, flexible, and ever-changing faces to your customers, responding to their customer journey and to the evolution of your company over time.
Instead of changing everything about the ecommerce process on your website when you need to make a change, you can add another head to the ecommerce body.
Headless ecommerce allows your business to become a more agile marketer, marketing across different channels in a seamless way. This allows you to be more competitive. As market conditions and customers' needs and expectations change, you can change too, and you don't need to reinvent your entire ecommerce infrastructure every time you need to evolve.
Static Versus Flexible Ecommerce
Traditional ecommerce platforms feel very safe to retailers who may have used these platforms for a long time. They're generally managed by professionals who are extremely competent in that specific platform and have developed the infrastructure in a way that works.
Flexible, headless ecommerce platforms can feel scary to retailers who are new to this approach. It involves another skill set, the skill set of flexibly creating multiple ecommerce faces and working to integrate those with the back end.
Integrating Traditional and Headless Ecommerce
Is it possible to have the security and infrastructure of traditional ecommerce and pair this with the flexibility of headless ecommerce?
Yes and no: while you won't use a traditional, monolithic platform in a headless approach, you can incorporate some of the features and tools that your business has grown to love.
- Your developers can use any kind of programming language or framework with which they are familiar, and this can echo the best of what you've had on your platform in the past.
- Your developer can also use whatever tools work best for your website. If there are certain types of tools that have worked for your business in the past, you can work with your developer and see if it's possible to integrate them or tools like them into the website.
- If you currently have a website but you have not yet added ecommerce features, headless ecommerce's flexibility will allow you to add a customer interface to the website without disrupting a lot of what you've already built.
While you can use some of the tools that have made you comfortable in the past, the biggest change will be how you approach your interactions with your platform. If you're open to working with a developer on an ongoing basis rather than seeking a one-time solution that needs large updates at intervals, then a headless solution could be the right one for your business.
As your business develops, you need an ally to bring you along into the world of ecommerce and online sales and marketing. At Connection Model, that's what we do. We offer results-driven digital marketing, and we can work hand-in-hand with your business to help you develop and expand your marketing opportunities. Contact us today to begin a conversation about how we can help you meet your marketing goals.
Written By: David Carpenter
