The Advantages of Headless Commerce for Marketers

Headless commerce has become popular in recent years, but is it all just hype? 

This idea sounds promising, but for many marketers, the value often feels abstract. In reality, traditional eCommerce can sometimes limit teams when launching new campaigns, creating custom content, or optimizing user experience. 

Headless commerce offers marketers the freedom to move faster, personalize more effectively, and establish streamlined user journeys across all touchpoints online. 

Here we’ll explore five ways that headless commerce can benefit marketers. Including practical tools and brand examples to showcase how they can be adopted.

Roll Out New Initiatives Quickly and Easily

As an eCommerce marketer, you’ll know there are countless instances where you’ll need to roll out new initiatives working to a tight deadline.

Speed matters, whether you’re:

• Launching a seasonal campaign..
• Introducing a new product line.
• Promoting a flash sale or exclusive offer.

Traditional eCommerce platforms can often slow things down, especially when you’re restricted to the display options included in traditional platforms. 

Headless commerce, however, removes bottlenecks and combats these issues. By decoupling the front end from the back end, you can launch: 

• Microsites for limited-time campaigns
• Evergreen content pages
• Branded experiences for specific product lines or audiences

With the flexibility inherent in headless commerce, these can be up and running in days, rather than weeks or months.

This will ensure that you hit marketing milestones but also provide the freedom to test, analyze, and improve performance without technical delays. 

Use the CMS That Works Best for Your Brand

Traditional eCommerce platforms typically include a built-in CMS. These often fall short for marketing with: 

• Limited templates.
• Predetermined themes. 
• Weak editorial workflows.
• Minimal flexibility in creating branded experiences. 

The importance of having quality, unique content to drive your marketing can’t be understated, especially as an increasing number of brands adopt headless commerce models. 

With a headless commerce architecture, you’ll be free to treat content and eCommerce as two distinct platforms and break down some of the limitations that come with more traditional CMSs. 

This will allow you to: 

• Gain more flexibility to create content that truly engages audiences.
• Attract more customers into your funnel.
• Nurture them for conversions later on.

3 Popular Headless CMS Options for Marketers: 

1. Sanity: Ideal for teams with agile workflows, Sanity offers real-time collaboration, version control and customizable editing views. 
2. Contentful: For marketers looking for structured content, multilingual support, and the ability to launch much larger campaigns. 
3. Strapi: As an open-source CMS, Strapi is highly customizable, offering teams the flexibility and full control over their content architecture and user roles. 

By separating your CMS from your commerce engine, you’ll find it easier to make necessary updates to content without it impacting the transaction and payment back end - ideal for SEO and CRO improvement work. 

Delight Your Customers with Omnichannel Experiences

Omnichannel experiences are already redefining standards across eCommerce. 

Customers are more likely to: 

• Discover your products on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc.
• Browse on mobile.
• Purchase via desktop. 
• Track delivery through in-app updates.

eCommerce retailers need to be present on as many channels as possible. 

Shopify’s Future of Retail found that many eCommerce brands are turning to omnichannel marketing strategies, “by engaging customers across multiple touchpoints, businesses can offer a seamless shopping experience”.

Examples of Omnichannel in Action

Nike 

Nike uses headless commerce to provide a unified experience across its website, app, in-store kiosks and even smartwatches. 

The results? Consistent branding and frictionless functionality where the customer engages with their brand. 

Sephora

Sephora has invested heavily in understanding its customer base. Using a modular, headless architecture, the brand successfully provides personalized product recommendations online, across mobile and in-store through various touchpoints. 

Within a headless eCommerce, marketers are better equipped to optimize the shopping experience across several channels individually. 

This helps to create consistent branding and a seamless experience that will delight your customers and supercharge your campaigns’ return on investment (ROI).

Personalize User Experiences to the Individual Shopper

Headless commerce architecture is also a great way to create personalized shopping experiences that are tailored to customers: 

• Personal needs.
• Unique behaviors.
• Location. 
• Purchasing desires. 

Like omnichannel experiences, personalized user experience (UX) is an increasingly important topic within eCommerce and marketing. 

Marketers who aren’t focused on UX when planning and executing their campaigns are at risk of falling behind the curve.

Headless eCommerce changes that. So if you’re looking to: 

• Offer localized payment methods in different regions.
• Provide product recommendations based on the customer’s history.
• A/B test layouts on both mobile and desktop. 

This is all possible with headless eCommerce.  

When your back end can be seamlessly connected to a range of different channels, you’ll have the opportunity to give shoppers highly personalized suggestions based on their purchasing behavior and browsing habits on your store.

Adopt New Technology Seamlessly

eCommerce architecture moves at lightning speed! 

Whether it’s AI assistants, voice commerce or visual search - as marketerrs it’s important to have the freedom to test and integrate new tech without needing to rebuild your entire website. 

Every company will outgrow its platform’s capabilities at some point and have to tackle all the issues that come with this. 

With headless commerce though, you’ll be able to circumvent the usual stumbling blocks and future-proof your customers’ shopping experience. 

• Adding new touchpoints through channels (mobile app, smart kiosks and social commerce)
• Integrate with AI technologies and engines with your online store.
• Use analytics tools for deeper insights to better inform your strategy. 

With headless commerce, you’re no longer dependent on your traditional eCommerce release schedule. Select the tools that will positively impact your audience, plug them in, and off you go.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve been feeling unsure of the marketing implications of adopting a headless commerce architecture, we hope this post has opened your eyes to some of the great marketing benefits that can come with it.

To get started: 

• Audit your current eCommerce setup 
• Look into headless CMS options like Contentful, Sanity and Strapi. 
• Test and launch a landing page or microsite using a headless front end. 
• Review the workflow and impact. 

Making the switch to a headless setup can feel daunting at first, but the marketing advantages are hard to ignore. Soon you’ll be able to leverage all these great benefits and open the doors to promising new strategies!