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Headless Commerce
Leverage the flexibility of Headless
Our founder, Dirk Hoerig, has known the only way for brands to embrace the possibilities of digital commerce is to break free of the defined limitations of traditional platforms. By launching the first headless commerce platform, commercetools delivers a decoupled, open environment that enables limitless commerce capabilities across all channels.
Adapt to changes quickly to maintain competitive advantage
Headless commerce is an eCommerce architecture that separates the front-end and back-end of an eCommerce platform, enabling faster, seamless, and innovative shopping experiences. This separation lets developers release updates—whether new functions, pricing, or designs—without disrupting the front-end UX/UI, ensuring agility in meeting consumer demands.
Start Your Composable Commerce Journey
Empower your teams Innovate and iterate with minimal risk
You have the freedom to weave innovation and experimentation into your organizational DNA. Test new business cases. Turn new devices and channels into revenue streams. From digital signage to voice assistants to in-car interfaces and more, headless makes the impossible possible.
Speed time to market Embrace the freedom of fast and easy
React swiftly to market changes within hours — a news-triggered flash sale, a competitor announcement, or weather conditions — without having to send your developers back to the drawing board and waiting weeks to activate a feature or respond to change.
Performance & security No downtime, even during peak performance
With the frontend separated from the backend, teams can update either the content presentation layer or business functional (commerce) layer without impacting the other. This gives you confidence your commerce will always keep running as expected.
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Reasons to go headless
Vendor agnostic
With endless compatibility, you’re no longer tied into one solution. Swap out one component for another without migrating your entire system, integrate with any SaaS vendor, and build the platform of your dreams without any restrictions.
Agility (time-to-market)
To remain competitive today, it’s critical to be able to respond immediately and pivot quickly. With less work and dependencies to deploy your frontend, you can introduce new channels or change existing ones faster than ever.
Scalability
Face seasonal spikes and market shifts without fear. Open stores, add SKUs, and launch flash sales without months of planning. Headless automatically scales, adapts, and grows as your business grows. You’re always ready for the day and prepared for whatever tomorrow brings.
Performance
Platform maintenance is automatic. Additions, changes, and upgrades are seamless with no impact on response times. Regardless of work being done on the backend, your solution delivers exceptional customer experiences on the frontend.
Flexibility
Pivot, change, and do what your business does best without worrying about the technology. Give more control to your business teams and partners. Headless commerce works with you, not against you, allowing you to build a solution that fits your needs and ensures your success.
Future-ready
Embrace commerce possibilities beyond the web — a world where any device or channel can become shoppable -— from mobile apps, chatbots and social media to virtual assistants, mirrors, cars, the IoT, and whatever new technology is to come.
Cost Efficiency
The cloud-native structure, automatic maintenance, and upgrade capabilities of headless architecture coupled with the SaaS on-demand pricing model delivers transparency and lowers long-term costs across the board while enabling omni-channel commerce and opening new revenue streams.
Extensibility
The open, composable architecture of headless provides flexibility and longevity. Need to go above and beyond for a custom or niche use case? With a foundation that supports future growth, you can continually fill individual requests, test use cases, and tailor functionality that fits your exact needs without any fear.
Customizability
Build the platform you envision. Choose from over 300+ à la carte API endpoints or build your own services. Launch personalized promotions. Give local agility to teams and partners. Instead of the limitations of a rigid platform, customization is in your control.
FAQ
What is the difference between headless and legacy commerce?
Legacy ecommerce suites had both the frontend and backend tied together as one. This led to bottlenecks and extremely slow time-to-market. Headless decouples these into two parts, speeding up processes by eliminating dependencies and duplicate work.
How does headless fit into my digital transformation strategy?
Adopting headless software into a business ecosystem is typically the first thing that occurs within a business when they transform digitally. It opens the door for them to adopt new tech such as API-based connections and modern ways of working like Agile.
Do I still need a CMS for headless commerce?
Typically our customers still use a CMS for managing their non-commerce related content such as marketing materials, corporate messaging, and more. Headless commerce can work hand-in-hand with a CMS platform to deliver a memorable, high-functioning customer experience.
What is a frontend and how many do I need with headless?
Each frontend typically serves a channel which customers interact with to browse and buy products/services. You can have as few or as many frontends you want. With a headless platform, you have the flexibility, performance and scalability you need so there’s no limit on how many channels you use to sell to customers.
Related Resources
The journey continues: Composable Commerce is the next natural evolution of Headless
By providing an open, interoperable environment, headless architecture has set the stage needed to enable composable commerce. Using commerce specific APIs, organizations can easily compose the experiences they want to deliver based on specific business requirements or changing needs. It is no longer a time-consuming, costly, and risky process, instead composable solutions let you adopt easily and as often as you like.
WHAT IS COMPOSABLE COMMERCE?