In this guide, we’ll cover how the ecommerce landscape has evolved to where it is today, what “headless commerce” is, and how it’s different. We’ll explore some of the benefits and primary use cases for a headless commerce setup to help you decide if “going headless” is the right approach for you.
The Evolution of Ecommerce
To understand what headless commerce means, it’s important that we first add some context. To begin, we’ll cover the history of the most commonly used approaches for ecommerce websites over the past few years. Each has its own inherent advantages, compromises, and shortcomings that become apparent under different conditions.
On-Premises (Self-Managed)
For a long time, the only viable solution for high-traffic, high-order volume stores was an on-prem or self-managed solution like Magento. This is an approach where a single piece of licensed software controls both the storefront and the backend product and order management. A merchant provides their own server hardware to support the software requirements and traffic.
A developer experienced with the software could customize the storefront, and as long the server running the store is powerful enough, then site speed and response times were fast.
Unfortunately, this functionality came with the added cost of having to install and maintain associated hardware, software, and security. Whether the server is managed in-house at your own facilities or is a virtual machine hosted off-site, the merchant was responsible for upgrades and maintenance. For many potential online businesses, this approach was just too costly and time-intensive, especially for SMBs and startups with limited operating budgets and staff.
The need for a new ecommerce approach, one with the power of an on-premise solution but with a lower cost-of-ownership, helped set the stage for the next phase of ecommerce which was “software-as-a-service”, or SaaS.
SaaS
With this approach, a single piece of software still operates both the frontend and backend of a store, but the SaaS provider also hosts that software on its own servers. Since your store uses the service’s powerful network infrastructure, site speed stays fast and responsive. They ensure your site is PCI compliant, and oversee security and fraud mitigation. By being able to offer almost all the value of an on-premise solution but at a substantially lower cost, this approach helped to “democratize” the ecommerce landscape by making it possible for smaller businesses to compete with larger stores and brands.
This is the most common solution in use today and satisfies most of the needs of most merchants. It has its advantages, but since the storefront and backend are both managed by the same software, SaaS is still considered to be a “monolith” software like on-prem. This can create challenges when a merchant wants to do things like extend their SaaS catalog to multiple storefronts, enable other existing sites for commerce using the same catalog, or use a frontend framework different from the proprietary one used by their SaaS provider.
CMS + Ecommerce Plug-ins
In response to the high cost of entry and ownership represented by an on-prem solution (and concurrent with the advent and growth of SaaS), an alternative approach evolved in which a content management system (CMS) like WordPress - extended with several plugins - is utilized to act as the storefront and manage the backend catalog and orders.
Compared to the early on-prem solutions, this approach was fairly quick, easy and cheap to implement for non-complex use cases. If you had an existing WordPress site and wanted to enable it for commerce without disrupting your site design and content, for a while this approach was your only option.
The primary drawback with this, especially for growing brands, is that it’s not very scalable. Speed is sacrificed as the site grows in traffic and complexity. In a CMS + plugin configuration (just like with on-prem and SaaS) one piece of software is both rendering the frontend and processing commerce data on the backend. This can become an issue as visits and order volume ramp up.
Incorporating additional features like real-time shipping quotes or automatic tax calculation also requires installing additional plug-ins, which further slows down the store.
Web hosts who offer CMS hosting sometimes also offer dedicated or virtual servers for improved site performance, but these come with added costs.
